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by craze3 2451 days ago
Looks awesome! I actually created a MMO prototype before, just by myself. A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy.

I used Babylon.js for the 3D game/controls, and I imported free 3D assets from various asset stores for the content. The backend was a simple socket server written in Node.js with socket.io connected to the web frontend via JS using the standard WebSockets API. I got realtime character movement, turning, & jumping implemented pretty quickly. Content became a bottleneck so I stopped developing, but I hope to finish it up sometime in the near future.

Good luck!
2 comments
hombre_fatal 2451 days ago
> A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy.

A weekendware prototype isn't what people are talking about when they say gamedev/MMOs are hard. It's 0.001% of the work, it's trivial.

Just as you, too, stopped at the actual hard part: building the game.

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jerf 2451 days ago
I'd also observe that an "M(ultiplayer)ORPG" isn't too hard anymore; not trivial, but something the tooling has gotten a lot better for over the years and something a lot of people could put a prototype together for fairly quickly. In fact we've seen a number of "Show HNs" over the years that amount to this.

But the "Massive" can be a real killer. Even if there are to some extent off-the-shelf tech that can handle fairly "massive" communications, it still takes a lot of skill and effort to use them correctly.

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Jaruzel 2451 days ago
This is where the fakery in most MMOs kicks in - they are not really 'Massive'. Most of them have sharded servers where only a few hundred players are actually in the same world together. Players think there are a lot more as the underlying chat system (originally just IRC in a lot of cases) runs on a separate server for all the players.
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glouwbug 2451 days ago
content is almost always the bottleneck in any form of gamedev
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grogenaut 2451 days ago
Well until you hire an army, then it's quality, and tooling to manage content, then it's back to creative direction as the blocker.
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platz 2451 days ago
that's why I find self-limiting forms of gamedev more interesting than AAA games.

I'd rather play a half-finished roguelike, gamejam games e.g. itch.io or Ludum Dare , indie games, concept games.

You feel the creativity more.

I don't care for a scripted piece of entertainment.

I want to explore different game mechanics and explore ways of interacting.

AAA games almost never give you that.

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