
A SimCity inspired city builder where you design an MMO RPG - doener
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=50706.msg1188742
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aaronjb
Hey everyone, dev here. Just got wind of this thread on twitter. Happy to
answer any questions. If you're interested you can find out more here:

[https://itch.io/t/9883/mymmo-design-your-own-mmo-city-
builde...](https://itch.io/t/9883/mymmo-design-your-own-mmo-city-builder)

[https://twitter.com/aaronjbaptiste](https://twitter.com/aaronjbaptiste)

[https://www.twitch.tv/the_alchomist/profile/highlights](https://www.twitch.tv/the_alchomist/profile/highlights)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo](https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo)

~~~
kawsper
Have you considered to crowd-fund the development?

It looks really promising, and it feels like one of those ideas that could
become popular.

(I like how you placed Notch's Minecraft character in the doorframe of the
image as part of the 'If you're names not on the list you're not coming
in'-update :))

~~~
aaronjb
I think it's an option, but i'd like to get it playable (and fun!) first.

Roleplaying and creativity is pretty high on my list. For example I'm working
on a Quest Design system where you can hook together anything in the world to
create a quest.

A simple example:

You create a Wizard NPC with an input of (4) (Boars tusks) (which you link to
the Boar's monster area). Once completed it unlocks the (Gate) next to him,
allowing the player to access the tower full of loot. The inputs and outputs
would be completely flexible and could lead to some pretty funny situations.
Careful balancing would be needed so players aren't walking halfway across the
map just for a shoddy Wooden sword reward.

~~~
pjungwir
If you want a couple old-school examples of this for inspiration, take a look
at Adventure Construction Set and the scripting language from ZZT. As a kid I
made all kind of stories with both of those.

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nyandaber
Reminds me of Dungeon Keeper, a old PC game where you have to build your own
dungeon, with rooms for your monsters, treasure room, magic room to research
spells, etc. Heroes try to invade your dungeon, and you also have to fight
neighbouring dungeons. One of the cool feature was that while monsters were
controlled by an AI, you could take manual control of one, going to a first
person view and playing like a FPS game.

So yeah, seeing this feels like Dungeon Keeper meets Minecraft. Which could be
very interesting if executed properly, but it's not going to be easy.

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thedaemon
Dungeon Keeper is still one of the best PC games ever. I still play it to this
day. I wish they would come out with an updated version, like DK1.. not DK2.

~~~
robocaptain
Try KeeperRL: [http://keeperrl.com/](http://keeperrl.com/)

Started getting some attention in the roguelike world but it's really not a
traditional roguelike... just an awesome Dungeon Keeper-esque game.

~~~
samstave
Have you submitted this to /r/roguelikes?

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rl3
This is one of these fairly simple, yet brilliant ideas that make you go "Why
didn't I think of this?" Granted, tycoon-style game ideas are a dime a dozen,
but few are this novel or meta.

Superhot is another recent game that also meets the criteria; time advances
only with player movement. Dead simple core concept. I suppose Minecraft
probably stands as the most famous example though (which is ironic considering
this game's art style and game mechanics appear to have been heavily
influenced by it).

~~~
hacker_9
True, though really you could say this of any game. Ideas are cheap. It's the
execution of the idea that draws the crowd.

\- Superhot actually took the stop time mechanic from Time4Cat [1], a free
flash game. With guns added, and a unique art style, players were drawn in. It
also helped that the game was originally created for the 7DFPS challenge where
it received initial interest.

\- Minecraft gained popularity originally because it added enemies that came
out at night, something the world building genre hadn't really seen before
(and so the reviewers jumped on it). Voxel engines weren't new, but it was
unprecedented to use them to give creative ability to the user like so ('user
customization' being a common theme in many successful games, see: TF2 hats!)

\- Same again with Portal, the mechanic was neat, but the story is what people
always talk about.

\- Monument Valley strikes me as another, great idea with the isomorphics, but
also great art style and animation regardless. The progression of puzzle
difficulty is what keeps the player interested though, as the learning curve
is subtle enough to work in the casual games mobile market.

\- Here is an example [2] of a good idea on the scale of Portal, but so far
poor execution, resulting in lackluster gameplay. It is Pillow Castle's First
Person Puzzler where picked up object's are re-scaled depending on your
perspective.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gO5hjxRsfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gO5hjxRsfo)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOfll06X16c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOfll06X16c)

~~~
baby
> Superhot

Isn't that game meh? Not a great example.

> Minecraft gained popularity originally because it added enemies that came
> out at night

I've never heard that point of view before. Rather that it was a cubic world
were everything could be destroyed and created.

> Portal, the mechanic was neat, but the story is what people always talk
> about

What? Besides "the cake is the lie" there is no real story, people talk about
the game mechanism not the story.

Conclusion: I disagree with 3/4 of your post.

~~~
sleepybrett
I'm actually convinced that you didn't pay any attention in portal. The story
is thin, it's the story of a tester that is constantly being thrown
curveballs. Finally the testing is done and the AI decides to kill you, you
then escape behind the scenes and plot to kill the AI. I think when people
praise the game for it's non-mechanics what they are actually praising int he
characterization and writing of GladOS (and then later in Portal2 Whetley).

~~~
yesco
It really was the coolest thing when you escaped the final test chamber and
found yourself alone in the abandoned facility; the music just stops. Up until
that point you knew something was wrong but not quite what. The lack of
scientists in the observation windows, the creepy graffiti in the alcoves
stating "THE CAKE IS A LIE" next to a mountain of broken security cameras and
the disturbing fits the robot would get into on occasion. The game was a great
example of the "show don't tell" style of story telling.

Also lets be honest, the whole cake thing in Portal was pretty funny. It was
just the people burning the joke into the ground and snorting the ashes that
ruined it.

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PhasmaFelis
The concept reminds me a bit of Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, in that
you're loosely overseeing a bunch of AI adventurers running around and getting
into trouble. Of course it's coming at the idea from a very different
direction. Mostly it's just that Majesty holds up astoundingly well for a
15-year-old sim game, and I've been thinking about it lately. :)

~~~
stcredzero
What about being able to play as a Hero-class unit, as well as overseeing? The
player could be Gandalf, who can exercise bad-assery and turn the tide in an
individual battle, but also direct the overall battle. Like an RTS where you
have to ride to line of sight give commands?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
That sounds like the 1998 Battlezone, an FPS/RTS hybrid with hovertanks. It
was really cool; there hasn't been much else like it.

The plot was loads of fun--it's the 1960s, and the Space Race is just a cover
for the fact that the US and the Soviets have both been waging war on the
Moon, with hovertanks, for years.

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egeozcan
I always dream about an RTS where one gets to be the DM (God, Gaia... whatever
you call it) where computer players fight against each other. I love scripting
maps to make current games (especially AoEII and C&C Generals) work like that.
I'm hoping this is, in a way, something like that. I know an RPG is played in
the map (city) you design, but still. I'll give it a try.

~~~
dspillett
_> I always dream about an RTS where one gets to be the DM ... where computer
players fight against each other_

There were quite a few of these around when I was learning to program: I and a
couple of friends competed in one where you provided a robot that had to kill
survive longer than the rest. Each action (movement, shooting at an enemy,
using your shield, scanning to see anything) took energy and sources of that
were unevenly distributed around the simple landscape (so a robot could camp
on a large source for a while as an example tactic). My robots didn't tend to
do very well unfortunately.

There must be modern equivalents around, though it sounds like you want to go
the other way: providing the challenge to the AIs rather than an AI itself, so
perhaps you could create your own.

I've considered it - it is one of the many projects on my "when I win the
lottery or otherwise have a lot of spare time all of a sudden" project list.
There are two main options: run the AIs on your platform in which case one of
the constraints is processing resource (which you somehow need to hand out
fairly) or just provide an API through which the AIs can submit moves (in
which case you can't govern how much processing resource each AI can throw at
the problem, but the game service would be very resource efficient to run. Of
course with the latter option if there are limits to what the AI can see (fog
of war or similar) then you have to play the whole game out before letting
spectators see it otherwise an AI could abuse the spectator interface to gain
advantage, if the AIs are hosted on your resources you can constrain such
visibility much more readily.

~~~
egeozcan
I actually do like programming AIs as well. For some reason I am just
fascinated to watch different AIs take on each other while I play the god -
that being throwing random resources, challenges, units, disasters and etc. in
the game and observing how they react. I used to do this with the very, very
limited AI scripting and map trigger placement availability in AoEII and now I
switched to C&C Generals but it is more unit modding oriented than general
scripting so I'm looking for an alternative.

If you or someone else ships something like you just described, I'd probably
waste a lot of weekends. So let me know if you win the lottery!

~~~
srpeck
I wrote a web-based MMO with the goal that players would augment their
experience by enhancing their client (potentially allowing a single player to
control 10s of units RTS-style) as well as writing AI/bots to help them. The
game can be played entirely by bots (this is how I tested it during
development). Interestingly, the game balance and mechanics are such that a
skilled solo hero can take on large numbers of bots and win (see this gameplay
GIF: [https://github.com/srpeck/kchess/blob/gh-
pages/docs/kchess.g...](https://github.com/srpeck/kchess/blob/gh-
pages/docs/kchess.gif)).

The major enabling feature is that I do not differentiate between players and
AI - both are networked clients (see here for the API docs:
[https://github.com/srpeck/kchess/blob/gh-
pages/docs/kchessdo...](https://github.com/srpeck/kchess/blob/gh-
pages/docs/kchessdoc.md)). I wrote up some of my other design decisions here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924316)

And sorry, the live demo is currently down...but should be pretty quick/easy
to run your own locally.

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emehrkay
This is a random question, slightly __off topic, but I was looking at the No
Man 's Sky videos and wondered how video game programming worked with regard
to a server and interfacing with multiple users at once. Does the team design
the game to run on the console and also a version to run on the server or is
it two separate applications each with its own set of business rules?

~~~
hacker_9
Depends on the architecture. If the game has dedicated servers, then they will
built 2 separate pieces: 1. The game they ship to the client and 2. The server
software which receives messages from the client and propagates world changes
to all clients in the same game session.

If the game is PvP (like most xbox games), the there is only the single game,
and a 'host' is chosen to act like the server above. This can lead to problems
though like host advantage [1], so the networking logic has to be carefully
designed in order to mitigate this effect.

[1] [http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/73302/is-host-
adv...](http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/73302/is-host-advantage-
real)

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ceejayoz
There's a subreddit now:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo](https://www.reddit.com/r/mymmo)

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CaptSpify
reminds me somewhat of Towns:
[http://www.townsgame.com/](http://www.townsgame.com/)

I think this shows a lot more promise though

Edit: As pointed out below, don't buy Towns unless you know your buying an
abandoned beta-stage game. Good idea for a game, but, IIRC, the dev got
kickstarted, took the money, and left

~~~
nacs
Warning to people who are considering buying Towns: Don't.

Its abandoned and an unfinished mess.

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Vekz
This is awesome. Its very similar to one of my favorite games Majesty The
Fantasy Kindom Sim

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majesty:_The_Fantasy_Kingdom_Sim)

I've been craving a new game in this genre for a while. I love the 'idle' game
play where the world evolves. Point me to the crowdfunding page!

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rodionos
Can someone please build new SimCity. I'm missing it badly and I'll pay
anything. This was the game that had a meaningful educational value (real
estate development, microeconomics) coupled with entertainment. I didn't like
people part (Sims) as much as city planning.

~~~
natosaichek
I think this is what you're looking for:
[http://www.citiesskylines.com/](http://www.citiesskylines.com/)

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alexc05
This is really cool! What engine are you building in?

Have you considered approaching Sony's indie-developer program?

As far as I can tell, on this generation they are being _incredibly_
supportive of indie developers ... and I would 100% pay for an indie game like
this on PS4.

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doener
This idea really seem to touch a nerve:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/4a149n/mymmo_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/4a149n/mymmo_a_simcity_inspired_city_builder_where_you/)

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omnivore
Looking forward to seeing the progress. Was an active SC4er and really enjoyed
Skylines and not really an MMO guy at all. I just love sandbox simulations and
this seems like a super unique idea and love your approach. Keep up the great
work!

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andremendes
A MMO tycoon/simulator, what a cool idea! I couldn't run the online version
but it looks impressive (guess my setup is missing Unity Plugin).

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herbst
This looks really nice, like a game i will waste hours after hours with. Will
it support Linux?

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swozey
Does anyone remember idleRPG on IRC?

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owenwil
Ugh, I really hope this is released publicly!

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akamaozu
Interesting idea!

Never seen anything like this before.

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twoquestions
I'll have to give this a shot later!

