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[mewse]

Update: MMORPG Tycoon 2 has been greenlit!

Here's the Greenlight trailer:





I'm amazingly proud to have finally reached this milestone, for the sequel to a game that I first made for a game competition on this very forum.  Big thanks to the mods, and to the community; you all rock!  


Original post:

So back in 2008, old-timers may remember that I created a little game called MMORPG Tycoon as my entry to the Procedural Generation Competition.  Despite getting a surprisingly large amount of press coverage, I was never quite satisfied with it, and so I spent a lot of my spare time tinkering away at the game during the years that followed.

A little over a year ago, I finally decided that it was time to do this thing properly.  I quit my day job and settled in to work on the game more or less full time.  And so now (or sometime in the not too distant future), it's finally time for:



Here's the pitch:

MMORPG Tycoon 2 is a single-player, offline game about building the world's best MMORPG – yours – and then keeping your (AI-controlled) players happy.  

(Or, you know, mercilessly trolling them, if that's more your style.  It's all good!)

New features in 2:

• Full 3D graphics with a big, big editable game world.  (About the same size as the original release of World of Warcraft)
• Design your game's classes and monsters, including their combat abilities.  Buff and nerf as you see fit!
• Build towns and cities.
• Create NPCs with sequences of quests for your players to complete.
• Subscribers now have a full, proper AI model.  They have desires and needs based upon the Bartle test of player psychology, and will likely leave if they aren't having fun.  (Or maybe they'll just loudly declare that they're going to leave, and then not do it)
• Get subscribers addicted to your game, so that they'll be willing to spend their savings, instead of just their disposable entertainment budgets!
• Full monster and combat simulation;  zoom right in and watch individual players fighting the monsters in your monster zones, or zoom out and see the forest instead of the trees.
• As you develop your MMORPG, its version number increases.  When your version number increases, you can develop new technologies to use in your MMORPG.  Want your game to have Guilds, or PVP combat, or large-scale raids?  You can develop those and enable them for your players!
  
• Involve yourself as much or as little as you like in the low-level design work.  Don't like designing combat abilities?  Tell your designers to do it for you.  Don't like customising character models using the game's character editor interface?  Your designers can do that, too.  Etc.
• Wield the banhammer (and remind those troublemakers whose game it really is!)

Screenshots:

Map from high up:


Designating level ranges for different parts of the map:


A couple views from ground level:



A group of players on their way to an adventure:


A village:


A few crocodiles lounging just outside that village:


Key features from the original game still in version 2:

• Free, smooth zooming from a full-world view down to ground level.
• Designate level ranges for the various regions of your game world.
• Your players still don't like swimming and will complain if the best path to their destination requires them to swim.  (Also if it requires travelling through monster zones, too-high-level regions, etc.)
• Support for organising multiple MMORPGs, with each maintaining a separate set of saved games.
• And most importantly, a cursor even more unnecessarily fancy than the one from the first game!

I'm currently in the middle of doing the last few fixes before I'll be ready to capture trailer footage, and the game will be going up on Greenlight once that trailer and its music are complete (so maybe two weeks from now, I think?).  Once Greenlight is sorted, the plan is to get back to adding new content to the game;  new terrain types, new buildings, new AI behaviours, new user requests, new technologies, integrating a lot more props to make certain types of terrain feel a little less empty, etc.

It's still a fair ways off from being ready for Early Access or Release, but progress is happening pretty rapidly now, and enough terrible programmer art has been replaced that I'm finally feeling a bit less embarrassed to show it publicly!

(I'm still absolutely terrified, though)

[FrancoGamer]

This game looks good,you need any beta tester? (don't need to pay me) for find bugs or give ideias

[mewse]

Definitely not to a beta state yet!

I have a small group of folks who have been doing testing for me so far, and that's currently meeting my needs;  I'll do a call out for more people at some point soon, though, once I need more!

Other news:  a Greenlight campaign for the game is coming really, really soon;  I'll post again with details when it's gone live!  Setting up that campaign is probably one of the scarier things I've ever done.  There's very little that's as intimidating as an empty text box on a Steam page, which calmly asks you to enter a text description of the game that you've been working on for years, so that hundreds of strangers can judge it and call you names.  


But since I'm here, have a few more screenshots!

Bug fix:  Roads now always join up correctly!  (previously, there were sometimes little gaps at intersections;  you can see those in some of the screenshots in the OP)


Another overhead view of an area


A little village, seen from ground level


Picturesque


A paladin (who appears to be wielding a hammer for some reason) fighting a spider


More updates really soon;  trailers and other stuff.  I'm really looking forward to getting to do some dev work on this again;  this last month or so has all been wrangling trailers, coordinating with musicians, marketers, writers, etc.  I really miss writing code!  Had not predicted how little time you get to do programming, when you're running the whole production, instead of just being an employee in somebody else's studio!  

[Khelthos]

Really great Idea, man. It looks good with low-poly enviroment and voxel humans/creatures  Good job, I'm really interested to see this published! 

[FrancoGamer]

Definitely not to a beta state yet!

I have a small group of folks who have been doing testing for me so far, and that's currently meeting my needs;  I'll do a call out for more people at some point soon, though, once I need more!

Other news:  a Greenlight campaign for the game is coming really, really soon;  I'll post again with details when it's gone live!  Setting up that campaign is probably one of the scarier things I've ever done.  There's very little that's as intimidating as an empty text box on a Steam page, which calmly asks you to enter a text description of the game that you've been working on for years, so that hundreds of strangers can judge it and call you names.  


But since I'm here, have a few more screenshots!

Bug fix:  Roads now always join up correctly!  (previously, there were sometimes little gaps at intersections;  you can see those in some of the screenshots in the OP)


Another overhead view of an area


A little village, seen from ground level


Picturesque


A paladin (who appears to be wielding a hammer for some reason) fighting a spider


More updates really soon;  trailers and other stuff.  I'm really looking forward to getting to do some dev work on this again;  this last month or so has all been wrangling trailers, coordinating with musicians, marketers, writers, etc.  I really miss writing code!  Had not predicted how little time you get to do programming, when you're running the whole production, instead of just being an employee in somebody else's studio!  

when you need a beta tester contact me with the email:[email protected]

[Cranktrain]

That is one incredibly fancy cursor.

It's an interesting game concept! Looking forward to how this develops. What sort of feedback system is there for when players get uphappy due to the design of the world? What costs are there with fixing the problems?

[mewse]

It's an interesting game concept! Looking forward to how this develops. What sort of feedback system is there for when players get uphappy due to the design of the world? What costs are there with fixing the problems?

Right now, there are two different systems for giving user feedback.  The first system is older, and I'm questioning whether it even needs to remain, now that the newer system is mostly in place.

This older system is that users have "thoughts".  This works almost identically to the "thoughts" interface in the Roller Coaster Tycoon games;  you can open up a window to view the current thoughts of everyone in the game, and get sort of a "snapshot" view of what's going on.  By scrolling through you can look for trends, and decide what needs to be done.  (Alternately, you can just click on users and see their most recent thoughts directly)

The newer system that's coming in is a "petition" system (in the theming, we say that this is being done in the game's support forum).  The idea here is that a user who has a strong feeling about something ("my class is underpowered; it needs a combat buff") initiates a petition for a change.  Other users who agree 'sign' the petition.  (not sure whether these also need a count for 'disagree';  I'll probably add that at some point).  

At any time, you can peruse the petitions which currently exist, and look at how many signatures each has.  You can "accept" any number of these petitions, which adds them to your task log (which is a bit like a quest journal, in an RPG).  When you fulfill the demands of a petition, the petition ends and each user who signed the petition gets a small bonus to their 'addiction' value (which measures how unlikely they are to unsubscribe if unhappy with the game), and you get a chance (proportional to the number of signatures) to get a small advertising bonus (which affects the rate at which you gain new users).

Plus, you've made changes which your users have asked for, so they'll presumably be happier in general just due to the changes you made; the petitions usually get initiated by bad experiences which could have been avoided.

...and there's the usual stuff about displaying little thought bubble icons over player's heads when they're happy or angry about stuff.  That's definitely not going away.  But when you have hundreds or thousands of logged in users, that's not really useful for getting a big-picture read on what's going on.

[mewse]

And a brief devlog for today:

Thing #1:  Finalised the Greenlight trailer for the game. 

For real, this time. 

The previous "final" trailer version didn't test well;  people said great things about it, but I noticed after showing it to about a dozen people that they stopped watching just before the call to action;  I was holding for a few seconds too long on the title screen, and so they assumed that the trailer was over.  So I went back into the editing bay and now the end is punchier!  Required a lot of audio finesse, too, to match the shorter length.  But I'm pretty pleased with the result!

I'd link the trailer here, but it's literally just finished rendering right this very moment, and it'd take me well over an hour to upload it to YouTube from the potato internet I'm on right now.  I'll do it from the fast net connection at work on the weekend, instead.

Thing #2:  Procedural buildings now store precisely what pieces they're made of

The buildings in MMORPG Tycoon 2 are built from pieces;  walls, roofs, doors, etc.  Previously, the game just stored the shape of the building, and where any doors were.  When it built the visual model for a building, it would load the shape of the buildings, and then would randomly assign wall pieces, so each time you loaded your game, your buildings might (for example) have windows in different spots.  Now it always builds each building the same way, so a particular building will no longer change appearance after you've saved and reloaded your game. 

And what's more, this system is future-proof;  it should all degrade nicely if someday I add or remove building pieces from the game; any saved games which referred to old pieces would recognise those pieces as missing, and automatically replace them with new pieces, while retaining any that are still present.  (Now that I'm thinking about it, it should probably revert to a blank wall/roof, rather than randomly picking a decorated one if the previous wall piece was decorated.  I'll put that on my list, too!)

Anyhow, this was an important step because one of the big things on my todo list at this stage is to make a building editor, so that the player can actually construct their own buildings, including cladding them however they like, instead of having them be randomly generated.  And it'd be a little silly to let the user edit things like that if their changes weren't being saved!   

In other news, the Greenlight campaign is planned for six days from today.  Panic level is at about 3 out of 10 at the moment, but I fully expect that to spike upward within the next few days.  More news as it happens.

[FrancoGamer]

i think that this game need to cost 10-29 or free,i think that better 20 $ (free too) but its you decision but PLEASE DON'T MAKE THIS GAME COST MORE THAN 29$ because my critic says that this game would need to cost 20 $ (Or free if developer want)

comes here a (or more than expected ) ideia to game:

You can make update to this update
you can hire musians,programmers,artists and designers


You can add you game to steam or make a launcher to this game

you can make others MMOS but will cost 1M-3M

you can make classe variations

You can buy slots of classes to make more classes

You can make others servers in other world parts like:Server in Brazil And in EUA

You can make swords,guns and other weapons

You can make a Virtual Shop,with some Virtual money That you can buy (its gives you MONEY MONEY MONEY) or get killing monsters,with a virtual shop but low monster areas make you lose players

You can make rules to you game,when someone break the rule you can ban or

You can make a auto ban plugin or some thing,that will auto ban some players but every banned player will be -10 money


You can make New areas,that will can be acessed with a port or you can make a long path in the water 

and You can make V.I.P that will give money to you,you can modify the V.I.P price (MAX=500) but when more cost more the chance to only some players to buy

[FrancoGamer]

More Ideias:

Types Of players (Like the Troll Player,Cheater Player,Strategist,Storyst,Dramatic and Balanced)

Mescle Genres:You can mescle genres like:Social Rpg,Survival RPG,etc

FeedBack:The players can give a feedback saying what going on like:I Want a Sequel,I Can't go into the port because the monsters are so strong,This game Sucks or This is the best MMO i ever played 11/10

Make a sequel:when the feedback for a sequel get to high (4 me) you can make a sequel,you can work in your new MMO and the last MMO but it need to be better or else you lost players,it will have a bar,when the game get better you can finally post the game

Make Dungeons Level:When you make 20 dungeons in your game you will can modify the level of dungeon
LOL A LEVEL 100 DUNGEON IN A LEVEL 1 AREA TOO MUCH TROLL 4 ME

DLC:when you make a dlc you game will get a "subgame" that you can go into this subgame every time the game will be the same... only when you create the game,when you make a update the update will be in the dlc BUUUUUT you can make dlc update,a update only disponible in a dlc

Forum:you can announce you MMO in the forum,you can get high expectation to the game,when more expectation,more players you will get,when you post some images and make devlogs you get MORE EXPECTATIONS but you need to be careful if you get too much expectations and you server is full you need to buy MORES SERVERS or you can lost some players because his friend can't play and number of players will be like this:853/360 [NEED MORE SERVERS]

Research:Researching will unlock too many things like dlc,you get rp (Research Points) by getting some expectations and players (the always unlocked research its:Forum,Launcher and Make Rules

And For Final: You can make skills:When you make skills will incentive the players to buy virtual money and buy the skill (like weapons and i dunt knuw)when you make skills you can make a animation like: a skill that you jump and enter in a aura and attack giving a strong damage

BONUS:Make Bosses:Dont need to talk,just make bosses

ps:You can make update to you game*

[FrancoGamer]

to reveal,i played you first game and the second when you started the 2 i played the milestone 9 when you release but in all this time i just played the 1 I Remember you site XD

[FrancoGamer]

Hey Vector i have a brazilian blog and i spread this post to the brazilians

link to the post:http://supergamersgamers.blogspot.com.br/2016/05/divulgando-projetos-mmorpg-tycoon-2-by.html

PS:I Quoted this discuss

[FrancoGamer]

2 days later:i think that dev is working much '-'

[mewse]

2 days later:i think that dev is working much '-'

I am, actually!    Silly amounts of work going into the imminent Greenlight campaign.

Regarding your suggestions, a lot of them are actually planned, or already implemented!

For example:

> you can make classe variations
> You can buy slots of classes to make more classes

Both of these are already present and implemented. 

> Make Bosses:Dont need to talk,just make bosses

Planned, but not yet configurable.  Definitely planning to do this!

> Make Dungeons Level

Also planned!  Dungeons should actually drop into the simulation really easily.

> FeedBack:The players can give a feedback saying what going on

There's a bit of design work going on around this right now;  I'm trying to find the best way to make this feedback easy for the player to digest, rather than having potentially thousands of players all giving divergent opinions.  I'm currently working with the idea of "petitions", so you can get an idea of how many people are asking for particular changes.  But obviously, that only works for negative feedback.  Maybe I need something else for collecting positive feedback?  Needs more thought.

> Types Of players (Like the Troll Player,Cheater Player,Strategist

Players are currently categorised by the Bartle system; they're explorers, achievers, socialisers, or killers.  And these different types of players approach the game in different ways.  You'll get a different mix of players every time you play, and what you do with your MMORPG will also affect which type of players you attract.  Cheating and ganking sit on top of that, as a separate thing;  they're some of the ways that players can misbehave if they get bored or unhappy.  You can then either try to make them happy again so they stop misbehaving, or just ban them.

> Research:Researching will unlock too many things like dlc,you get rp (Research Points)

I'm doing this not using "research points", but by tying it into your MMORPG's version number, which behaves a little like an experience level.  As your game gains version numbers, you're able to select new technologies from a tree.  Some of those technologies make changes to the game rules (such as enabling PvP combat, or guilds), some give you bonuses for particular types of players (explorers love it if you boost the amount of world lore in your game;  achievers love it if you add.. well.. achievements.  And so on.)

Right now I'm not planning on adding further maps to the game;  it's already using about as much memory to hold the game simulation as I feel comfortable demanding of players!    Maybe in the future, though?  I'm just working on the base game, first;  expansions will come later, if folks like the game!

[FrancoGamer]

Hey mewse  i think you should make a dev log or give some images every day because if you pass some days the people can think that you abandoned the project (Like people with much expectation to the game that are waiting you reply) and here's come some more ideias to the things that you are implementing/already implemented

1-Researching:I Think you should make the possibility to have 6 focus to MMO (Quests,Dungeons,General,Scenery,Monsters and Players) what focus? when you make a focus one part of tree will get more boosted,and you get more things in version numbers like:Focus in Players and Quests:You get 3 researchs of players (principal focus) and 2 of Quests (Secondary Focus)

2-Types Of Players (Optional):It would can have the Mega Player:A Rare Player that will search everything to do,even if to do you need to pass for a level 30 area in level 15,this player will be a player that when you make a version this player will invite friends and you get more players,but if you do much updates in one time this player will give a negative feedback and when you ask whats the player want this player will say:please don't make too much updates in a time,this would give too many things to do even if you dont want

3-Feedback(Optional):it would have a research that when you do it you can make a forum,in this forum players will give in some seconds their feedback

4-Dungeons(Optional):you can make the inside of dungeon,but to make this you need to place some monsters and treasure chests
after that players will enter the dungeon

and now 2 new things

1-MMO Level:when you make updates you get MMO level,when the MMO level gets to max you get more players slots,money and a TIER,when you get a TIER you MMO will get more things to research

2-Stats:You can make a stat and consequences of stat,the first stat that you will have its HP,you can make more like:WATER (And consequences like:When you Water get low you lose more hp in battles and lose HP every second) or stamina

ATENTION:You dont Need to make everything,just do MMO Level,Research and stats and you MMORPG Tycoon 2 will be more good,only make the optional things that you really liked

[FrancoGamer]

Mewse i have seen the trailer and now i giving you the MAX Support i an a Brazilian and i never will give up of this project

Check this post if you want to see:supergamersgamers.blogspot.com/2016/05/mega-newsmmorpg-tycoon-na-greenlight.html

if i need to modify anything tell me

[mewse]

As FrancoGamer has noted, the game is now live on Greenlight!  I've embedded the trailer in the OP and linked to the Greenlight campaign from there.  But I'll link to the Greenlight campaign from here as well, for those who've come to the bottom of the thread rather than the top.   

It's been a huge effort and learning experience to get things all put together and ready for public view;  I've only ever done the technical side of game development before;  the whole marketing side of things has been very scary and new to me!  (Key lesson learned:  anything you can automate around marketing is worth its weight in gold!  I totally need to take a break from email for a while, just to decompress after manually sending several hundred over the past couple days!)

[NicMagnier]

I'm not into Tycoon games or MMORPG so I'm really not the intended audience.

But this cursor is a real beauty...

[Oli414]

This is an insanely genius game!

I actually planned on making a game like this in college but we realised that we wouldn't have enough time for such a project so we made a platformer made out of standard Unity shapes instead ^,^

Wait, I just called myself genius indirectly, anyways, jokes aside:
This is a really really cool concept which looks really really cool! Actually seeing the players fight and stuff is really what makes this a Tycoon, really can't believe that a game like this isn't really made before, because the concept is simply perfect.

Voted 'Yes' on Greenlight :-)

[mewse]

This is an insanely genius game!

I actually planned on making a game like this in college but we realised that we wouldn't have enough time for such a project so we made a platformer made out of standard Unity shapes instead ^,^

Wow, thanks!

For what it's worth, I spent about 17 years in the mainstream industry, and MMORPG Tycoon 2 is by far the most complicated project I've ever worked on.  This is mostly because all the rules of the simulated game are editable;  you can (for example) get rid of health bars, if you want.  Or replace them with something else.  Or you can make class abilities which drain the user's own health in order to damage an opponent, or in order to heal an ally.  And the subscribers' combat AI has to be able to figure all that out and try to work out an optimal strategy for themself or their party to succeed, using whatever game rules the player has specified. 

And then, of course, players react to the optimal strategy that has been found.  If there's a really strong "optimal strategy", new players are going to read about it online and select their classes to exploit it.. and long-time users are likely to demand that you nerf it.. you get the idea.  Everything sort of cascades like that, between the various game systems. 

So it's been very challenging!  But a whole lot of fun, too!  It's a little like what I imagine it must be like to work on Dwarf Fortress;  systems talking to systems talking to systems...