Grid Games: what’s next?
Over the past month(s) we’ve been giving shape to the ideas that have accumulated over the months and asked ourself critical questions along the way. When we started this endeavor in March we had given ourself a year to learn, thinker and build out a prototype. Joey and I, we are both fairly autodidact. Joey has never truly modeled anything serious and I had never done much in our chosen engine: Unity3d. I’m an avid programmer and have been enjoying programming since I was fairly young. And while I have done my share of game developing on my own, I have never truly taken on a game dev gig as ambitious as this one. Don’t get me wrong here though, when I say ambitious I do not mean over ambitious; we will pull this of, given time.
Joey his modelling skills has been improved far beyond what anyone can expect from someone who’s never done any real modelling and I have made my way around Unity; a successful year when it comes to learning new things.
When it comes to game design I believe we’ve got very interesting and compelling game play. We’re trying something different than what most of the RPGs are doing in terms of combat, armour and overal leveling experience (more on this in the next year).
Prototyping wise I do believe we’ve gotten quite far and we’re pretty good in terms of being on schedule. Joey has been doing an amazing job on creating assets and I have written quite a lot of code for what will eventually make it in to our final prototype-product. And while prototypes aren’t final products and will likely contain quite a few quirks and bugs, here’s a list of things you may expect:
- Custom client/server architecture
We’ve written a custom model for our client and server architecture, which you can read about here. But in short, we can deploy a master server for authentication and world management, which handles instances and other areas.
- Fully networked
Everything that you do from moving, jumping, looting to shooting should be synchronised to all other clients.
- Basic character controls (move, jumping, etc.)
- Inventory-, equipment managent and looting
A basic but functional inventory along with equipping items. Equipped items are visible on the character.
- Combat
You can combat other players or NPCs given you’ve a weapon equipped. A fully working auto-attacking combat system is in place with various simple abilities.
- NPC and basic Artificial Intelligence
- Monster spawners
NPC can roam a given area allowing to walk or guard a certain area. The can identify friend from foe and have fully fletched combat controls.
- And many, many more core components that aren’t game features :-)
So this year, as you can imagine, has been very busy and interesting for the both of us, our gamedev biz and our whole learning experience. I do find it unfortunate I don’t have as much time for writing (updates) as I would have liked. I was also kind of shocked by the few lines of code I had written:
Scripts git:(master) $ find . -name '*.cs' | xargs wc -l
13975 total
In March 2019 we want to wrap things up and finish our prototype. With a little luck we might be able to make it a public release, which will include a playable prototype with multiplayer capabilities. March will also be the time where we will hopefully move from my home office to our new larger office that will, at some point, house all of the talent that will be working on our Massive Multiple Player Online Role Playing game.
Funding
Like most companies, we also require funding. We need cash to pay for all the talent we want to attract. Luckily for us we already had our funding ready prior to starting this. I can’t specify numbers, but I can tell you it’s significant enough to see this through with a fairly large and substantial team.
Now we’re off for two weeks so we can spear-head in to the new year and deliver an awesome prototype come March.
Happy holidays, merry x-mas and we hope you’ll have a wonderful holiday season.
— 🎄GG🎄 —
