The Origins

The project started on January 1, 2011. Man... Yes, 14 years! But don't worry, it doesn't have 14 years of actual coding under its belt. More like 3 or 4 maximum, not to mention that I started over from scratch twice.

That year, I simply hit a bit of a blues patch: I was 30 years old and hadn't done anything that felt notable to me. Passionate about IT, coding on and off since the age of 10, a video game enthusiast... And nothing, not a single achievement to my name.

At the exact same time, I was playing HOMMK (Heroes of Might and Magic Kingdoms), and while I liked the game, it disappointed me. No real strategy, just diplomacy and logistics. No fog of war, no tactical movement...

So, I decided to learn web technologies and create a game. And after five months, here is the result:

So yeah. It's ugly. And there isn't much to it.

But I have a randomly generated world, fog of war, and units that can move. And that's the foundation—to me, it's incredible.

I learned PHP, JS, SQL, and CSS all at the same time. And I don't even know yet that something called object-oriented programming exists. Well, okay, I'm lying, I know it exists, but it scares me, so I don't touch it (or rather, I imagine myself not touching it).

Imagine the spaghetti code... After a year of work, here it is:

I code in the evenings and on weekends, on the train commuting to and from work. I deploy it to a free server and invite a few friends to test it.

I code the basic stuff, and then I add combat, mail, options... Above all, I try to think about what I would like to have in a game.

In July 2012, I became a dad. Shortly after, I resigned to try and find a better salary. And also, I reset the world, rented an OVH server, and decided to do a bit of online advertising. If you search for 'Klod Online' on the internet, you will certainly find posts that I left on various forums back then.

A few months later, I got interested in OOP (Object-Oriented Programming), and I recoded... EVERYTHING. I took the opportunity to add features like resources and the ability to 'mint currency'. Ambitious? Not at all, ahahah!

At the end of 2012, I updated the interface to give it what I thought was a modern look (no laughing, please), and then I published it directly on another site.

I implemented rare resources and an inventory system, while also keeping the site's forum active and managing bug tracking using Mantis.

I had about 200 players and a few volunteers who tried to help me out more or less with ideas or graphics, but I had absolutely no clue how to share my code. I even received an acquisition offer that didn't go through—mostly because I never replied to it.

And then? Well... I have traces of news up until March 2013, which is probably when I abandoned my project. I had a few crazy years: in 2012 we had our first child, I quit smoking, I resigned and found a new company, but things were going badly. In 2013 I tried to stay with that company, I was working quite a few hours and I was exhausted, and in 2014 I was more or less laid off. I prepared for and passed a competitive exam, joined the civil service in 2014, and had my second child in December of that year.

Suffice it to say, none of this was easy, and I kind of let Klod Online go to waste, especially since I no longer knew how to move forward efficiently. Years later, I tried to revive the thing a bit by re-coding it... from scratch. Yes, because in fact, the previous code was a complete mess. I only learned OOP in 2012, not to mention the overall design. So I slowly got it all back on track around 2023 I'd say, I don't remember exactly. Implementing Leaflet, and thinking about the architecture.

In parallel, I was given some part-time teaching assignments at a university. There I met some students, some of whom were very passionate, and in 2025, one of them (Stenguyz) offered to give me a hand. So I accepted, and then... He brought in a few people and took my code into another dimension: Git, Deepwiki, Docker... A whole bunch of technologies that I actually didn't know very well, and which made it easy to get the project back on the tracks of creation. And so here we are, in August 2025, with a new server online, and a reboot!