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Successful unity developer makes MMO by himself and lives off it!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by hippocoder, Oct 23, 2011.

  1. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Hi guys,

    As I've been saying a while, if you keep the concept small enough, an MMO is possible. Some of you may feel very motivated to read about one successful unity mmo developer, so I post the link here for the MMO crowd to chew on and enjoy...

    http://www.over00.com/?p=1727

    You'll particularly enjoy the closing remark from the developer!
     
  2. npsf3000

    npsf3000

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    Yep.

    Though if you play DF you'll note that it is not some fantasy game that magically does everything - there are some very real world limitations that the game simply builds around. Oh - and the dev made some single player games before hand :)
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2011
  3. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Thats right. I recall him being active when he was just a kid though, years ago on indiegamer forums, making shootemups. To find he is now 24 and married with kids comes as a surprise to me. Either I'm getting old or something horrible is happening to my RAM.

    But, inspirational I'm sure. If the kids making mmos here follow his example of making single (finished) games then perhaps there is hope for them in the future.
     
  4. janpec

    janpec

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    Very inspirational. It is true that this is very different MMO than usuall fantasy MMOs but still hands down to his achievement.
     
  5. Redbeer

    Redbeer

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    This is indeed inspriational.

    However, I setup an account and started playing. Went to the marketplace, 1200 credits for a "special" halloween piece of gear, which is about $50 "normal price" ($38 on sale). Ok, no big deal, I don't have to buy.
    Then I went into the city to play. Could only move my character in one direction. Hit shoot once and it started firing over and over again, chose to go to fullscreen, and the game crashed.

    So....maybe he should spend a bit more on making the game work. :D
     
  6. WolfShield

    WolfShield

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    Ah yes,
    The young rogue all we programmers see ourselves as in our own minds. :) I'm glad you posted this, inspiration is very important in any situation, and in programming it is possible to get discouraged quite frequently. We need stories like this to keep us going and creating the next great MMO. ;)

    - WolfShield
     
  7. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    I noticed it kept trying to make me install an older version of the webplayer too. Could use a touch of polish, I'm sure the author will stumble across this thread and sort the niggles out.
     
  8. I am da bawss

    I am da bawss

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    I think MMO isn't such a taboo for Indie if you know EXACTLY what you are doing - the trick is limit the scope as small as humanly possible.

    And it is indeed inspirational. Thanks for sharing hippo!
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2011
  9. jin76

    jin76

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    I believe if are organized, a decent programmer, along with 2 artists are more than enough to make a small mmo, as long as they dont try to compete with WOW. I think like most people here i too have tried to make one but failed. I decided to make a few other games first and gain lots of experience with unity3d before i try to tackle that task again.

    Jin76
     
  10. runner

    runner

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    What are your previous projects?
    That is some serious previous experience and yet 99% of the threads that start with MMO's in our forums have next to nothing experience with Unity or making games.

    Thanx for the post Hippo it should be a sticky for every new Indie with such dreams
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2011
  11. Chaoss

    Chaoss

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    wait Dead Frontier is made with Unity? that's awesome, I play this quite a bit x
     
  12. reissgrant

    reissgrant

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    It's great to see people realizing their dreams with Unity. You put in the hard work and anything's possible.
     
  13. Arowx

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    Didn't see any mention of the backend systems he's using what would be the best of breed MMO backend for an indie Unity Game developer?
     
  14. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Poke him on indiegamer forums if you can, I think he still checks there often.
     
  15. niosop2

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    The article did mention it. It's mostly SMF for the forum stuff, SFS for the multiplayer, PHP for all the game related stuff. We use some node.js for utility things (email address remapping, proxy server, more to come), and HAProxy for load balancing. I recently switched one of the webservers from apache+mod_php to lighttpd+fastcgi, and will probably move the rest over if it proves stable as early indications are that it performs a little better.

    Backend servers are a mix of OpenIndiana and CentOS6. You really can't beat ZFS for its flexibility (L2ARC, dedicated log devices, etc), snapshots, shipping backups to backup systems, etc. Packages tend to be a little more out of date on OI, and there's sometimes some issues with compiling stuff, but it's worth the trade off.

    Database is MySQL, just switched over to a Percona build. Performance vs. stock MySQL seems about the same, but the extra observably and control it gives is very nice for tuning. Been looking at some other possible solutions like MongoDB or MySQL Cluster for future scalability (you can only scale up so much), but at the moment it's not worth the trouble. MySQL Cluster would be the easiest route, but some bugs I encountered with it make it a no go for right now.

    It's still running off of Unity 2.6, we'll start porting to 3.5 when it's released though.

    Some rough stats for those that are interested:

    Over 4k players online at once during peak hours. This generates 300 HTTP requests for dynamic pages per second. Average page generation time is about .5 seconds, but it varies a lot. About 25% of online players are in the multiplayer game at any given time. The rest are browsing forums, trading in the market place, etc.
     
    Last edited: Oct 23, 2011
  16. jackshiels

    jackshiels

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    In other news, MMO threads on the Unity forums increased inexplicably by 12,000% this past week...

    But in all seriousness, as bawss said: limit the scope and it can be done. It's the same with any game genre.
     
  17. Redz0ne

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    If i were aiming for an MMO and not just a multiplayer game (starting with the singleplayer, just to prove to myself that it can be done) this would be even more motivating.

    still, for a solo-project (since team-members that have joined in have dropped off the face of the earth) it's had it's frustrating moments and days where i'd rather not work on it (since i don't do this full time) it's still coming together... albeit slowly.

    the hardest thing that i think anyone has to learn to deal with is the legions of naysayers... if i had a dollar every time someone expressed doubt that i'd have made it this far, i would be able to quit my day job :p
     
  18. Games-Foundry

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    Interesting article, thanks for sharing hippo.

    One thing that's often missing from such articles though is hard financials. What one person considers enough to live on varies depending on their quality of life expectations, and the number of people I've encountered who don't take into account the cost of their own time before mentioning the word "profit" are too numerous to mention. Apart from the benefit of being your own boss - which has significant value - in the long run would such a developer have been better taking a career at a large games developer?
     
  19. Duskling

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    It's an inspiration.

    I always knew that no matter who you are, if you want to, you CAN make any type of game you want. You just need to learn and expand your knowledge.

    The only thing holding people back is money. If I had enough money to spend I would love to create an mmo.

    But anyways this is definitely an inspiration. I always love to read about successful developers with unity.
     
  20. TehWut

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    Yes it is very inspiring, but yes he also had alot of previous game design experience...
     
  21. scarpelius

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    Motivational yes, but you should read between lines and understand that making a mmo by yourself is a scary task. You need that type of personality that get punched in the face and rise and repeat. Is not easy to spend hours and days in some nasty bug, to put together unity, smarfox, php, mysql to deal with faulty 3D models and then some player come and tell your game looks like S***.
     
  22. ProtonOne

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    I'm just developing a backend right now and decided to go with MongoDB right from the start. One thing that that is hard for me to embrace is intentionally de-normalizing the database for performance, seems to be the norm since you don't really have joins. But the JSON documents are just a treat to work with.
     
  23. niosop2

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    Well, we end up de-normalizing when using MySQL anyways since JOINs tend to kill performance. For a lot of our data a document store would actually make sense, but redoing the whole backend really isn't worth the hassle right now. And since we're using Percona, we can use Handler-Socket to get a name/value store backed by that actual tables right now and bypass the query layers. That's something I may look into in the future.

    I was really impressed with MySQL Cluster, it's a nice DB, but on all the systems I tested on if a node went down it wouldn't come back up without re-initializing the node's data store. So if a whole node group goes down (replica set in MongoDB lingo), or you want to restart the system, you have to restore from backup - you can't just start it up. Once they get that worked out then moving to it may become an option as it offers a really nice way to scale horizontally and still have support for all the apps that support MySQL as a backend.

    MongoDB would probably be pretty nice in your situation since you don't have any legacy code to port over, especially once they get some of the locking issues worked out.
     
  24. PrimeDerektive

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    Hah! I play DF quite frequently... I had no idea it was a Unity joint!
     
  25. Nexic

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    Hey everyone, I'm Neil from the interview. It's great to hear that this story has motivated some of you! :)

    I just wanted to respond to this quickly:
    I'm not going to give out hard financials, but I can tell you that I've made significantly more income out of this project than I would have working the same hours as a top end programmer for a large development company.
     
  26. npsf3000

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    Hi Neil,

    I played you game 3+ years ago - and transferred the trading skills developed to RL to help gain funds for my computer!

    So it's good to know that it's worked out for you as well :)

    Did you ever get around to removing the ~30 item limit for traders?

    Thanks again!
     
  27. janpec

    janpec

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    I am so happy for you really am. I am just glad to see someone doing so well on your own backing just on your skills and laughing in every face of those who are posting: why you shouldnt build MMO; topics.
     
  28. vdek

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    That's a neat story, I think the most important thing to take from that though is that he built a game he could based off of his skill level. He started small and made many single players games then transferred that knowledge to make an MMO. Unlike the Constant MMO Threads in the forums here started by folks who can't even make Pong.
     
  29. dogzerx2

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    This sort of things give me a weird mix of anxiety and excitement... knowing it's possible, you just gotta make it happen! But I wish I could work a lot faster on my game!
     
  30. WolfShield

    WolfShield

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    Oh, so true!
    Nothing against dreams, but if you are going to make something, learn how. Actually, that is not even enough, you need to KNOW how. Without KNOWledge of how to create the simple games, you cannot expect to make the advanced games without major difficulty. Games are like marathons: you can't run one mile and think you're ready.

    - WolfShield
     
  31. Arowx

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    If you consider the mix of technology he's using unity php flash smartfoxserver mysql that's quite an undertaking unless you are experienced in these areas or you can get good tutorials or off the shelf components that are easy to plug together. And it sounds like his bespoke solution had built up gradually over a number of years.

    Things to consider before we all rush off convert our latest project to an MMO!
     
  32. Games-Foundry

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    That's great to hear Neil, thanks for at least offering a hint. It's always great to read success stories, especially when it results from the exceptional efforts of an individual or small team. Shame you can't disclose actual financials. They would have made incredibly insightful reading.

    One option for our latest project is to go the self publishing route, rather than signing with a publisher, and I'm trying to gather some metrics on the different routes to market so I can do some financial modelling for our business plan.
     
  33. tatoforever

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    The difference between DF and some random guy's one, is obviously "experience" and of course "content". Dead Frontier isn't a monster giant WoW-like game, most of the MMOs threads you see every day are some random wannabe dudes with zero to none experience willing to create an other WoW game (I've also saw some of them stating that their game will be even bigger). 0_o
    It is possible to create MMOs games with a small team but there's two things you should meet. Experienced (networking requires lot of experience) and your game must be doable (small mind you).
     
    Last edited: Oct 24, 2011