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A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

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Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#21

Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, a old PC game where you have to build your own dungeon, with rooms for your monsters, treasure room, magic room to research spells, etc. Heroes try to invade your dungeon, and you also have to fight neighbouring dungeons. One of the cool feature was that while monsters were controlled by an AI, you could take manual control of one, going to a first person view and playing like a FPS game…

Dungeon Keeper is still one of the best PC games ever. I still play it to this day. I wish they would come out with an updated version, like DK1.. not DK2.

You might give KeeperFX a try. It's a mod that reuses the existing exe file but builds around it. IIRC it allows higher resolutions, adds more maps/campaigns and makes it possible to run Dungeon Keeper on newer Windows versions without problems.

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#22
post #6

I always dream about an RTS where one gets to be the DM (God, Gaia... whatever you call it) where computer players fight against each other. I love scripting maps to make current games (especially AoEII and C&C Generals) work like that. I'm hoping this is, in a way, something like that. I know an RPG is played in the map (city) you design, but still. I'll give it a try.

> I always dream about an RTS where one gets to be the DM ... where computer players fight against each other

There were quite a few of these around when I was learning to program: I and a couple of friends competed in one where you provided a robot that had to kill survive longer than the rest. Each action (movement, shooting at an enemy, using your shield, scanning to see anything) took energy and sources of that were unevenly distributed around the simple landscape (so a robot could camp on a large source for a while as an example tactic). My robots didn't tend to do very well unfortunately.

There must be modern equivalents around, though it sounds like you want to go the other way: providing the challenge to the AIs rather than an AI itself, so perhaps you could create your own.

I've considered it - it is one of the many projects on my "when I win the lottery or otherwise have a lot of spare time all of a sudden" project list. There are two main options: run the AIs on your platform in which case one of the constraints is processing resource (which you somehow need to hand out fairly) or just provide an API through which the AIs can submit moves (in which case you can't govern how much processing resource each AI can throw at the problem, but the game service would be very resource efficient to run. Of course with the latter option if there are limits to what the AI can see (fog of war or similar) then you have to play the whole game out before letting spectators see it otherwise an AI could abuse the spectator interface to gain advantage, if the AIs are hosted on your resources you can constrain such visibility much more readily.

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#23

Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, a old PC game where you have to build your own dungeon, with rooms for your monsters, treasure room, magic room to research spells, etc. Heroes try to invade your dungeon, and you also have to fight neighbouring dungeons. One of the cool feature was that while monsters were controlled by an AI, you could take manual control of one, going to a first person view and playing like a FPS game…

Check out War for the Overworld, the unofficial successor to Dungeon Keeper. They even brought in the original narrator!

Link: https://wftogame.com/

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#24
post #13

Hey everyone, dev here. Just got wind of this thread on twitter. Happy to answer any questions. If you're interested you can find out more here: https://itch.io/t/9883/mymmo-design-your-own-mmo-city-builde... https://twitter.com/aaronjbaptiste https://www.twitch.tv/the_alchomist/profile/highlights https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo

I think this is a really good idea. Best of luck with it.

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#25
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Museum of Simulation Technology may actually turn out pretty good [1]. There's a sort of paradox with game development that revolves around a gameplay mechanic. The mechanics really have to be rock solid, so that gets polished out first; polishing takes a long, long time. But it also has to be engaging or else it isn't worth playing. The direction taken for SuperHot is so unexpected (to me at least) that I was ho…

> Notably, I think there is a bit of a genre trap, where this kind of mind-warp game is stuck playing out in certain stories. My thoughts as well. The trap you mention is typically a linear environment with a solid-yet-comical (or whimsical) narrative, ala Portal. That allows the featured game mechanic to be introduced at an optimal pace, effectively realizing more milage out of it. It's also the safer and more conse…

Plonking that idea into a brawler-style melee game would be great. Especially if you could change the game dymanics: big players have more health, but small players can't be hit; two players fighting over one object tug-of-war style; guns shoot bullets with odd distance mechanics.

I could see that being a fun one-off game.

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#26
post #24
post #13

Hey everyone, dev here. Just got wind of this thread on twitter. Happy to answer any questions. If you're interested you can find out more here: https://itch.io/t/9883/mymmo-design-your-own-mmo-city-builde... https://twitter.com/aaronjbaptiste https://www.twitch.tv/the_alchomist/profile/highlights https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo

I think this is a really good idea. Best of luck with it.

Thanks buddy!

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#27

Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, a old PC game where you have to build your own dungeon, with rooms for your monsters, treasure room, magic room to research spells, etc. Heroes try to invade your dungeon, and you also have to fight neighbouring dungeons. One of the cool feature was that while monsters were controlled by an AI, you could take manual control of one, going to a first person view and playing like a FPS game…

Check out War for the Overworld, the unofficial successor to Dungeon Keeper. They even brought in the original narrator!

Ah this game had so much potential, but in the end they didn't really manage to capture DK's spirit, and the game play ended up being uninteresting and frustrating. The constant stream of game breaking bugs didn't help either.

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#28
post #13

Hey everyone, dev here. Just got wind of this thread on twitter. Happy to answer any questions. If you're interested you can find out more here: https://itch.io/t/9883/mymmo-design-your-own-mmo-city-builde... https://twitter.com/aaronjbaptiste https://www.twitch.tv/the_alchomist/profile/highlights https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo

No questions. Just wanted to say I'm glad you made this. A few years ago, I was playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and World of Warcraft a little too often. Had the idea to merge the two, since WoW is basically an amusement park. I mapped the project out but never put anything together.

Anyways, I'm thrilled you made it happen.

Re: A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG

#30
post #13

Hey everyone, dev here. Just got wind of this thread on twitter. Happy to answer any questions. If you're interested you can find out more here: https://itch.io/t/9883/mymmo-design-your-own-mmo-city-builde... https://twitter.com/aaronjbaptiste https://www.twitch.tv/the_alchomist/profile/highlights https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo

Have you considered to crowd-fund the development?

It looks really promising, and it feels like one of those ideas that could become popular.

(I like how you placed Notch's Minecraft character in the doorframe of the image as part of the 'If you're names not on the list you're not coming in'-update :))

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