This is a great example of marketing the dream of game development. You can make the argument that Star Citizen is a completely different version of the same thing-- I mean in that it is not the game you love it is the making of it. This guy is tapping into what we (on this forum) all love about game design, all the projects people have started or tried in our lives. It is such a drag to make games with huge teams, with marketing and technical compromises, design by committee. It drains the joy of developers and it bores a lot of the audience. This is the dream of one person pursuing their passion.
The One Man MMO Project
41–50 of 119 posts
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#42I think a mmorts is pretty unique. If you manage to spice up those menus a little bit and get the balance right (some) people will buy it for sure
I used to play a now-defunct MMORTS back in the day with Warcraft3-looking graphics: Ballerium (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgIk8HQPnP4).
Shattered Galaxy is also MMORTS and is still alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBY-WGFQk98
Really hard game concept to get right, though. Something that was cool about Ballerium was that it was one big open world. I think Shattered Galaxy was a lot more instanced, but I didn't play it much.
Definitely room for more exploration in the space.
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#43love it! i spent YEARS playing and coding for MUDs and ran a few games as a solo admin/coder. imo it is so very satisfying to watch the global chat channels after a new feature/area/weapon/mob gets rolled out...and what the community thinks of it. i can recall more than one occasion where a well planned quest resulted in interesting dynamics after players started interacting with it. an example; one quest would add a…
Awesome...I also spent years playing/coding/admining MUDs, though the one I was writing never got very large. The mechanics you mentioned are interesting; what kind of MUD was it? I got hooked on DIKU MUDs in 1990 or so, and still play https://mume.org:4143/ from time to time.
i did a good amount of work on merc/rom based games...but it was lpmud that i really got into!
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#44How do MMOs maintain and update state for tens of thousands of players and then push those updates from the server back to clients efficiently?
Not a game dev but I guess you could go quite far with just an IRC server.
Crosshatch your world in chat rooms, with a bot in each one.
A player sends a command to his current chat room; the bot validates the player position and current action.
Other players listen to bot responses in all nine chatrooms around them.
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#45love it! i spent YEARS playing and coding for MUDs and ran a few games as a solo admin/coder. imo it is so very satisfying to watch the global chat channels after a new feature/area/weapon/mob gets rolled out...and what the community thinks of it. i can recall more than one occasion where a well planned quest resulted in interesting dynamics after players started interacting with it. an example; one quest would add a…
Any suggestions on protecting credential transfer in a MUD? I have been wanting to build one but honestly I'm used to the convenience of HTTPS and the passing of credentials over a socket is preventing me from starting.
if you ran it over a websocket it seems like that could help the situation you mention. back in the day, honestly, as mostly 14-16yo kids....we really didn't think about that!
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome...I also spent years playing/coding/admining MUDs, though the one I was writing never got very large. The mechanics you mentioned are interesting; what kind of MUD was it? I got hooked on DIKU MUDs in 1990 or so, and still play https://mume.org:4143/ from time to time.
i did a good amount of work on merc/rom based games...but it was lpmud that i really got into!
> lpmud
Yes, I remember those, and played with them a bit. They were a far more flexible, dynamic environment, but 'back then' (in the early 90s), as I recall, the performance hit associated with LP MUDs (inherently dynamic) vs. DIKU MUDs (inherently static) was pretty large, and available memory/CPU cycles were at a premium.
Mostly though I think I preferred DIKU MUDs because I happened to start with them, just by chance.
Good times, thanks for sharing!
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#47I remember ages ago it was common to see the advice "don't try to create your own MMO" as they were one of the most complex game dev projects you could do. Are MMOs any easier to make now given the libraries and cloud services that exist today?
Realm of the mad god proved it's possible to make a miminalist MMO game
The difficulty is building a MMO that is appealing and fun to play, so you have to think about multiplayer game design, which can involve a little bit of game theory, economics, reward systems...
A mmo is not difficult to make by its strict definition, once you have a large open world, the spatial partitioning to manage network traffic, things work. What is hard is to populate such a large world with "life", activities, things to do, and especially rewards in a persistent world.
MMO are amazingly interesting, world building is a vast subject, but building a quality MMO is also enormously expensive.
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#48Looks awesome! I actually created a MMO prototype before, just by myself. A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy. I used Babylon.js for the 3D game/controls, and I imported free 3D assets from various asset stores for the content. The backend was a simple socket server written in Node.js with socket.io connected to the web frontend via JS using the standard WebSockets API.…
> A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy. A weekendware prototype isn't what people are talking about when they say gamedev/MMOs are hard. It's 0.001% of the work, it's trivial. Just as you, too, stopped at the actual hard part: building the game.
I'd also observe that an "M(ultiplayer)ORPG" isn't too hard anymore; not trivial, but something the tooling has gotten a lot better for over the years and something a lot of people could put a prototype together for fairly quickly. In fact we've seen a number of "Show HNs" over the years that amount to this.
But the "Massive" can be a real killer. Even if there are to some extent off-the-shelf tech that can handle fairly "massive" communications, it still takes a lot of skill and effort to use them correctly.
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#49A number of years ago I completed an MMO project by myself (art, programming, marketing, etc). It was fun! Real-time server was in Python Twisted, lots of Cython to speed up the deepest parts of the game loop. Django for the main website. The client was Flash (this was back in 2013, when it was still kinda a thing), which meant anyone could jump in really quickly, but technically that was challenging for a real-time 2D Zelda-style game because you were limited to TCP rather than UDP and the server has to be 100% authoritative since opening up Flash swf's or sniffing packets is so very easy. The server could support 250 people, and I had some fun tooling that let me spin up virtual players to stress-test it. Fun to remember!
The thing with MMO projects that really gets you is, even after you've got a mature client and server you still need to put together enough content, which if you're level designing/writing/painting everything yourself, is an enormous quantity of work. If you don't want players to run out of quests and whatnot you've probably got to lean towards a sandbox experience, and this MMORTS is a particularly interesting way to go.
Re: The One Man MMO Project
#50I think a mmorts is pretty unique. If you manage to spice up those menus a little bit and get the balance right (some) people will buy it for sure
I used to play a now-defunct MMORTS back in the day with Warcraft3-looking graphics: Ballerium ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgIk8HQPnP4 ). Shattered Galaxy is also MMORTS and is still alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBY-WGFQk98 Really hard game concept to get right, though. Something that was cool about Ballerium was that it was one big open world. I think Shattered Galaxy was a lot more instanced, but I…
I played in the Shattered Galaxy beta and it was a fantastic game. I haven't thought about that game in a long time. Glad to see it's still running.