MMORPG Tycoon is GPLv3.

It's actually not. 

After a fairly exhaustive search, I've finally found that the old 'About' section of my website implied that everything on the site is released as GPLv3, which is no longer the case;  I've now revised that page.  But I had intentionally removed all of my usual GPLv3 notices from the credits and readme files for MMORPG Tycoon, and the source code for the game itself has never actually been made available.

But based on that old 'About VectoStorm' page, I can understand why you'd make this mistake.  My fault.


(The VectorStorm game engine that MMORPG Tycoon is built upon is still available under the GPLv3 license, as well as all of my "Game in a Week" games.)

The only problem I had was the I couldn't figure out how to zone at first, so I just kept clicking the zone icons until (20 minutes later) I figured it out.

Ditto, might benefit from an ingame tutorial...or if there was one I totally missed it. Looks very nice though...very Tronish. good job.

Yeah..  it desperately needs an in-game tutorial.  There just wasn't time to finish one for the compo. 

But I'm going to continue work on it, after the compo.  Big things I want to add for it are an in-game tutorial, tooltips on the buttons, and a few improvements to the user AI (make them go exploring even without a quest, give them inventories, make them follow a road partway to their quest target, etc).

any word on voting?

Derek's probably still working on the procedurally generated poll.   

I'm not sure that I actually want an answer to this question, Melly, but I have to ask.

Is there any significance to the name "Minus"?

I like this a lot!  I love the "lock and key" procedurally generated levels, and how regenerating the level each time you go in means that you don't get frustrated if you do bump into a really difficult level. 

When I'm writing a game on my own, I generally don't write down any design documents at all (exception:  MMORPG Tycoon was complicated enough that I had to keep paper notes to so I could keep all the various simulation systems straight in my head).

Instead, I keep a log line, similar to the log lines that writers use to sell their screenplays.  It's a short, 25-word-or-less description of the core idea of the game.  I keep the log line written on paper, electronically, and in any other form I can manage, to keep it fresh in my mind at all times.  Then, whenever I want to add a feature to the game I'm making, I first compare the feature to the original log line, and see whether or not it helps further the game's core idea.

As an example, my log line for MMORPG Tycoon was:  "The player designs a complete WoW-style MMORPG, and must keep his users happy while still turning a profit."  Having that log line around made it easy to decide not to include (for example) letting the player have a character within the game;  while a cool feature, it wouldn't have advanced the core of the game.  In fact, the log line tells me that the most important facets to the game are the users, their happiness, and cash, and so any gameplay element which doesn't affect or reflect at least one of those factors probably doesn't belong in the game at all.

I've been wondering about that for quite some time now. How are graphics for games like Geometry Wars actually done? Are they created ingame with some glow effect from the engine attached to it? Or are just just shapes from Photoshop with a funky color and a some sort of Blur/Glow filter?

There are several ways to do it, including the sprite method you mention above.

But the way that I do it is to have my game draw bright lines using standard OpenGL calls, and then perform a glow operation as a post-process on the final rendered image, just using a fragment/pixel shader while copying that rendered image to the screen.  (Actually, mine is about a six step process, moving the screen image around between various offscreen buffers to construct different blurred versions of it, and then recombining them into the final on-screen "glowing" image.  But you get the general idea.)

Of course, not all graphic cards support fragment/pixel shaders, but for those that do, this is by far the fastest way to get the glowing lines effect.  So I'd be shocked if the XBox 360 Geometry Wars didn't use something similar to this approach. 

I'd also imagine that Geometry Wars on the DS probably uses a very different scheme, as I'd be shocked if it supported pixel shaders.   :D

I'm pretty bad at art too, though maybe not as bad as you from the sound of things. The best thing to do is just cover up your crapness using a pretentious 'art style'. Here are some options:
- Retro style: Draw everything 1/4 size and scale up.
- Abstract style: Don't bother to change from programmer art.
- Limited Palette style: only use 2 or 3 colours to make things simpler.
- B-game style: Just draw shit, but laugh at yourself for it. MSPaints highly recommended.
- Witty References style: Rip all your sprites from other games or base them on pictures from Google Images.

Old-school vector graphic style is my personal favourite.  Virtually anything can look fantastic, if there are enough glowing lines on the screen. 

In general, I'm not thrilled about downloading a beta build of a game for the purposes of providing feedback, only to be greeted by a "Buy Now!  Trial limited to 60 minutes!" dialog box.  That just felt a little rude, since I had assumed that I was giving my time to do somebody a favour.   

Anyhow, apart from that, I get no textures at all when I'm running via in a WinXP virtual machine (using Parallels Desktop under OS X), so I can't actually get into the game to test it.  All the in-game UI is missing button images and the like;  I just get flat-shaded coloured squares.  Judging by the layout of the coloured squares, it looked like maybe I had reached a text entry window (maybe asking me to enter my name?  No way to tell).  Had to alt-tab out and kill it from the taskbar.

I'll also note that the installation goes into a non-standard "C:\My Games" directory by default.  That's kind of weird;  I've never seen anybody create a directory there before.  And if you do let the game install there, then uninstalling the game again doesn't actually remove the game's directory;  it leaves behind a stray "Log.txt" file, which I had to remove manually.

So I can't really give gameplay comments, as I didn't manage to reach the gameplay.  But there were definitely some oddnesses in the install/uninstall process that made me raise my eyebrow.

Well, pending some technical problems, the windows version is delayed till tomorrow morning as I am falling asleep at the keyboard. I am posting the OSX version for now.

The link to the OSX version is extremely typoed. 

Here's a fixed link to the OS X build, just in case toastie has gone to bed.

Finally got to play this..  it makes me happy in ways I'm not sure I'm able to explain.   

So many wonderful tiny details, and the music just wraps it all together.


If I had any complaint, it would be that the game becomes a little frenetic as you get higher up, and the music makes me long for a more gentle, relaxed activity once I'm near the top.

But it's still beautiful.  I really want to make a game as nice as this, someday.

Sounds like a re-theming of the gameplay from Robot Finds Kitten, yes?  Neat!

Played it for a couple of hours last night.

This makes me happier than I can say. 

(is there something weird that happens when you set the subscription above 15?  I found that my population dropped whenever the subscription cost went above this.

Yes -- the rival MMORPGs all have $15 monthly fees, so if you charge more than that, you'll have higher than normal numbers of subscribers leaving to join the other MMORPGs.  I guess I should make that a "complaint" which will show up in the complaints report. 


Anyhow, I've just uploaded a new version 1.0.4 (link back in the top post), which fixes most (all?) of the issues that have been reported to me over the past 24 hours.  This includes a couple crashes and a graphical bug if you remove a building which still has a road attached to it.  Plus a few minor glitches involving the road placement tool.

But the big change is that I've done a massive revamp to the player satisfaction/addiction calculations;  hopefully they should be a little more reliable and believable now, and you won't get quite the same hugely profitable turnover as before, just by abusing your customers, taking their purchase price, and letting them unsubscribe.  As an extra assist, individual users will now show their satisfaction and addiction levels in the "Inspect" dialog, if you focus on them.

And I finally remembered to actually wire up the "Attack" and "Defense" values of monsters and player classes, which had slipped my mind several times, before.  High defense values will tend to make combats drag on a bit, unless countered by high attack values on the other side.  So if your users are gaining levels too quickly, you  might increase monsters' defense values, or decrease users' attack values.  Or both.  Or just go into the 'General' design tab and increase the number of XP it takes to gain a level, and be done with it. 

I have noticed one little bug though. If you change the combat range to 0, it's an insta-crash. I imagine combat range means the maximum difference in level a player and a monster can have for them to fight? That's what I figured, anyway.

Whoops!  Yeah, that'll probably be a divide by zero.  And you're exactly right --  If the difference between the player and a monster's levels is greater than that number, then it'll be a very one-sided fight, and a user in that kind of fight is likely to complain about the game being too difficult or too easy (check the complaints report to see if this is happening frequently;  it can indicate that you've made a mistake in your zoning or town placement).

I've also noticed that "Monster Density" appears to be working incorrectly;  turning the density up seems to be decreasing encounter frequency.  So ignore that option for the moment;  I'll get a bug fix up as soon as I can track down these issues.

Awesome, Melly!  I've never had the time to actually build out a MMO to that size.  Thrilled to see it!  Did you have many troubles with server stability?  (You only have about 300 users out of 10,000 subscribers online.. that doesn't sound right to me, unless you have a bunch of overloaded regions knocking people offline when the online population gets too large.  You should be closer to about 2,000 subscribers online at once, if my calculations are correct.. though again, I've never actually had time to build up to this level, myself)

Just a couple of comments..  yes, it's not difficult to drop the negative buzz to zero once you've figured out how the MMO works.

But that's not the most interesting goal to set for yourself.  If you've got 10,000 subscribers and only have a total buzz of 6, then it pretty much means that most of your users are enjoying your game, but aren't feeling addicted to it (but check your census report to verify that). 

Ideally, you want a lot of your users addicted, because addicted folks will keep playing your game (and paying the subscription fee) even if they're unhappy with the game.  What's more, they will also post to your forums, which increases the new subscriber rate (positive buzz is better than negative buzz, but negative buzz is still much better than no buzz at all!).

To get addicted users, you have to start annoying them.  Increasing the number of xp required to gain a level will help.  Increasing monster health will help.  Giving zones a wider level range will help.  Towns give out quests to the zones immediately surrounding them, so having higher level zones adjacent to a low level town will increase the difficulty of that town's quests.  You get the idea.  Increase the risk for the users so that they do sometimes fail, and addiction levels will rise dramatically.   

Sure, you'll get some negative buzz from this from time to time.  But all publicity is good publicity.

For some reason there is an error when I try to extract the Windows rar. Also when I look in the actual files there isnt an exe.

Perhaps a corrupt download?  You might try re-downloading the archive, as it's working for me at the moment..  Did you get the full 9meg zip file, or did the download stop midway through?

Looks awesome, but the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't seem to zoom in/out, so I can't get close enough to the zones to see/place/remove anything from the build meno.

I've found this bug.  It happens if you enter the game while the "Enter a game name" field is still active.  Effectively, the game thinks you're still typing the game's name, and has disabled most input, including the mouse wheel.

You can fix this at any time by pressing the Enter key (which kicks you out of string entry mode).  I'll put up a fixed build tomorrow, which will keep the bug from happening in the future.

Looks awesome, but the scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't seem to zoom in/out, so I can't get close enough to the zones to see/place/remove anything from the build meno.

Running Vista Home Premium on a Dell Inspiron 1520 (2.00 Ghz dual core, 2.00 Gb RAM) with a GeForce 8600M GT if that helps. I'm using a Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse on a USB port. Left and right clicking work in-game, but the scroll wheel does nothing. The scroll wheel works in all other applications, though.

Edit: I turned "fullscreen" in the preferences to "0 0 0", which fixed it. I think it wasn't going into fullscreen properly, causing the bug?

Are you still having trouble with zooming?  I was really hoping I'd be able to get away without making a configure controls dialog in this one, but if your  mouse isn't sending the standard buttons for the scroll wheel..  :/

Technically, the game will happily run at any resolution your computer supports.. I just didn't have time to build a mouse-driven interface to select one, so it does 800x600 in a window, since that's what I generally use as the default. 

Also, I've uploaded bugfixed versions which address a rare crash that was pointed out to me in IRC. 

Phew, all finished!  Download links for Mac and Win32 builds are in the top post. 


I'm really pleased with what I managed to get done in time for the competition.  There's some obvious stuff I wish I'd had more time to implement and tune, but by and large, I'm thrilled with the final product.

Of course, I'm still going to work to improve it further, once the contest is well and truly over. 

I really wanna see this done.

Me too!

I'm hoping to have the compo entry finished within 24 hours.  But first, sleep. 

Core gameplay and simulation logic is basically finished now (or at least, as finished as it's going to get for the compo).  I still need to implement about four or five UI screens, plus a title screen.  Which I suppose also counts as a UI screen.  But that's it.

My only major disappointment at this point is that there won't be the ability to save and restore games in this initial version.  There's just not enough time to get that done, now.     (It'll be coming in a post-compo update, though, along with a number of other fun new features and simulation improvements I have planned)