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MYMMO - Design your own MMO city builder

A topic by aaronjbaptiste created Dec 02, 2015 Views: 12,583 Replies: 14
Viewing posts 1 to 8
(3 edits) (+6)

WTF is MYMMO?!

A Sim City inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG. Design your own mini World of Warcraft and watch as AI controlled players complete quests, refine their equipment, battle dragons and enter the PVP arena for glory. More details on gameplay below.

Single player. Tycoon style. Pure creative freedom.

But first, eye candy!

Combat simulation

Full voxel engine for creating the terrain juuuust how you like it

Role playing. Scratch that Lego-like itch!

An older gif - Players logging in. Swoosh!

Meat n' potatoes

The idea is to mix the strategic elements from games like Sim City, Theme Park & Dungeon Keeper with the lore and theme of an MMO RPG - WoW & GuildWars. Don't let the voxels fool you, this is no Minecraft. The voxels provide a ridiculously simple way to terraform the terrain so you can really dive deep into getting the world exactly how you want it.

The players are simulated. They log into your world (how many depends on your world's rating) and they have three basic needs:

  1. Adventure
  2. Social
  3. Level, status and fame

Adventure: Players need quests and monsters and caves and all that typical MMO goodness. You as the designer need to provide NPC's, design the quests, zone aggro areas and balance difficulty.

Social: Players will want to interact with other players from time to time. That might be telling war stories over a beer at the tavern or ripping each others eyes out at the PVP arena. Eh, to each their own.

Level, status and fame: Players level up. Everyone knows MMO's are all about Classes and Professions. This will need it's own post to fully get into, but here's a teaser of where my thoughts are at:

What I think would be really cool would be that when the Player (By Player I refer to the AI controlled civilians) reaches a certain level they decide whether to become an adventurer - where they branch off to be a Warrior, Hunter etc. Or they become a Crafter, where they become blacksmiths, cooks etc. You as the designer will be able to affect the chance of what they become by building certain building types (like a Kitchen, upgradable with add ons to boost the cook profession's desirability).

Now the adventurer's needs shops with good loot in them, the higher the level they are, the higher tier equipment they need to survive. But shops in this game get their stock from the crafters, who instead of hunting monsters they gather resources, craft items and sell them to shops which fuels the economy. There might even be some end game content such as an auction house, which streamlines the exchange.

So imagine this, you see a warrior fighting a dragon with legendary glowing gear on, you click him and can see he is level MASTER and has the sword "McLovin's Sword of Justice" equipped. You can click McLovin's name and you're taken to the very Player that crafted his sword - A level MASTER blacksmith :D. I'm so pumped about those kinds of interactions and minor details it's unreal.

The classes will have specific traits that affect how you play the game. The Priest class for example will be able to resurrect players, so a possibly strategy could be to spend your money on improving the priest class tech to keep your players from dying.

Current Status

MYMMO has only been in development for 2 months, so it's quite a way off release. I have a day job too (booo!) so it's only worked on in the evenings and weekends. Hopefully I can get a public alpha build out in late spring next year. Details for signing up will be posted here.

I'd love to hear your ideas, what would you like to see in the game? Thought of a good mechanic? Let me know! I'll be reading and replying to every post.

What's done:

  • Voxel engine - optimised for performance at large scales.
  • Procedurally generated islands.
  • Biome support and a few basic biomes.
  • NPC's
  • Combat simulation
  • Level 1 mobs called Jello's ^_^

What's next:

  • UI and sound
  • Shops and player equipment

Keep up with development

I'll be posting milestone updates here (bi-weekly ish). If you want more frequent updates @aaronjbaptiste is the best place to get them.

@SphexArt provided the animated player model, the Jello mob and some of the building models. Thanks buddy!

MYMMO is also on reddit.

and sometimes on YouTube.

Thanks for reading! Look forward to your feedback and reading all your devlogs too.

This definitely brings back memories! XD I love the cleanliness of the graphics, and those colors are so nice :3 The Jello enemies remind me of porings... ah sweet MMO memories...

The voxel engine by itself already looks a lot of fun to play with :D on top of that being able to see AIs populating that world and playing in it, it's amazing!

(+1)

Cheers buddy! You must be a Ragnarok Online fan then? The Jello's are in fact based on them! Had a lot of fun playing that game. Would love to capture some of its spirit in this.

It definitely shows some of it's spirit there! :D I played a lot of Ragnarok Online back in the days ^^ Great job \o

(1 edit)

Amazing idea ! The visuals are very nice :) . The player will be able to modify the world, but will it be possible to create new assets (tree, chest, etc...) with mini-voxels for example ? Also something that would be cool is to use the virtual players' view, so you will experience in a first-perso view. I think some tycoon games do this (on roller coasters for example)

Also, what are the target platforms ?

The player will be able to modify the world, but will it be possible to create new assets (tree, chest, etc...) with mini-voxels for example

Haha, that question has given me many sleepless nights, i'm kinda glad you've asked as I have no idea how to approach it and i've kinda been avoiding it. The environment details are created in MagicaVoxel, an awesome (free!) voxel modelling application. As you have guessed they are not part of the terrain engine (currently).

Worst case? I keep the set up how it is now. MYMMO is going to be be moddable. With that in mind the very keen designers could create their own assets in MagicaVoxel (or any 3D modelling tool in fact) and import them into the game. How easy this is to do would depend on how good the modding tools are. Steam workshop integration would be great and I think how Cities:Skylines done it is fantastic. A major problem for me here is that there will be textures and block types that are "hardcoded" as it were in these models that aren't available in the terrain editor. Want that cool red leaf block from the Blood Leaf Tree? Nope, you can't use it by itself with this system :(.

Best case (arguable!) All models (excluding animated things like the players and mobs) are handled by the voxel engine. Upsides are obvious - full design control in game. Downsides:

  1. Smaller voxels = longer generation and more data to get through.
  2. Supporting two voxel sizes might be difficult to implement. Although, i'm kind of already doing this, I have to support the external models, making sure they are scaled appropriately and that the colour palettes match.
  3. Increased complexity from a UI point of view.
  4. If you build a wizards tower, you probably want the AI to appreciate that it's where the wizard should go. How does the engine know that those random voxels are part of the wizards tower? You would need tools to be able to define the building type. But then, could you create a random pile of dirt and call it the auction house? Eh... sounds messy.
So there you go, prompting me to articulate the problem has been very helpful, thanks for that! I'm kinda edging on the side of 'worst case' at the moment, although that could quite easily change if feedback, especially once the alpha build is out, convinces me otherwise. Maybe there's a half way house, where you can go into a separate mode outside of the game but still within the engine to design the assets. What would you do :)?
Also, what are the target platforms ?
It's built in Unity so it should be straight forward enough to release on Windows, OSX and Linux.

Mocking up a few icon/UI ideas.

Nice :D I think it fits well with the environment art. I like the pixely icons.

This is a really cool idea. I thought it was some sort of MMO engine, and I thought that there was no way that you could make it work, but an MMO-simulator of sorts sounds fun. Nice work on it so far - I like the blocky style; just gotta push more variation into it when you can, I think.

I'm going to struggle with that problem, people will see 'MMO' and get the wrong impression. Easy to explain away, but you don't usually have the chance to when people are quickly scrolling down a list of games.

Agreed about the variation, need to dedicate some time on asset creation.

The voxel style is good, but be careful: right now the players really look like Minecraft models.

(1 edit)

Thanks. There was an interesting discussion on reddit about the player models. They are designed to be compatible with the Minecraft skin layout, this makes it easy for players to upload their existing skins and have them inhabit their world - seeing a well known YouTuber or a friend's skin running around completing quests has a certain charm about it that I find funny.

It may change it if Mojang aren't happy - I did contact their legal team but heard nothing back.

Great idea! I don't think Mojang will sue you (unless your game is a huge success), but it just looked like you were too lazy to make your own models. However, this is a nice feature so I think you should keep it :) . What you could do is change the animations to look less like Minecraft.

(+1)

Alllright guys, it's been a while. There's been a lot of work on the engine side of things.

1. Optimised the hell out of the voxel engine, it draws all voxels (~28 million currently) in two draw calls - one for solid blocks and the other for transparent ones.

2. New block types for building stuff, including micro (quarter voxels) for slabs etc:

3. These can be used to quickly build in game assets this cute little house:

4. Complete rewrite of the pathfinding engine to work with voxels:

Now that the underlying engine is looking good, new gameplay features should start to follow soon and i'll be able to ramp up on more interesting updates :).

Wow - looks unique and right up my alley.

Reach out to me if you're looking to collaborate or team-up with others. One of the publishers we work with from Spain has strong ties to the PC/Console gaming industry.

Matt, Managing Partner: Geek Fever Games, Creator of "Sim Hero"