MMORPG Contest - 36 Hours Left!

We're making a mad dash to the finish line... not running out of steam, but we're definitely running out of time.

It's tough making the final decisions... looking at the long list of things we'd like to have completed is tough because we've got several weeks worth of things that we'd really like to see done, yet we only have a few hours for the contest.

The coding for the core features that distinguish Fractured Universe from other MMORPG's are still incomplete, but I expected that to be the case because our first goal was to get the basics done, then add the fun stuff. Because of that, I won't be surprised if we don't come off with a win on the contest.... sure, we'll possibly be a little disappointed, but I think nearly all six of the current game developers are in it for the long haul.

The contest has become less important than finishing the game... we'll turn something in, and although it'll be playable, it'll definitely not be complete.

The overall game design / back story / concept art, etc is coming together beautifully. The core code-base is very solid and nearly flawless, with only a couple of bugs that need to be squashed.

Contest Postmortem

Recruiting - Most of the first 10 recruits didn't really work out... although they all had good intentions, most of them simply didn't have the time available to dedicate to a short-term intensive project like this. Even I was hard-pressed to put in the time required, and I usually have plenty of spare time.

Some of the initial recruits were also lacking in skills.... for a longer term project I would have kept them around and trained them a bit, but for something on such a short deadline I simply didn't have the patience.... apologies to the few that I did this;

Being picky paid off for the most part, though... with the four people that stuck it out plus the addition of two more that we picked up in the second round of recruiting, I'm happy to say we have an incredible team. Maybe after the contest I'll be able to recruit another highly skilled coder.

One thing I learned about short-term coding... if something isn't working, drop it immediately. I made the mistake of concentrating too much on Blender / MakeHuman / BVH and I lost over a hundred hours on this sub-project, and although I made significant progress, I didn't finish it in time for the contest. Luckily I abandoned it soon enough for me to work on other things, otherwise I'd probably still be working on it with nothing to show for the contest.

This was a huge mistake as far as the contest goes. Luckily, the time wasn't wasted and for the long-haul game-finishing goal. We'll be able to use this technology for the final game, which will allow us to have a significant number of NPC's / toons / animations with a small team in a short period of time.

Another mistake for the contest but a huge win for the final game was the way in which I did the MMO Kit integration. Instead of taking the MMO Kit and adding / subtracting from it, I started with the stock TGE 1.5 engine, stripped out all of the scripts (yes, I did say all) and used the MMO Kit / TGE starter.fps as a code-by-example resource.

This took significantly longer than using the MMO Kit as a starting point, but the advantage is that I know 100% of the code that's in the game... Dave, Dreamer, etc wrote so much code that I never would've been able to wrap my hands around all of it, so modifying / enhancing it would've put me in a dangerous situation of orphaning code and introducing a bunch of bugs.

The disadvantage is that I didn't have enough time to integrate all of the features included in the MMO Kit... the camera, inventory, quest editing and a few other features simply didn't get put into the game for the contest even though they came stock with MMO Kit.

An advantage, though, was I had TGE 1.5 from the start and AFX integrated within an hour after I downloaded it.

Alpha testing - Although it's way to early to begin beta testing, we started alpha testing a little over two months into game development. This was necessary for the contest and I probably wouldn't have done this in a normal situation because it starts wearing out your primary testers, but in the long run the feedback that we've gotten from the early testing will shape and form the final game into something that's exciting, new and enjoyable to play.

Kicking off Fractured Universe development through this contest has been a great learning experience. We've made a few mistakes along the way, both in making long-term decisions as well as short-term decisions, but nothing disastrous. In short, thanks to this competition, we've got a fantastic start on a game type that many people say cannot be done by indie developers.

I look forward to the day that the nay-sayers are proven wrong, and in a big way because there are at least 5 new MMO RPG/FPS indie games that I expect to be finished within the next 12 months.

Thanks for reading my blogs. Wish us luck!