2dMmo: Scope of Milestone 1

Ponder the architecture
My mission over the last month (as part of Milestone 0) has been to research the various technologies that are applicable to designing and developing a grand MMO (in 2d of course).

Now I have a pretty good idea of the technical needs for the project, and indeed it is rather daunting! Since the complexity of a MMO is very high, I decided to restructure the milestones a bit.

M1
Previously, M1 was going to implement the general world persistence, networking and visualization needed for the MMO. I decided to rescale that, and instead focus on M1 as a kind of "mini-game", an arena based combat game that then can be used to prototype additional functionality, in a very scaled down system. This doesnt change the ultimate goal of the 2dMmo over the next 10 months, though it does give a fairly concise goal for the next 2 months (I plan on having the "arena mini-game" prototype done before July 20th).

M2
After the arena game prototype is finished, I will re-evaluate the project, and do a post-mortem of the milestone. So I actually dont have much defined for post M1, except that the work done in M1 should be extendable into future milestones, and the ultimate goal is a Mmo by March 1st 2008.

Design doc:
I am restructuring the design doc to take this new M1 into account, so in a few days I'll post a summary of the new milestone goals. (to my blog) Thankfully, this means I'm actually getting close to fully understanding the scope involved, as I was holding off on serious writing of the design doc until I understood the project better. I still need to do a little more research into the network protocols and object management, but that should be done in only a day or two more.

Summary!
So in summary, things are going well, I'm working on this about 12hrs/day, 7 days a week, and feel pretty confident in the scope, though it is admittedly the most complex project I've every attempted!

My next update here on GG will be in about a month, so next post you'll have a much better idea of if I'm actually capable of anything ;)

- Jason

Disclaimer: this is a repost from my 2dMmo blog