Meridian Core Online - Development Blog!

Hey guys! So for the past 3 years my friend (PastyWhite) and I have been collaborating together on our first game and we figured it was about time to show you guys what we have been up to. We created a company called Ghost Mantis Games LLC, and this is our first project.

The project initially started off as a competition entry into the DX Studio 2008 Winter Games Competition. After the competition the game was put on hold for a few years until we decided to collaborate on it and finish it. Since then we obviously made the jump to the Unity engine and have been grinding away at it ever since.

We are going to be updating this thread regularly as we progress!

A bit about the game:
It's a fully networked web based MMORPG with heavy emphasis on combat. We wanted to put a fast paced fighting system into an MMORPG, since we haven't really seen that before. Think Devil May Cry meets World of Warcraft.

What has been completed so far:
- Database setup
- User account creation and login
- Character Creation
- Lobby System with Chat
- Players can create a mission and others can join
- Enemy Spawning
- Networked Enemy AI
- Attack System
- Item Drops
- Experience System and Player Level ups
- Player Inventory and the ability to equip items
- Wepaon system with the ability to link attacks to weapons
- Player movement prediction for smoother gameplay

We have recently switched from baked vertex lit shaders to using the built in Unity lightmapping. Since our game will be played from the web player, we wanted to keep the file sizes as small as possible. There was a concern about using lightmapping but we have managed to keep the scenes light weight and the results look infinitely better than baked vertex lighting. Once we get everything converted over we will post some gameplay videos.

Keep in mind everything you see is a work in progress. During development we focused on fleshing out the game play mechanics first, and making sure all the server side code works and is as optimized as possible. We are now going through and creating final assets for the game.

Some screen shots:

 

And some concept art!

 

Ok, that's it for now! Didn't want to photo bomb the Unity forums so we will show more later. Thanks for taking a look!

 

Concept art is good. I would've love to see more info about the game. Current state? Videos showing gameplay? Mechanics...

 

Hey primus88! I've updated the first post with a bit more information about where we currently are with the game. We will be posting videos soon which should give more insight into the mechanics of the game and how it plays.

 

Hey guys,

I"m new around here so I thought I'd introduce myself. I'm the concept artist on this project. It's been a ton of work but it's also been very rewarding.

Here are a couple of pieces I did. There's a rendering of a health/maybe potion capsule and some warp design concepts, as well as a really loose sketch of what could end up being an environment that our heroes will visit at some point in the game.

Thanks for taking a look.

 

Hey Guys,

Just thought I'd share a few more concepts that I did for this project.

 

Once again, here are a few more concepts for this project.

 

Is this an homage to the old 90s on-line RPG called Meridian 59?

 

@ drewradley,

Nope! Completely unrelated, just a coincidence that we have the same word Meridian in the name. To be honest I had never heard of Meridian 59 before.

 

Really? I'm surprised by that. M59 is the grandfather of all MMORPGs. First one to use 3d graphics. Probably wouldn't have WoW without M59 paving the way.

 

I heard of Meridian 59, but honestly not 'til we came up with the name for our game and I was looking online to see if it had already been taken. Then again, I didn't have that much money growing up and we didn't have a computer in the house. I never owned a computer 'til college and by that time Diablo 2 was already out.

 

I am in the same boat as PastyWhite, Didn't have a computer till the end of highschool / college. We were mostly console kids growing up.

 

Oh, me too. But then again there was no internet when I was a kid and Steve Jobs was still working out of a garage.

 

Very cool, I like the art and design so far.

 

Thanks! We still have a long road ahead of us, but we're chugging through it.

 

This looks really good especially the environment. Also, the concept art is really, truly amazing

 

Seems like it is one of the few serious MMORPG project. Hope you guys will make it up to the end. Good luck!

 

THanks! It's been a TOOOONNNN of work but hopefully it'll pay off in the end.

Thanks! It's definitely a serious project. As was stated in the original post, we've already spent 3+ years on this thing so there's a lot invested into it. That being said we're definitely doing to finish it. Even if it takes 5 more years (it won't. We'll hopefully be beta testing within the next year and possibly sooner!

Oh BTW I feel like it's worth pointing out that our website has more content on it than this thread does. If you're interested in seeing more updates of the process, more art, more screen caps, and eventually tutorials showing how we made this game they'll all be appearing on the site at www.ghostmantis.com

 

Hey guys. Just thought I'd show another minor update. Just a little bit of a cleanup to the sky level sketch I posted the other day and another sketch of a tree asset.

 

Hey Guys,

Still busting some serious tail-end on this project. Here's a few more art updates for you.

Thanks again for the support.

Cheers.

 

I got tired of manually placing light probes by hand, so I decided to write an Editor Script that places the probes automatically! I will be posting the code plus a quick tutorial to the ghostmantis.com website soon in case anyone else finds it useful.

 

This is looking really nice so far. Looks serious, and like someone mentioned, one of the few we see on here.

PS, I actually just designed my own light probing system, no hand placing at all, uses the actual lights for the probing data.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/200280-Efficient-Light-Probing-for-Unity-Free-amp-Pro!

 

Hello again,

Here are a few more art updates. There's also some more content and updates on the www.ghostmantis.com website. We'll also be uploading some tutorials there in the future, both for Unity and Photoshop and possibly other software that we're using to develop this. Just thought it would be cool to give back to the community in some way.

Cheers,

Pastywhite

 

Posted the code for the automatic light probe generator script to the ghostmantis.com page. I hope that it proves to be useful for anyone needing automatic probe placement. Feel free to use it or modify it how ever you want. We will be posting more tutorials and code snippets to the page soon. Cheers!

 

Hey guys, here are a few more concept pieces I worked on. These are actually a bit old and will eventually receive an updated and better look, but I still thought they were worth looking at.

 

Here's another concept piece I worked on.

 

More art. I actually did this one today and I like how it turned out. I did this for the specific purpose of designing a hairstyle. The characters in the game will be fully customizable so this sorta art is necessary.

 

That art looks great!

 

Thanks!! We're just gonna keep on keeping on. I'll try to get some more screenshots from the actual game on here soon.

 

I love the art. I can't wait to see some gameplay

 

Thanks! I'd like to see some gameplay too. haha. Well we're still working on it so hopefully we're not that far off from having a short video clip showing how the game works.

 

Here's another quick character concept. I have the rest of the character sketched out and the design has been finished in black and white from head to toe. I'm gonna try to finish rendering out this colored version in the next 7-10 days, but for the time being this is all I've got.

 

Hey All,

Just thought I'd share a few more creature designs I've worked on. The big gorilla thing is still a work in progress, but I think it's at least presentable at this point.

 

So Fishypants has modeled on of my creature designs for the game. We'll post the final version as soon as we can get this thing done.

 

I Love this stuff. The work is really high quality on all fronts from the sets to the UI. I will be following this one. Great work!

 

I love the intense graphics here! The player is top notch! Just kidding guys, I love the whole look of the game. I'd love to be able to walk around in a test scene to see how it looks in game!

 

Yeah I always put some extra effort and detail into the character because that's the most important part. Ok actually it's just there for size reference. We're finally adding some content into the game after finalizing most of the back-end stuff. We're thinking we should be able to have a limited Alpha release within a year from now.

Thanks! We're definitely taking our time to try and make the best product we can make.

 

Haha, yeah, I understood why it was there. I had fun explaining that to my girlfriend though!

Thats cool that you're working on an alpha release. I hope I didn't give you the impression that I was begging to get into alpha or anything. I know that stuff takes time, and I'm sure you guys are anxious about letting others see your unfinished work. I hope you guys find some trustworthy people to help in the development/testing portion of the project. I just figured I'd give your post some attention since I am excited to see what you are going to do with the game. I know feedback, and attention in general is always awesome when sharing something that you've worked hard on.

 

Finished rigging up our penguin duck model. I think we can push him into some pretty ridiculous poses, which should hopefully be entertaining. Anyways, here is a WIP:

 

Thumbs up, looks like a great project, keep it going. Rocks with grass texture overlayed are very nice feature, environments look very nice too, maybe a bit too exagurated fog, but i know why you did becouse i do it too, it just makes environment a bit mysterious and filed with ambience, since Unity lighting by default makes it other way around.

 

The best part about this game so far is how detailed the environments. The quality if your 3d team is very pro.

 

Thanks! So far all of the 3d work you've seen was done by Fishypants. All assets are original assets and he's done all of the modeling and texturing himself. That being said, from here on out I'll be helping with the texturing so he doesn't have to carry that burden all by himself. My first attempt will be on the Kwippid model that he recently did (the one that looks like the penguin with a gigantic head.)

 

Yeah, I feel that without the fog, the environments lack any depth to them. Fog is so simple but adds such a nice effect.

Thanks for the kind words!

 

So PastyWhite has been grinding away at the Kwipid texture, and I wanted to share a WIP of where it is currently at:

 

So PastyWhite finished texturing the Kwipid model. Here's a few screenshots of it:

 

I know we have been bombarding the forums with Kwipid model updates, but we figured this was substantial enough to warrant an update. We noticed that after we brought the model into Unity, the lighting on the mesh from the light probe data was VERY washed out and flat. It looked pretty bad. So I wrote a new shader that adjusts the lighting from the light probe data to give the model a better lit appearance. If you compare it to the previous post you can see the difference that it makes.

 

Hey guys! Been working on implementing a few image effects for the game lately. We were looking at a lot of different solutions for implementing glow in the game, and we decided to use Glow11 because it just looks awesome. Can't wait to put glowy bits on armor, swords, plants, etc

Glow11 in action:



Standard Unity Bloom and Contrast Enhance:



Custom radial blur which blurs in the direction the player is dashing / attacking in:


We are currently working on finalizing the player model and clothes, so we will have more updates soon! Stay tuned.