Lands of Ammox, Mobile MMORPG in development.

The historians recorded the feuds and battles between four kingdoms. These four kingdoms were united and then divided into two warring Factions. The four kingdoms of Sivloreia were constantly at war. Their names were lost through the passing of times. Sivloreia was razed by war and fell into an age of darkness under famine, constant hostilities and mysteries. Years of prosperity disappeared within a blink of an eye and the land now lay in ruin.



Lands of Ammox is about two warring Factions in the Continent of Sivloreia. Your quests lead you to unlock its ancient pasts and to defend against the dark infestations that are plaguing Sivloreia.



Features:

• Open-world environment
• 2 Factions - Royal Aristocrats and Heroic Outlaws
• 4 Races - Humans, Orcs, Elves and Undead
• 4 Classes - Healer, Archer, Warrior and Magician
• PvP Area, PvP Arena (Capture the flag, last man standing), PvP hard-core and PvE areas
• Pets, Mounts and Vanity Items
• Multiple 3D views (1st person view, 3rd person view)
• Trade system
• Crafting system
• Spell system

Site: www.landsofammox.com

 

The terrains are very large. There are two representations - on server and on client.


What the player sees on mobile client:


This is part of a very big dungeon:


On the server, there is terrain management so that the NPCs can do path-finding, A*, way-points, patrols. AI is easier as the terrain data is on server.


Players and NPCs cannot walk though the walls; they have to enter the door to get to the next side.

 

Looks pretty nice! Good luck!

 

Very good assets, and very solid design. Is this PvE or PvP only?

 

It is both PvP and PvE. Dungeons, however, are closed-world instanced sessions.

 

Terrain Problems:

• Emulating server-side physics - not so much the physics but getting ALL the terrain data - trees, houses, anything placed on ground to be correctly represented on the server.
• Server-side management of terrain, meshes, data generated by Unity. There is not much information for art pipeline.
• Make sure the terrain data exports the in-house data as well.
• Make sure the terrain exports the second floor or roof data.
• Marking specific areas and places as non-walkable by NPCs - water layer, river layer, lava layer, sky layer...
• Dungeon problems - marking walkable areas and forcing NPCs to enter door and respect terrain instead of going though walls.

NPC management problems:

• Server-side pathfinding without using Unity
• Bugged versions of Recast implementation in C# and more efficient A* path-finding not available in Unity.
• Server-side path-finding - not many scripts compatible to use outside Unity for server-side usage.
• Generating waypoints, terrain data to use inside Unity is impossible because of 2GB limitation. Need 64-bit Unity to generate terrain data for huge terrains, or need to code your own server-side terrain loader to read data into emulated world-space.
• Loading up 2,000 or more NPCs to a terrain. The server needs to manage states of huge numbers of NPCs (more than 10,000 NPCs on multiple terrains).

Coding Problems:

• Portability of Unity-specific C# codes outside Unity. Using with Interop Java or C#.NET
• Emulating Unity codes. We had to emulate C# classes, Mathf, Terrain[], Mesh[],
• Non-existent support of UnityScript and BooScript outside Unity.
• Emulating Resource.Load using YAML.NET to read Unity data.
• 64-bit problems. Server uses 64-bit and need specific integer types clearly marked as Int32, Int64.

Dizzying number of languages needed.

• Server-side coded in same-language on client and on server. I do not understand how our competitors claim to use UnityScript on client, Python, PHP and Java on server.

 

Database Problems:

• Server-side needs to manage huge number of NPC states (more than 10,000 NPCs), transform, animation states. Need for higher-speed database than MySQL.
• Need for higher-speed caching system and non-binary serialisation of NPC, quest and player data.

Mobile Problems:

• Dozens of stupid AOT errors due to binary serialisation of data to and from server. Eventually we got tired and became a tester for one of the vendors here so the vendor gets accurate results and we get accurate binary serialisations.
• Usage of touch-pad and need to describe force and angle in Vector instead of sending WASD to the server.
• High optimisations on the terrain. Terrain data is loaded on demand.
• Memory, CPU and GPU constraints - many things won't run. Challenge to fit networking, terrain data, streaming quest, player and NPC data to client on Android and iOS devices.

Hacking problems:

• The occasional comment spammer (yeah, the Arabic guy spams our forums too...),
• 0-day attacks on server due to PHP vulnerabilities, MySQL vulnerabilities, some script vulnerability.
• Hackers probing our servers for vulnerable scripts.
• Real-time security

 

Most difficult and challenging problems:

• Good AI, Navigation, A* on server - http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html
• Making quest data to be stored on server. Storing completed quests data on server.
• Server-side management of hundreds or thousands of NPCs, NPC states, NPC data per terrain.
• High optimisations for mobile environment.

 

the result is very nice, i will play it. It look like a good old school mmo

 

Problems of making an MMO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ8-lla9430


1. Getting the artists, modellers to use VCS was hard for them, instead of exporting dozens of FBXs (Skip to 18:00)
2. Getting the artists, modellers to integrate into Unity themselves.
3. Single language on client and on server. Not sure why there is no Unity-Script, Boo-script implementation outside Unity... (22:41).
4. Cold chill on 3rd party assets. There are plenty of open-source C# behaviour tree implementations outside Unity. (24:12).


Your team needs to be very proficient in their line of work. The modeller needs to model well, the artists need to model well., Do not assume you are or can be successful. The people in that video had funding of $300,000 but were still unable to make a multi-player version of their game. They had additional funding, unspecified, which caused them to lose more time (and money). They managed to succeed, re-doing almost all their codes and learning some lessons.


If you have lots of idea guys and rookie modellers, stick-drawing artists you probably end-up half-dead and no MMO. In fact, the idea of MMOs by an unskilled team is stupidity and sheer incompetence.
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resourc...agement/never-team-up-with-the-idea-guy-r3088

 

> I want to make an MMO. Can it be done, what should I do next?




Please see this thread:



Can it be done, I've lost my way post:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/184797-The-answer-to-every-Can-it-be-done-and-I-ve-lost-my-way-post.

Here are more reasons why you should not make an MMO:


- Skill factor. If you cannot even make a simple game or even basic arts skills, modelling skills. Please, don't make a fool of yourself. If you want to make 8 million poly terrains, 2 million poly NPCs, 1 million poly small monsters, then bitch and moan that UnityPro needs to be free, -- please, brush up your modelling skills

If you are making stick drawings and want to make an MMO, please, don't make a fool of yourself saying that you are a CEO or CIO and constantly recruiting for an MMO.

If you are doing poor coding, constantly drifting from one team to another, not making any final game, calling yourself a Programming God, Hotshot, Hotrod, -- please -- start to become humble and start learning to code well.

If you purchase a degree from a degree mill, people can google your University and find you out.


- You are an idea guy. The key difference between many people on this forum who strive to learn, strive to make a game, is that person does absolutely nothing. Two or three years, even the basic art, basic modelling, basic coding skills - the person does not make any effort to learn and improve themselves.


- Money factor. If you cannot afford to rent your own server, or even buy your own copy of UnityPro, you really shouldn't be drumming up recruiting, finding a team, posting every 2 weeks about difficulties finding people to make your MMO, annoying the moderators on this forum about how your posts on Collaboration forum gets moderated.

 

I don't know why this post came with awful formatting. Please bear with it.

The problem is not so clear cut, but it goes something like this:

• Misrepresentation of capabilities. MMO servers are authoritative. They need to store all the state of the game on the server. It is passing WASD to the server and then emulating the terrain details on the server. There are no mobile toolkits because the vendors have not figured out how to pass angle and direction from touch-controller instead of WASD.
  
  
  There are two kinds - non-Authoratitive multi-player (FPSs, 4-player FPSs) which uses network interpolation and authoritative kind where the server stores the terrain data.
  
  
  The problem goes like a chicken and chicken egg problem. There is a need for the person to get blocked when they walk against something - be it, a tree, walls. The MMO toolkits are pretty spartan and have no walls, no kits or have to run a session of headless Unity on server for the physics.

• Network culling, huge terrains and server-state. The server should store the states of all the NPCs and stream-down the NPCs to the clients for that area or region...
  
  Why don't you ask the MMO toolkit vendor to host his own server, put 1,000 NPCs on huge terrain and get a Unity client to load all that data? Instantiating 1,000 NPCs on the client would just kill the game instantly not to mention Instantiating hundreds of players on that terrain too.
  
  How much traffic would be needed to serve so many NPCs if the sessions are not properly managed?

• The vendors don't give any after-sales support or very little support.... and you're on your own. That tells you all you need to know. Sell and they dump you after that. Enhancements comes months or years later, while your own MMO implementation lays in waste.

• AI problems. If you put 1,000 NPCs you will bump into the licensing limitations of SmartFox or any licensed MMO server very quickly. Anyone wants to buy SmartFox unlimited to test how good the MMO toolkit is? How about a full re-write to solve that MMO vendor's problem since that vendor does not want to update their scripts?

• What support does that MMO toolkit have for Unity Physics, terrain data, AI, path-finding on server? Hahahahhahaaaaaa

• What kind of scripts does that MMO have for server-side registration, forgot password and player management? A normal player would expect the site to be something like NCsoft or Battle.net quality. Time to rewrite the scripts ... ?

• Simply reselling asset items at high-price. They claim to have a full spell system (taken from Asset Store), quest system (taken from another asset store vendor), chatting (taken from another asset store vendor)... and so on. They might as well stop bluffing people and just point people to buy so and so assets on the Asset Store instead.

• Crashing and bugs they have, are your problems. Corrupted data? Client crashing? Bad SQL statements on Insert? not concurrent variables on server? those become your problems, not the vendor's. If you buy a kit and then find you cannot load or save hundreds of NPC data, good luck...

- MMOs are very difficult to develop. They require expert network, server and database coding skills on both client and server. If you are not proficient or the network developer is not proficient, it is very, very difficult. Several people whom we hired walked out after finding it extremely tough.


- This requires optimisation on grand scale - optimised terrain, optimised models which are fast-loading and highly optimised low-poly models. This requires expert modellers and expert 2D artists. They are not cheap to hire.


- MMOs require multi-server communication or server-to-server communication. This requires expert coding skills. If you cannot debug server-to-server or raw UDP, raw-TCP, do not even try.


- MMOs require extremely demanding GUI requirements which 95% of the items on the Asset Store won't cut teeth. This requires vertical-grid (property per item), horizontal grid (team, guild, friend list), HP and MP bar connected to the networking, special list-view for chat and many demanding GUI requirements. which will require expert GUI person.


- MMOs require server-hosting. if you have no money to host the server, you are probably not serious and just joking around.
If you are not proficient in server-side AI, server-side path-finding, server-side load/save for persistent world, do not even try to think about creating an MMO.


- MMOs require lots of funds. If you are going to make MMO on a shoe-string budget, you are probably fooling yourself or fooling the people who are working for you.


- MMOs are twice or four times the amount of complexity than an RPG game. If you make an RPG game, the whole game is self-contained within Unity. With an MMO, most of the logics reside on the server for which most of the codes may not be compatible or significantly harder.


- If you are using an MMO server such as EletroTank or SmartFox, chances are you'll have to re-code the path-finding, AI and most of the codes in Java which is different from C# and UntityScript.


- The hardest part is to implement authoritative server. Few people have done this successfully. If you do not do this, you'll have lots of people cheating and duping gold, duping in-game items to massive scale, destroying your in-game economy.


- MMOs require persistent save-states. If you do not do serialization correctly, you'll probably end up with corrupted players or even a MMO that has no save state.


- MMOs have area of interest or network culling sphere. If this is not implemented, the game can overload with thousands of people on a single terrain and crash the server and client.


- MMOs require round-trips to the server for advice or authoritative data.

 

Can you give example of difference between MMO and single-player RPG


I can state examples of different methods of coding:




On RPG: LoadLevel() goes to next level. Colliders go to next level, you move around in the Unity created terrain.




On MMO: You actually don't use LoadLevel. There's a tip to use XML instead. We don't use XML because it's too much network traffic. we use something else but concept is same.

Steps are:
- The client sends a command to the server to load next level.

- The server saves all the character data for that terrain and sends a message to the other terrain server to "load me up" and stops sending data to client.

- The client sees "Loading Screen...".,

- The client gets commands to listen to next terrain server and stop listening to the current terrain server.

- The sever sends back initial terrain data and list of near-by NPCs, other Players and terrain data way-points. The client reconstruct the data and load the assets to viewer.

- The client loads the terrain data at X, Y, Z to the nearest quad-tree point. It loads mesh data, normals, lighting and other data from at that area.

- As the client moves around, the back-ground thread loads and unloads the terrain data, loads the NPCs at that area, unloads the NPCs and players that the client has moved away from.

- As the client fights, it sends commands to the server to calculate the attack results...

 

Wow, that is quite a comprehensive examination of issues to overcome when building an MMO using Unity. Looking at that list it makes it seem an insurmountable task. And yet, there are many released multiplayer and self-labeled MMOs made by small, dedicated teams. But I imagine all of them suffer from several of the aforementioned problems, each with their own gameplay concessions to avoid crashing.

MMO kits...that can handle 20 players - I definitely agree with your position that many MMO kit developers are selling multiplayer kits that would likely fall to pieces when confronted with users in the hundreds, without sharding. The terminology here is deceptive, since none of them are capable of handling a massive number of players. I appreciate your point that under many implementations, NPC and Monsters are “players” as far as most servers like Photon, Smartfox and Electrotank are concerned. That being the case, reaching a 1000 CCU limit is easy with a mere handful of players.

We just make Networking software, so build your own damn game - The question that nags me is why aren't the major server developers and cloud hosts creating kits? Hero Engine is the only major kit host that I can think of and that still requires an enormous amount of custom coding. They do provide a basic example kit, but it still looks far from anything I'd want to wrestle with.

Photon, Smartfox and Electrotank are the providers I'd expect to be developing kits. Actually, Electrotank has Electrotank Universe Platform (EUP) and Smartfox has the OpenSpace engine. Both are designed for isometric Flash games (like Club Penguin on Smartfox), so not very applicable to people trying to make WoW-clones. But Photon seems to have become the #1 solution to Unity, providing hosting to thousands of games and with only the most rudimentary demo kits. Still, I'm of the opinion that if they built a MMO kit that could be only hosted on PUN (and assuming they made it as easy to use and customize as RPG Maker) they could double or triple their subscribers. I thought that was what Axis was going to do, but they seem to be focused on making custom world-building tools without any server-side support.

This will get me half-way to my WoW-clone. Maybe a third. - I think you may mistake some people's willingness to purchase these MMO-kits as the starry-eyed fantasies of gullible noobs, when in fact what we are looking for is training. For example, I bought Zerano's RPG 2.0 kit despite not really liking the demo. The controls are sluggish. The spell effects are difficult to control. The AI is ridiculous. But here's the thing: What better kit was there? Ratspell? One of the Player.IO kits? One of the kits where the user shows a game in a YouTube video, but there is not way to test it?

RPG Kit 2.0 underwhelmed me, but it had a functioning demo and many of the features I would want for a multiplayer game, so I bought it well aware that I might never build a complete game from it. I bought it as an education, a first step in learning how to build a basic multiplayer game using Photon. It wasn't that much more expensive than a couple of tutorial textbooks on the subject of game development. By tinkering with it, I'm learning things I wouldn't understand from using a single-player RPG kit (of which I own many). And it gets me by, until a better kit with stronger design becomes available.

You guys are clueless. Call me in 10 years - Which brings us back to Lands of Ammox. You have obviously gone through a trial by fire to produce this game. You have learned a great deal and become an expert on the task of creating a functioning MMO with Unity. What will you do with this knowledge? Are you going to use it to warn us of the charlatans and discourage us from developing games the way you did in an effort to make Lands of Ammox one of the few successful MMOs? Or are you going to create your own kit/training based on your experiences and show those who buy/subscribe to it the true path to MMO success with Unity?

Sorry to be so melodramatic. I guess I was in the mood after typing such a long post.

 

I found the SFX and (other servers) pricing scheme really weird. I mean, price 1 NPC as one player? Come on... By the time you realize that, you might end up buying their unlimited expensive version just to host multi-player games. Photon does not do that, so it became very popular for that reason.

My personal opinion is that it probably won't get you anywhere. You would lose time and effort building on very deficient MMO kits. The word MMO is there to hype-up and jack-up sales. There is nothing MMO about it.

The differences are:

• We took ground-up approach not to use any OnGUI codes, so we step-sided the slow FPS problem.
• We never used any Unity AI at all. All the AI is on the server-side, which is made using non-Unity.
• We never used any Unity networking; so we step-sided the RPC mess.
• There was huge effort to emulate much of UnityEngine.dll codes - such as MathF, Terrain[] to the point where we could read (obviously not write...) Unity data on the server.

I don't know of any other effort because other people give clues; not working codes. From the clues you can then deduce down what to do.

 

I think one should be realistic and pragmatic that it is huge amount of effort just to figure out what to do to achieve it.

I've heard of people spending months trying to crack their head on the Physics server-side to find none is suitable nor ready-made. Then some people spend 10 months just doing the GUI or a year doing the server-side coding.

Some people spend months trying to figure it out, when the solutions exists outside Unity. They keep looking for an all-Unity solution but not look outwards outside the community. The people who find solutions outside Unity find it almost impossible to talk the same language, or share the same artwork and models.


Such a kit would not be Indy friendly. For example., NavPower costs $45,000 if you wanted to make a PC or Mac version of your game. Note that I state this an example. You could get another AI kit but all of them are similarly priced.

http://www.babelflux.com/license.html

NavPower Complete | All platforms | Full Run-time source | 1 year unlimited support | $45,000

 

I've asked around. There were people quoting ridiculous prices - $20,000 for nonsense "MMO" that cannot save, $50,000 "MMO kit" for a fraction of what we've done and no successful implementation. I think there is a fool's market for non-functional "MMOs".

 

I think the problem lies in the way how Unity created their engine. They made great strides in their GUI and editor, but poor in the language (Boo-script, Javascript not compatible outside Unity), Networking has limitations and everything else is per-licensed sold separately. In doing so, they created their own solution which works for simple games, but not complex games.

Yes, you can create a FPS, but if you want to create a kick-ass multi-player FPS with authoritative physics to prevent cheating... You would be better off using Valve or some other engine instead.


MMO-genre games are server-based solutions where the logics are server-based. If you are going to make an MMO, you need a strong server, some way to exchange not just binary data - models, language, database-connectivity and ways to make the server control everything.

Granted, Unity would take the approach which satisfies the causal market games - those one-trick ponies, games that you spend 15 minutes a day, games that do not take so much time and effort to make. Unity would make more money selling engine that powers casual games.

MMO development - artwork, models and code costs money. Who will pay for it? You cannot have someone work 6 months for peanuts working on MMO development unpaid or under-paid, nor can you do get unskilled people to make bad art, bad models. Quality models do not come cheap either.

You can ask around for quotes for 100 models to populate 20 terrains, the poor sob. would be working day and night to make them unpaid. Nobody would do that. Then, the project eventually fails as many people leave and the "idea guy" keeps recruiting and recruiting for more team-members.


If you are a new-comer, it would be realistic to make games that are shorter to develop, easier to make and put it on the market to get some money. That's what people have been trying to tell about MMO development. You can spend months trying to get there, but you could end up losing your way.


Thus, you can see the difference - the way how the MMO companies treat their unpaid team vs. how other people are making money selling casual games and paying for licensed software.


It is same trend on the asset store - almost 95% of the asset store is geared towards casual gaming assets. I would say almost 5% or almost zero is geared towards MMO-friendly assets. Most of the codes won't even run outside Unity, so don't bother.


Personally, I don't call it recruiting for team-members, I call them employees and they have full-time job here.

 

I appreciate your detailed responses.

Before I settle into my response, I want to apologize to Zerano (if he's read these comments) regarding my negative comments about RPG Kit 2.0, particularly calling the AI ridiculous. I am not saying that Zerano is a poor programmer. Far from it. He is 10x better at programming than I am. And for a single developer, RPG Kit 2.0 is quite an impressive feat. He is to be commended for his work.

My disappointment is in the gap between his kit and what a AAA title is capable of. Of course, I shouldn't expect to have a AAA title level of engineering for the small price he is charging. I have gotten pretty much what I paid for, an introduction in multiplayer design.

And perhaps this is where I both agree and disagree with you. I agree that “$20,000 for nonsense” and “$50,000 for a fraction of what we've done and no successful implementation” are examples of the potential rip-offs in this industry, although I have to remember that those are your estimations of their value. To a rich man, a $50k learning experience may be no big deal. To me, it would be financial ruin.

But where I disagree with you is in the value in Kits at lower price points. A $200 kit might be worth it if it taught me new and useful programming tricks. A $40 kit would be a no-brainer with even lower expectations on my part. But it seems you feel that even free MMO kits would be a waste of time since they are bound to send you down the wrong dev route.

You seem very sure that you are doing things right while others are doing it so very wrong that I wonder about your objectivity. I would be tempted to label your critical nature NIH Syndrome with the exception that you do seem to think the solutions are out there, just not at an indie friendly price. That is discouraging, but probably true.

I would further argue that the “perfect” indie MMO solution will never be financially viable unless users are willing to spend money first on “imperfect” solutions, demonstrating a marketplace demand. Who would spend a million (or however many) dollars to develop an indie friendly MMO solution when solo MMO devs (like Zerano and others) cannot make a living with their products, because people are waiting for a perfect solution. A forest needs some bushes first. If we complain that the bushes are not solid trees and yank them out by the roots, the trees will never come.

I'm sure the Unity Technologies folks would disagree that it is primarily useful for casual game development, but it does seem like Unity devs skew heavy toward casual games with low expectations. People know that as indies, they are handicapped in the market place and will likely have to roll the dice several times making mobile and browser based games before they hit a success. It is a logical route to take and, for better or worse, that is the community focus.

Your point about using Source or UDK for an FPS is spot on. Engines do matter and those are specialized enough to surpass Unity, but if someone were to make a hybrid of two genres, they would be better off with Unity's flexibility. However I think many avoid those engines due to their concerns about licensing fees. UDK is 25% revenue over 50k last I heard.

I think your points about art are not that salient. Anyone with ambition to make an indie game needs to either accept purchasing royalty-free content or be responsible for making their own. Yes, I am aware of the volunteer teams that form and disband around game development, but I feel that those are generally the 419 scams of gamedev. Everyone joins or at least considers joining one early in their career, gets quickly disillusioned then educates themselves enough to never be dependent on that again. Word gets around and people avoid them. Artists learn some programming and programmers learn some art. Then they can get their solo efforts to a complete enough state to show that the project is real or get some modest capital from crowdfunding (I'm sure you have some opinions on that too).

Start small, then take on bigger games is always true. I very much agree with this, but the dreamer in me doesn't want to go slow and steady when fast success is surely my destiny. And I keep falling for that siren's song.

It's been good discussing this with you! Gotta get back to work on my game (as I'm sure you should as well). I'll let you know when I have something to show for my efforts. For now, I wish you the best with Lands of Ammox!

 

The $20,000 quote is actually someone's fake-MMO that they are attempting to resell. Those persons are looking for fools to buy his MMO. The buyer must have been a big sucker to buy that product. The thing crashes, hangs, and the vendor quietly slipped away. He does come here on the forums from time to time to resell his re-branded MMO with different names.


You might discover who the asset-store $50,000 MMO is. Goodness. If you want to sell an expensive fake-MMO, you might want to have successful track record of customers who can actually use your product and make successful project, than your customers sue that developer in court for misrepresentation, fraud and reselling Asset Store items at high markups to unsuspecting customers.


Those are expensive lessons.

 

If you look at the FAQ I wrote, you can derive a specification of what product or what is being used or how it was being done.

Those kits would be representative of what not to do to make an MMO or even basic multi-player kit.


We developed most of the things from scratch. The ways they were done were completely different from what others were doing. We did single-source and avoided using PHP or Iron Python or Lua on the server. That was to avoid re-writing and re-writing the same thing again in two or more different languages.


The current source-code base is re-written more than 40 times as of today. The terrain management was re-written 10 times. The AI was re-written 5 times. The GUI was re-written 32 times. I burned lot of bridges with lots of dishonest GUI vendors who could not do things correctly. I think it is shameful that Unity has bad GUI. The server-side was re-written 9 times until we got it correct. To write the GUI 32 times represents the high level of optimisations we did to make it work in MMO environment.


If we do sell such a kit, I would have to make an Investment Prospectus, we would meet-up with you and you tell us your ideas and what kind of an MMO you want to develop, and we be realistic about whether that kind of game is available to be done, time and effort it would take to achieve such desired results. Whether your budget would accommodate it, is up-to you. We would them tailor-made the engine to fit your purposes and then sell as a custom-developed solution for you. I am sure all MMOs are different and require extensive customisations but nobody to do it. We would then guarantee our work so you pay for ready-made marketable game.

 

It it not so much the dreamer or destiny. There are several other MMO vendors who I keep contact with. They often advertise for server-developers, modellers, artists to help with their MMOs. They are tight-lipped on their source-codes and how they did it.

The idiots on this forum annoy them to no end and try to scam them for a copy of their server. They are more stricter and more no-nonsense than us. The HR here interviewed several people who were kicked out by them. If you put that you were working for so-and-so MMO and we give the owner a phone call and ask, the vitriol the other party spews out about misrepresenting what they did. They have even came on forum to set the record straight.


It was hilarious when it occurs. Such skirmishes often happen and the other party comes on forum to set the record straight. If you want a $4k job doing grayscale models, you really should be asking who would pay someone $4k a month for for untextured, not-rigged, non-animated models?


They are looking for proficient developers who can handle huge source-code bases, can understand packets, networking, databases and very proficient in Unity. If I were you, I really would not heckle them or misrepresent your skills, portfolio or academic record to get job there.

From the job description they advertise, you could improve your skills to the point where you get job there. If you do not have the money to develop an MMO, you could get a job at a game-company who sells MMO-related product and services.


Getting a job would represent 0% upfront cost and 100% profit, provided you can do the job. Some people don't like that because they want to be Indy. You have go to do what you need to do to survive.

 

@eskimojoe - Just a few quick questions -

1. Why did you guys choose mobile and not PC's (Windows, MacOSX and Linux) for your MMO? At least for the Client Side.
2. What custom tools are you using to bring your game to market?

 

@nixter and @eskimojoe, I agree with the points you both have made. I have learned a lot from you both.

But from what I have read it looks like you both are not taking into account that it is just fine to make an indie casual game. Even a multiplayer one.

Many indie companies should start by making web or mobile casual games to start off with. The app store are full of money making games like this.

Your mmo is quite a feet I must say and I think many teams on these forums need to read what you wrote about trying to make an mmo. I do not see the big need to make an mmo but that may be just my prefernce.

But I think the best advise I have seen discussed here is learn learn learn.

@eskimojoe I think you should write an advise thread just for this.

Good job and please do not stay silent for all us.

 

We use json extensively here.

There are json editors so you can experiment modelling json to stream to the client:
http://www.jsoneditoronline.org
http://jsonmate.com
http://jsoneditor.appspot.com


After that, generate the C# so you don't have to fiddle around writing codes:
http://json2csharp.com
http://jsonclassgenerator.codeplex.com

 

I would be against using MySQL and SQLite for multi-player projects.

For:

• It is easier to structure data earlier on in-game.
• Creating a new column would not cause data-loss, as such problem happens in binary serialisation.
• You can easily create equivalent data-structures in-game.

Against:

• It imposes a rigid structure early on in-game
• Someone has to pay for a MySQL server + PHP on-line to host the MySQL server database.
• Someone has to make web-pages to create a web-based editor to edit the items/ NPC/ other data.
• The game-client has to keep a cache of the item data, NPC data, player data and Unity equivalents - resource.load assets -- not sure how MySQL would help stream assets down to client.
• It would introduce unneeded problems which AOT errors on IOS environment may occur.
• Having 2 databases - client SQLite, server-side MySQL would mean much work-load for developer.
• Massive data changes would cause chaos in the game development.
• If you intent to redistribute the server, it would cause hassles to the other party who is setting-up a LAN party.

If you are using SQLite or MySQL to store game-data, you should move towards Json or XML-based data storage.

 

They are mostly server-side things which emulate Unity codes, such as YAML reader, MathF, Terrain[], Mesh[] reader.
I put those *.mat, *.meta, terrain, *.prefab to the server and then the custom YAML reader reads the data-values in them.

Unity -> Edit -> Project Settings -> Editor -> Asset Serialization -> Force Text
Unity -> Edit -> Project Settings -> Editor -> Version Control -> Visible Meta Files


I've never been in-favour of running Unity headless sessions on the server. The server only consumes 1.3 gigs for 23 terrains on one server. So as more terrains are added, the memory requirements do not expand exponentially.

If I was to run 21 headless terrain servers (one for each terrain) and dozens of instanced terrain servers for each instanced dungeon session, you could potentially need a huge server farm to run this thing. If one or more of these Unity headless terrain server stops responding because of flakey connections, consumes too much memory you can imagine the administrative overhead needed to baby-sit the servers.


I don't know how someone could run multi-player FPS sessions if they made their FPS game authoritative as they need to load-up dozens of headless Unity Sessions on the server.

 

The meta-files needs some explanation.


The source-code link between MonoBehaviour in the Prefab matches the guid: XXXXXXXXXX entry in the *.meta file.
There is a look-up table of GUIDs on the server to execute what and what.


So when the prefab loads, it has links to source-files. The server looks at the guid link and does a look-up at the *.meta and then executes the corresponds to the MonoBehavior emulation on server. It executes Awake() and executes Start() and sends a heart-beat to Update().

The FBX loader isn't needed. The *.prefab or the *.scene stores the height, width, which kind of mesh and points to collide and animation states. The server reads the transform, rotation and instantiates at that point.

The mesh data is then loaded to the Physics layer. The data is then used to build the Convex hulls, and seed initial values to the physics. The prefab values matches the initial data needed to initialise the engine.

Sound data, lighting data, colour data, shader data, detailed animation data... ignored and skipped when parsing. The Unity client loads the sound and animation data when the char is instantiated on client.


Personally, I've never had a problem with missing Monobehaviour property.

 

Code (csharp):

1. %YAML 1.1%TAG !u! tag:unity3d.com,2011:
2. --- !u!1 103143322
3. GameObject:
4.   m_ObjectHideFlags: 0
5.   m_PrefabParentObject: {fileID: 0}
6.   m_PrefabInternal: {fileID: 0}
7.   serializedVersion: 4
8.   m_Component:
9.   - 4: {fileID: 103143324}
10.   - 114: {fileID: 103143323}
11.   m_Layer: 30
12.   m_Name: Ogre
13.   m_TagString: EditorOnly
14.   m_Icon: {fileID: 0}
15.   m_NavMeshLayer: 0
16.   m_StaticEditorFlags: 0
17.   m_IsActive: 0
18. --- !u!114 103143323
19. MonoBehaviour:
20.   m_ObjectHideFlags: 0
21.   m_PrefabParentObject: {fileID: 0}
22.   m_PrefabInternal: {fileID: 0}
23.   m_GameObject: {fileID: 103143322}
24.   m_Enabled: 1
25.   m_EditorHideFlags: 0
26.   m_Script: {fileID: 11500000, guid: 997fd687ae6bce146bc39fff73fe9187, type: 3}
27.   m_Name:  JohnDoe the Ogre
28. --- !u!4 103143324
29. Transform:
30.   m_ObjectHideFlags: 0
31.   m_PrefabParentObject: {fileID: 0}
32.   m_PrefabInternal: {fileID: 0}
33.   m_GameObject: {fileID: 103143322}
34.   m_LocalRotation: {x: 0, y: 1, z: 0, w: -4.37113883e-08}
35.   m_LocalPosition: {x: 175.712906, y: 7.98566437, z: 187.577087}
36.   m_LocalScale: {x: 1, y: 1, z: 1}
37.   m_Children: []
38.   m_Father: {fileID: 2141937158}  
39.  

Example: the gameObject prefab is read first, then the child -4, -114. The -4 corresponds to the Transform. So the server reads the direct m_LocalRotation, m_LocalPosition for X, Y, Z values, rotation. Then it reads the -114 value to get the GUID of the script being executed.

The tags are set as editor-only. The object Ogre is then instantiated into the server world-space with JohnDoe the Ogre as the name-title. The rest of the other things are in the 997fd687ae6bce146bc39fff73fe9187 script. In this manner we get initial values from the terrain and prefab data.


What I've seen is someone spending ages to load-up the initial positions to the MySQL database (or whatever database). Then later what happens, the modeller then makes extensive changes to the terrain and there are flying horses, underground ogres and the guy who does the entry of the Initial values to put on the server (for game-objects, for NPC positions, object locations) gets hosed.


Remember to close the file after the file is being read.

 

Multi-player advice:

1) Keep the game simple. If the other opponent is going to spend ages trying to connect, trying to go on-line to find players, nobody will play the game. Once you choose a certain network provider, be sure they support you and have frequent updates.


2) Cautionary tale. Nobody will host the server. Most of the FPS games outside Unity are peer-hosted or community hosted. Is multi-player FPS needed? http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/142401-Cautionary-tales-in-Financial-aspect-of-Game-Development


3) Is it necessary to have multi-player? If you make it multi-player, you could make it leader-board competition instead where people vie for highest scores on leaderboards instead.


4) Keep your terrain simple, stupid. I could never understand why people have the need for extremely complex terrains - such as odd-shaped extremely high mountains and/or complex shaped terrains which have lots of poly.

Keep the poly count low for your terrain. Several noobs claiming to be CEOs of their own game-companies have FPS terrains that have 5 million to 15 million poly for their terrains. And that's just the terrain, excluding the objects on top of it. Yes, this sounds ridiculous. It is a fact and these people lame around for a free copy of Unity Pro every now and then. It gets bored. Wake up!

If you don't know how to make a low-poly terrain, read the Unity tutorials and look at the Unity videos.


5) Some of the work-load I've seen given to free modellers are just ridiculous. I've seen collaboration projects where the main leader asks for 50 different kinds of animations for free models, have a need for 100 models for a small FPS game and... don't want to pay for it.

What are you going to do with 50 different animations per model? I've asked around and could not get a satisfactory answer. We've only used 12 - move left, move right, move forward, jump, strife, crouch, high jump, squat and prone.


6) Beware of certain cloud providers and server-solutions where 1 NPC = 1 player. If you cloud-host servers with multi-player, you end up with huge bill due to hidden fees. That's like telling your cloud-hosted FPS game with 20 NPCs and 2 players multi-room game needs thousands of euros in hosting fees.

Where there is no NPC charge, beware of low message-counts per month. That could bite where you end up losing lots of money due to NPC messages sent to client.


I could never test those servers correctly as I've bumped-up the 50 player limit or 5,000 MAU limit within hours. Just loading 1 terrain with 2,000 NPCs, I just quit the evaluation early.


I don't know why these cloud service providers don't do network culling on their servers or provide the algorithm implementation for it for their customers, for their server/cloud solution.

 

I can state several instances of bad implementation or wasteful performance:

• Database usage. Here, we didn't use a database for the MMORPG. There is a MySQL database here, but only for the membership and login. It's linked to a secured site which, gets 3,000 hacks every month. There are more non-human visitors than human visitors.

Some Unity-based MMOs are aware of that. Example: http://sormmo.com/ Their forum site is closed due to tremendous amount of spammers on their site. We choose not to use a database for information such as Vector3, vector4, Unity assets because it was difficult to serialise such data to and from database. Did anyone find a Unity-asset editor for MySQL?

• Database usage without ORM. There are hundreds of ORM layers for NET, Java, PHP. I don't know why these MMO kits do not use them at all. Although we step-sided and used non-database approach, is it too hard for them to use NHibernate or EntityFrameworks or an ORM layer to design the MMO database, instead of using raw SQL statements and hap-hazard database design?

• Incomplete implementations. Several MMO kits have that 80% rule. Satisfy 80% of the simple needs, leave the complex bits out for the user to figure that out, collect the money, ignore the after sales support -- to the bare minimum, tell those people who customised the code - you are on your own, or the vendor does not bother to respond to you at all. If it is a feature, it would be done 6 months later or none. The only thing that seems to work is the PayPal link to collect money. Nothing else works :wink:.

• Terrible implementations or abuse of the concept MMORPG. You can take this simple challenge. Put 20,000 NPCs interspaced on 10 large terrains:

- Unless the person can speed-up the way of interspacing 2,000 different NPCs, the person would have a hard time moving the data to and from the database. In the first few hours, you would bump the limit of the server, or reach the limit MAU or reach some other limit which requires you to pay up huge sums of money for servers.


- The second terrain issue. That's when these MMO kits fails. There is code for the first terrain, but no way to have an list[] of terrains to be served or instantiated terrains, such as dugeons or instanced PvP arenas?


- Culling issue. Because the vendor never bothered to implement culling, it sends the whole 2,000 NPCs to the client and the client crashes, optionally, it may send 10,000 NPCs to the client because it cannot distinguish different terrains. Your bug or the vendor's bug?


- Poor implementation of Login system, create account, create character, no race? no gender selection? no different classes?... no way to change passwords? no way to retrieve password?


- Chat feature is deficient. In any MMO, there is global chat, private chat, guild chat, area chat, team chat. This seems to be mostly non-existent in every MMO kit. Also, there is terrain specific chat, which is chat for that specific terrain only. It seems nobody implemented it.


- Crafting or creating your own items. This is not invented here or crafting does not work well.


- Item quality. Things like bound on character, bound on use...


- Equipment part type. You'll find people having 5 shields, 5 swords on different inventory slots for those MMO kits.


- Poor AI and crowd control. You get monsters that chase you to the end of the terrain. As you run, you will accumulate monsters which gang-up on you. Did I mention no way to make monsters patrol certain way points in the dungeon? How do you do that... ? Timed monsters spawns is non-existent.


- Talking about multi-player dungeon crawling, you would have monsters walking through walls, flying monsters, underground monsters and easy to fall down. These MMO kits are smart: they avoid showing such type of terrains to their customers.


- The inability for peer review. Since many of them are one-time sales, the vendor is just selling smoke. He claims as many things as possible and then it gets declined on the Asset Store (or not there...) or next month, or next month...


- All the MMO kits need to have a headless session of Unity on the server, has no authoritative checks, or need you to run an instance of the client on the server for some reason. So if you have 20 terrains, 10,000 NPCs, you need a server farm, you can see some hapless MMOs which the server constantly crashes, the MMO is off-line, the site off-line after some time...


- The need for 5 or 6 languages. Add in Lua or F# for bonus points. Usually, you keep it same language for productivity purposes. So... the website is in vanilla PHP, the server is in vanilla Java, the client is in Javascript mixed with C#, there is server-side scripting in Python and/or Lua or F#.

I don't know why people do not know how to use ASP.NET for the website, C# for the server, C# for the client, C# for the database editing scripts. and so on...


... which is good. I believe that some people need to learn lessons in life beyond spending money and having grandiose plans to create an MMO.


I will continue later.

 

Interesting thread, i was pointed to it today, but i disagree on some points, but i am just a hobby programmer doing it in my free time.

 

Interesting.

 

Several people had asked me about our policies about hiring. I've been a bit rough on people and sometimes, I do not respond back (or just leave people alone) since several of my posts were removed and the forum moderators said it was better to leave these (people) alone and 'let him sink on his own'.


When we first started development on this game, we had many inexperienced people asking for large wages ($3,000 a month or more). The quality was very poor - shimmering, grayscale graphics, cannot texture, cannot rig correct, stick drawing artists who had their own agendas, developers who didn't know anything about C#. Dozens of people had came to the project and left.


http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/13...der-C-Javascript-Unity-Javascript-Browser-PHP
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/144480-Average-time-taken-for-artists-to-make-low-poly-models
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/150797-Say-NO-to-extortion-by-unscrupulous-individuals-using-cracks


The next hire was very good, Stefano, a University graduate who bring in his friends so we had a team of people working steadily on this project. So I would get him to assess the candidates before making decision. I got duped several times and learned from them.


We would get candidates who leave us address and numbers, which were un-contactable after 3 weeks, or no such persons. When I call them, 'we are sorry, the number you called has been disconnected or not in use'. I especially like the way how some people would go to the middle of nowhere to get a pre-paid and then make convincing fake portfolio and how they would live in dozens of prior addresses.


I've asked candidates to put their name and SSN on eVerify and the screen would show a different name or a woman's name instead, or they would decline. As they declined, the person conducting the interview said, sorry we could not employ you.... It is like, the person you pay to does not exist, he needs to be paid by his relative in some other state or country. Yeah, I fell for that trick once.


I've asked for a consent for academic records since that person's work done does not even represent the person went to the arts institute/ or got his Bachelor's degree in Arts. It gets weirder as some Universities have Unity courses and then that developer fails and fumbles, and when he owns up, he didn't attend that University.


It turned very nasty as I and the employees here would get insults, slurs, threats, over emails, Skype. I've told my employees to just block them and also file police reports. I show the evidence to them as well - the asset vs where it actually came from and other proofs. I've emailed DexSoft and get reply that person didn't make the asset and it was from DexSoft.


We've called the police on these people. There used to be several fake LLC companies on this forum who advertised for fake jobs, fake projects, take the money and then ignore the customers. It is good that the moderators here banned them, or they would skirmishes with multiple people on this forum and the moderators take action.


Off-line, the police went to those address, the persons said nobody lived there, or don't know, don't answer the door. Few months later, when I asked about the case, the police said they came back with search warrants, then they just fled instead.


Since they were banned on the Unity forums, they went and started to do their funny business on UDK, C4 and got banned as well and even making fake games on IndieDB - http://www.indiedb.com/games/pokemon-adventures-online. I wonder when they would give up making Pokemon MMOs?


I get resumes where artist or developer or modeller put they worked for (fake LLC) for 6 months, I often wonder how they were paid by, since we were paying wages but those guys do not get wages at all.


I thought me a lot about how these people operate and the lengths they would do. I thought people worked hard, take the effort to make good games.


For me, it was mostly over . When I see someone with a weak portfolio, I just leave him alone. If he asks for a job, I would just pass him over and move on. I do not attempt to tell further. I've posted about this, so I can eventually move on.

 

We did do projects with many artists, developers. I asked to do the project on VWorker (now called Freelancer).



An artist uses fake name on VWorker, the project for medieval artwork was closed down by VWorker and then the money refunded back to us.




Developer did not finish work, we recovered $3,000 from him later on.




I do thank the people at former VWorker and Freelancer for 50+ arbitrations in our favour. We have never lost an arbitration there. Where the work was done correctly, they were paid.

 

There actually is. Here is a terrain, one of many done by senior modeller. On the left is a mesh done by him (5.6 million poly). On the right is the optimised mesh (1200 poly) for the terrain repaired.

I don't know whether he did that to spite us or he had no experience.




We do check for portfolio plagiarism. The below was done by an artist who claims to do artwork. His portfolio is full of artwork done by other people.


Actually, someone else did it instead..



When it comes to negotiating prices, we have several people come to us, but they login via anonymous proxies so their identities and actual locations are unknown. Since they don't and won't want to browse our website, or use our SVN, and don't want to leave any addresses, we ignore these developers.

This person is from the USA... but ...

 

Dear Dev Diary,

we implemented infinite terrain system. The terrain we have, that works on Mobile iPad1, iPhone3GS and older Gingerbread devices. There are 8 terrains, each one having 4,800m x 4,800m. or 23,040,000m or 23,040 km^2 for a total of 184,320 km^2.


A person could walk, and walk for around 4 hours non-stop, using touch-controller, from one end to another end. The terrain is so huge that the modellers here had problems making so much content for it. There are many NPCs there, around ~ 20,000 NPCs per terrain.


Screenshots to follow.

 

I posted this because I wanted to move on and that in some ways, as the new year arrives, the old is past.


My staff receive harassment from Prion Games. This harassment issue taints almost all business relationships to the point where, in doubt, the business relationship is gone.




When our company took a lawsuit against Prion Games, instead of facing the truth, Josh decided to become a fugitive and run away. Every time the bailiff would contact him, he would get another pre-paid phone, move to another address, put up another website or yet another non-existent 'subsidiary' of Prion Games.




The BBB also tried contacting PrionGames and later gave them bad ratings.




If you give Prion Games a phone call - the line is dead, nobody lives at the address where it operates, and the business owners never bothered to pay taxes, never paid the hundreds of people who work for him.

Prion Games got banned twice from this forum. Prion team-members have been banned many times over.



If you are signing a contract with Prion Games or his non-existent subsidiaries or sub-company or whatever <game company> they call themselves, you are signing a contract to a company that is out of business or does not exist.

 

New Scenes

 

Give me the game already!

 

Visual Overview

Parser to parse Unity prefabs.


Server-side Game Objects


Server-side Utility Objects


Server-side Game, Zone, Messages, Database objects

 

List of functions


Visual Representation

 

Dev Diary.

Some time ago, we hired ex-studio employees. The ex-studios employees are excelling, taking leadership and mentoring the current staff on techniques they learned at their former workplace. We try to have two training sessions a week so they can impart their skills, 1 on 1 coaching and training. The most telling was the way how the coding, arts, modelling went about.


For the management here, it was godsend, for the first time we could get correct answers on certain issues about whether our business policies, managing the game development part of our business, what is the best techniques to rig, animate the models, what is best practices to handle coding, what is best practices to handle 2D art.


Bump, bah rump pah rump pah bump bump...
For new hires, for developers, if you don't have any decent completed games, a coding test is now mandatory. That is so you don't waste our time and we can close the interview quickly on developers who know nothing and lie about it. Stop constantly bumping your threads every now and stop asking your friends to post good references. HR won't buy it and if HR smells a rat, it's over.


The method of operations is:
1) bump your thread every week,
2) delete the original post, and post another '^bump' post.
3) next week, delete the previous ^bump post and post a new post on same forum-thread.
4) Repeat until 52 weeks pass, or someone notices it and complains.


About that good looking model...
Plagiarism is grounds for dismissal, it's kind of weird when new candidates show models similar to what ex-studio guys used to make! I can understand you are great fan of Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty or Warcraft. Unless you can create the models by your own effort and your own work, just don't do it. It is unprofessional to use other people's work and claim they are your own. The pace here is very fast, if you cannot keep up pace with the current team, you are out. Claiming ownership of someone's else work, that's going to cause fights here and fastest way to leave this place.


It is pointless to have hundreds of model packs you downloaded, then claim it as your own when you come for a job interview for 3D modeller. The contract states that you are to create models by your own effort and using your skills, create a set of highly optimised models, rig, animate and texture them.


Age increases and not a constant
If you are planning to create fake profiles, just remember that telling others you are 20 years old for past 4 years = you are now 24 years old, and stop putting false information you are still 20 years old. It gets old after some time when you are still asking basic questions when you were on this forum since Unity 2.0 was released.


Finishing that degree vs. quality of work
Every candidate we ask from for-profit universities - Devries, Phoenix, Arts, Graduate institute - when are you going to finish your degree and show your certificate? It seems like nobody ever finishes their education there. The people usually put - studied at (for-profit education provider).

it comes to the point where if the person is unable to substantiate anything and puts there (studied at for-profit education provider), he or she has probably learned an expensive lesson in life, get saddled with huge repayment terms.

Employers learn expensive lessons that based on past prior candidates, that such people are expected to produce very poor quality work. People who claim to be from (for-profit education provider) and draw stick drawing, black white models, unable to code well -- don't put the place of where you study at, to disrepute.


Trio collaboration, for modellers, 2D and texture/environment artist.
This time, the management tries to get 2D, 3D artist and texture artist to work together. That's probably a new term. Texture or environment artist. It takes almost an hour for the environment artist to create the scene and texture the terrain, an hour for the 3d modeller to convert concept to models placed in the terrain. The 2d artist would then go about finishing the textures.


Play Testing, Play Testing, Play Testing
This time, The MMO server was changed to quickly add more scenes, auto-detect client terrain data and so allow change levels, (see prior post as that is not just issue LoadLevel command) quickly. More time and effort was made to make sure the developers kept the project compilable. No more crazy check-ins unless it compiles.


Interns.
As we have people who can train new employees, we may consider in the future, internship or apprentice programs.

1) If you are unwilling to learn, this is not for you. Seriously. Don't waste our time if you are unable or don't want to learn.

2) If you are a new comer, The minimum is at least a college diploma with prior experience in software development, 2D arts or modelling.

3) There is cross-training, so you are required to attend training that are not relevant to your field - you are a modeller and you will attend programmer training sessions to see how they work.

4) All internships follow FLSA and applicable federal laws.

5) This is a local job, not a remote job. If you cannot come to work promptly and always arrive late, please don't apply for as an intern. It's funny when the persons who are always late are the interns...


Arts related poverty
Gimp is free, Blender is free, .. but nobody seems to use it. Why is it that many modellers have dozens of pages of their own models on their DeviantArt page, many screenshots of art on their FB page,... and the artists on this forum are having arts-famine, poverty of art?

Now, artists don't have to buy water colour pastels, quality water-colour paper, shading pencils. They can use free Gimp to do their art. It is not shameful to use Gimp or Blender?


Abusive employment terms
I don't know how other companies make their employees work for free for more than 3+ months and don't pay them. Pay next month, pay next month or do not even pay at all.

Yet, these very same people call themselves senior artists, senior modellers, charge $50 - $100/hour, with net 48 hours payment. When reported to police (Unemployment rate is over 15% in certain counties in US states) they have no fixed address - have dozens of addresses, let their LLC expire, they hang-up on debt collectors, don't want to answer the door when the bailiff comes, shame on them.


We usually hear S.O.B. stories from people cheated by them:

1) Daily payroll is only for agriculture and farm workers.

2) Promissory notes made by them cannot be enforced as judges cannot enforce illegal payment terms. Words like 20% interest per week is illegal and comes under usury laws.

3) As they are constantly shifting addresses and phone numbers, they don't update their LLC information. They try to look legit by adding a suffix LLC and then when you check, no such company exists.

4) Learn from it. There should be no reason why they collect $50/hour and you get nothing for your work.


How to fail at being Indy.
This company gets offers from others who are wanting us to take-over their company. We don't do this anymore, since many of them run up debts to tens of thousands waiting for someone stupid to bail them out.


Their method of operations are:

1) Claiming about major publisher talks. When we asked our employees to contact their former workplace about such 'talks', no so such talk ever existed in the first place.

2) They have hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of likes, but shrink progressively over time, or 1 or 2 comments per post, at the very most.

3) A fetish or constant need or desire to get brought-over, when their coding, artwork is really terrible.