MMO Prototype - April report

Last month was a little bit stressful as I self-imposed a deadline on some milestones for the first quarter of 2020. It was kind of a selfish act because I wanted to show people what a reasonable list of "things to do" would look like for a single developer.

In hindsight, I realize that it's not that great of a reference considering I only do this on my spare time. I would like to point out, however, that for somebody who would work on something like this full-time, the more further along you are in a given project, the more time it takes to get something done. The exception to this rule is content creation (like creating a dungeon or a quest line) as you progressively have a better grasp of the tools and the capabilities of said tools within the game engine. You have an establish pipeline.

But, generally speaking, the list of things you can do should be considerably shorter 7 years down the line compared to when you first started. There are potentially more things to break and the state of whatever feature you added should be much closer to final as it has to work with practically every other existing feature.

The reality of this, as anyone working in ANY industry involving large teams will attest, is that you can't just throw more people into the problem. In many cases, it slows down production. There's a sweet spot that production managers have to find.

I say this so that people temper their expectations when it comes to video game development. I guess I'm sort of preaching to the choir at this point as people are progressively more disappointed with the state of Shroud of the Avatar but this applies to any studio. It doesn't matter if you're EA or Blizzard, Square Enix, CD Projekt Red or even smaller like Larian Studios, Ambrosia Software, Mojang or Portalarium/Catnip... if you have 10 or more things listed in your quarterly goals, you're biting more than you can chew.

So, yeah, with a lack of a publisher, investors or even a budget, there was no real reason for me to do this but the idea of communicating the above was why I gave myself quarterly goals (as an indie dev, is healthier an easier to deal with yearly goals). It's silly but it still gave me some stress nonetheless.

So, for April, I decided to relax. I have this other RPG project that I've been working on for a little over 6 years now (in my spare time) so I've been mainly working on that.

I couldn't NOT work on the MMO prototype, though. There's too much cool things going for it to ignore so, even though I spent less time on it this month, I still worked on it. There hasn't been an MMO that really captured what I want from it (Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen comes close but it's still based off of EverQuest and I feel like there's a missed opportunity here) so there's no reason to stop now.

• The latest Unity updates (there has been quite a lot lately) deprecated one little thing I had to change.

• Houses will rise to match terrain elevation (up to a certain limit).

• Fixed an issue that caused clients to considerably drop in frame-rate when asked to compute pathfinding on large amount of NPCs.

• Added the data structure for player inventory. Determining if there's enough space for a particular item (of various sizes), being able to move things around, etc. I'll need to eventually store item data into a decoration item to allow players to drop items on the floor and/or decorate their house with them.

• Looked into single-player mode and made some adjustments to make the transition (if needed) to be more plausible.

• I probably spent more time thinking of a secure way to do a mini-game for gathering resources than anything else this month. I couldn't come up with a solution, though. For anything I came up with, a client could theoretically send a false signal and pretend that it aced the mini-game with little to no way for the server to validate it. So, for now, I opted to scrap the idea in favour of a traditional "sit there and watch a progress bar" while the server does a "skill check". I'm kind of disappointed because now I have to think of another way to make the game interesting for gatherers.

Is there something in particular that gatherers like to do when gathering? Or is it mostly about the excitement of getting a rare item? I understand that people do it because they can either make an item out of it or sell the materials for gold but I feel like there should be something enjoyable out of the activity by itself.

I want to avoid the "warriors can also be good at crafting" but I also don't want gatherers to be bored out of their minds.