MMO Prototype - A new year; what's planned for the first quarter.

Time flies. Half a year ago, I started spending my Sundays working on a MMO Prototype with the goal of achieving what (in my mind) SotA failed to do.

It's less about doing things to spite people and more about showing people how it can be done.

  • Can a single-player narrative exist in an sandbox multi-player environment?

  • Can NPCs have daily schedules and respond to typed text without being a nuisance to the player's time?

  • Can a satisfactory crafting experience co-exist in an economy where good loot can drop from mobs?

  • Can a game be deep and thought-provoking with game-play-centric consequences in an era where instant-gratification is the norm?


These are the things I aim to answer. The project has gained some momentum to the point where I'm considering working up to 2 days a week (rather than one).

While the project is tangible (as some of you have seen for yourself during PHASE TWO) it is far from being a video-game but maybe one day it'll grow into an actual product.


Allow me to share what I intend to do in the next 3 months:

  • Complete the path-finding logic (with a procedurally generated grid to accommodate the ever-in-development terrain) to allow NPCs to move. The grid is done, I just need to assign "weights" (so that NPCs are less likely to walk on grass than on the road) and plug the NPCs to said grid.

  • Create spawn points that can spawn procedurally (based off available space on the terrain) as well as enabling some to be destroyed by players. This is to enable the game to dynamically spawn encounters based on player density, like pushing a wolf den away from the perimeter of player structures or having mobs appear from the depths of a dungeon and have them walk/patrol back to their designated "spawn location"; rather than just popping into existence behind players as they delve into a dungeon.

  • Allow player-owned plants to grow at a pre-determined rate rather than be subject to the growth rate of the overall ecosystem (to enable gardening).

  • Establishing a server-authoritative infrastructure for gathering/crafting/lock-picking mini-games.


Hopefully within that time, I'll open the project up to the public for them to try it out and stress test the server and game-logic.

It is my hope that I'll have enough infrastructure so that I can have a game where players can gather material and construct buildings (either a house of community structures like a lumber-mill) by the middle of the year.... albeit, still, with programmer art.


During my spare time (if you can believe such a thing), I'm fleshing out each of the 3.5 factions with characters, story beats, how they'd react to players with different "virtue scores", etc.


Stay tuned.

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