[Devlog #1] Building a mmo game with Unity and C#
So, before I begin to write about the development itself, I would like to clear out why have I even decided to write that devlog and what is the point I see in creating a mmo in a very small (just 1–3 people) group, as well as answer a couple of fundamental questions that might come up to ones mind.
Why?
Me and my friends, who help me out in this voyage, were always very passionate about games and programming. We’ve spent hours playing all multiplayer games that we could find and enjoy (mmorpgs mostly). Even though we enjoyed and still enjoy playing some of them, we always felt like there is something lacking in every game we played. Years went by and with every year we got better at coding and had an increasingly clearer vision of what our dream mmorpg game would look like. And then, one sunny day last summer, we came to a conclusion that if we don’t create one, we will never get to play our dream game. That’s how it all started…
Why start a devlog on Medium?
If you’ve managed to get past the first answer you might possibly start to realize what the answer for this one will be — motivation. For almost half a year we’ve read a lot about game development, mmo’s, networking etc. We’ve also tried (and many times failed hard) to use different frameworks, plugins for Unity and all the other goodies we could find. Some of the actions we took didn’t get us far as we realized they limit us too much or aren’t fitting our needs, while some other failed as we didn’t have enough motivation to just follow through with them and battle the hardships we faced. This is precisely why I decided to start that medium devlog. I figured, that publishing next parts every 2 weeks or so, will keep me motivated to introduce new features so that I have something new to publish every time. Other thing that convinced me to start publishing such a thing is what I will talk about in the next paragraph.
YOU CAN’T CREATE AN MMORPG GAME!1!1!ONE!
Yes, you guessed it. A person who joins different Facebook groups or writes posts on Reddit, stackoverflow etc. and asks for some help or just announces(!) that he wants to create a mmorpg game gets ridiculed and hated a lot. The more I dug into that topic, the more angry people I found answering either my or some old questions on the topic. It seems people find creating mmo’s impossible for a small team and, what’s even worse, they try to discourage others from even trying. That’s why I decided to start that devlog. I hope that my case may encourage someone else to give it a try, and find for her/himself is creating a dream mmo what they really want to do.
That being said, I would like you to understand me correctly. Creating mmo’s is hard and needs a lot of work and passion. And its very likely that one will fail a lot on the way. The truth is, that the dream game might never come out. However, unless you want to do it for a living and risk all for it (which I strongly discourage you from doing), trying to create a passion project of that kind will always make you benefit — although not always will that be a financial benefit. The amount of skills acquired and knowledge gained during the development means for me that even if I fail to deliver my dream game I will be a better developer and the joy I feel every time a new build brings new, interesting changes is out of this world. So, to sum up, don’t be afraid to venture on that hard journey as no matter where you will end up, you will end up richer than before — be it financially or experience wise. Or maybe, if you are lucky, even both (like the story here)?
What’s coming next?
In the next part, I will talk about the basics of the project - what frameworks we are using and what made us decide to use them. For now, the next couple parts will be published quicker than once every two weeks as they will talk about things we’ve already managed to create. Then, once medium devlog catches up with the development, the frequency of devlogs will probably drop a bit.
