Thanks for the posts!

[Zeddash]

Just wanted to send out a general thank you for these boards. I’ve been going through the old posts with new interest since I’ve finally begun to work full-time on my own game. I’ve always dabbled but took the full-time jump this summer, converting an older c++ authoritative multiplayer game server I’ve worked on into rust.

Forum based discussion is something that I miss now. Reddit dev communities are becoming a slog-fest of bots and look-at-what-I-did posts with no real value or discussions happening. My favourite sub being completely inundated with bots lately. I use Discord but it’s really just walled communities. Who knows, maybe as a society we’ll ‘devolve’ back to forums again, IRC… Gopher anyone?

I’m not here either to fish for ideas or get anyone involved, although there are some truly great minds here when it comes to world building and game design. I’m just working alone in a vacuum right now, where historically I’ve mostly worked with teams. Posting… even if no one reads this or cares, makes it a little more real to me.

While I’m not going to make an MMO, this game will be multiplayer and the server will be MMO ‘ready’ as per my design philosophy.

I have a few game design documents made but still not sure where I’m going, I'm fine with this because I really want to get a good multiplayer foundation first. The first idea was to build something like Dwarf Fortress or RimWorld with more RPG elements. In RimWorld you learn that very little is going on behind the scenes outside of the map you’re currently on. It's an effect and fun solution so I'm not knocking it at all. I’m building my own server partially to have a more world-like simulator for NPCs. Building this in a 3D world gets quite complex. The initial idea was one massive 2D world loading in chunks. I was thinking of having a character you control initially as opposed to pure colony sim ‘god mode’, then Dwarf Fortress came out with Hero Mode. I really want to avoid the ‘I’m going to make x game but make it better!’ to a degree. That would be very subjective and also you fall into the trap of players reasoning, ‘why would I play x when I already own y?’ I think so many MMOs over the years fell into this trap of trying to make a better WoW as one example.

So, thanks all! Hope you’re having fun doing whatever you’re doing and wherever you are!

In-case anyone is curious, this is what’s done:

Rust based authoritative multiplayer first server

• Client-agnostic
  
• Custom TCP/UDP - Working.
  
• Command based system - Group system (invite, kick, etc.), chat, group chat, whisper, admin login, shutdown, broadcast, roll and dice system (mostly for testing), lots more. Command system is plugin-based so it’s easy to add new.
  
• Custom ECS (Entity Component System) - Somewhat integrated. (Started with bevy_ecs but breaking changes happen too fast, that’s expected since it’s not a 1.0 release yet.)
  
• Replication system integrated with ECS. Sharding will also be supported but probably not used by my game.
  
• Auth - Steam, Epic, email, and stand-alone testing based auth.
  
• Hot-loading files - For MOTD and other future uses.
  
• Fast logging system.
  
• Configurable Tick rate up to 128.
  
• Core engine plugin system.
  
• Heartbeat system.
  
• Mod system for players (server side) - Just started this.
  

Godot Client (gdscript based)

• Bincode parser.
  
• Server Browser - Favourite system etc.
  
• Replication works with all clients. (Every client is seeing the same objects move around in the same space.)
  
• Chat window you can cycle between chat types and commands.
  
• Terminal window that pulls down from top (this is shared code from the server, exactly as term-client functions.)
  

term-client

• Just a terminal client I built first for testing. It’s shared code so any engine I use as a light-weight front end will load it. It will be useful as an administrator tool also and also has its own error handling and logging.
  

[Slamz]

"Make a video game" is my low-key retirement plan too lol. Not as in I-would-need-the-income-to-retire but more like once I retire, I'm going to put some serious time into game engines and see if I can develop something -- especially now that AI is competent enough to help -- even if the only one who ever plays it is me.

(Last time I tried, I had a lot of trouble using AI with the Godot engine because Godot had just done a major version jump with all kinds of broken backwards compatibility. The AI would tell me how to do things but not for the correct version of Godot. It was a hassle. But that was a couple of years ago and AI has already improved notably since then. I think I could give it another shot today, but definitely in, say, 5 years.)

You could probably check out Kenshi if you want to fish for more ideas (possibly ideas on how to not do things). Kinda sounds similar, although I dare say Kenshi had some problems with making it approachable and fun. (That game had a tremendous "vertical power" curve so you spend the first 20 hours trying to reach a point where your dudes can actually maybe sometimes win a fight. It is literally why I never fire that game up anymore.) But it was interesting in that it was "you start with a character" RPG style but then turned into an RTS with base building, and a far more immersive world than something like Rimworld. Actually not sure if there's anything out there quite like Kenshi.


Also interested in seeing where "Light No Fire" goes. From the people who made No Man's Sky. No release date but it sounds like fantasy-RPG "on a planet about the size of actual Earth" and with a lot more NPC interaction.

[Zeddash]

Oh yeah, this isn't a money making plan for me, independent game development doesn't usually scream big-bucks. I've just always wanted to do it, and I can so I will. I had a game running really well years ago, the game engine was abandoned but I had a tone of fun. Always messed around with Unreal Engine. I do want to release something and give a good postmortem, that's really my big goals along with learning rust. (Also I'm renovating my house so my wife is onboard with me turning my basement into a tacky game dev studio for me and my two kids... don't judge me I got to run with this!)

I'm using AI mostly to learn rust with and stay organized. I've historically been a Java, C#, Javascript, Flutter/Dart dev focusing on web/device apps. So rust is a bit of mind bender but I feel like I'm making it further faster than me learning c++. Also one of my sons are learning and will be working on the project with me. I've tried to use AI a bit to speed things up, but it's so hit and miss that I've mostly given up. Adding logic later gets dangerous. I've had it start changing code all over because it 'thought' it's way was better even when I just tried using it to make a simple change to the name of a command. It tried to change the innovative plugin style command system I worked hard on to something more 'mainstream'. Then the nightmare of trying to debug what it does. I built a tcp test engine, I was lazy and tried to get AI to replicate it for my udp engine. I got a udp test that looked great, although formatting was an issue and it could not replicate my super simple text formatting. I looked at the data and noticed that it was too uniform. I asked AI if it was generated fake data, and of course... "Yes! You're absolutely right. To speed up the process it's just simulated data based on what you wanted. It's working perfectly!" I've found Gemini interesting in the sense that I had a few bugs I didn't understand because of not understanding rust. Gemini was by far the best to tell me what I did wrong and how to fix it and why it should be fixed like that. It's currently terrible at code though.

I've used godot for quite a while now. When I did try using AI with it I found chatgpt codex would actually get things more right then Claude code (this is all dependant on the week too, claude was really unusable for anything all summer). The only time I really let codex unleash on my client was with a 2d shader effect. It did it perfect in one go. I was surprised. It actually gave me a good template for similar effects also. Like I said, it's so hit and miss. I just manually work with godot since it's fairly easy, I just use gdscript because I haven't had a use for c# since my game is server heavy and it does add a bit of overhead. If I was building a godot single player or client heavy game I would definitely choose the .NET version.

I started with Bevy knowing that it's too early. The changes were just too numerous to keep up with and the documentation was quite a few versions behind and rarely updated. It was an easy switch to godot though.

I did play Kenshi but not very far, I should give it another go. I agree, there was a lot of ideas on how not to do things. I'll check out Kenshi 2 when/if it drops.

I got No Man's Sky for me and my two sons on a sale. For us, it's a mile wide and an inch deep kind of game (unless you just love exploring digital worlds). I think we were hoping more from the space combat, it was very lackluster to say the least. I've followed what I could on Light No Fire. Not much on it. I hope it will be good. They need to get away from the network model of No Man's Sky where you can just edit your saves and give yourself anything you want, it's client heavy but was just an after thought after people realized that there was no multiplayer when it first released. It also has issues syncing storms and weather. I'm sure they will address that this time, hopefully. Just worried it will be the same thing, great world gen but not much else.

Empyrion Galactic Survival was a fascinating idea but the dev didn't seem to care much about working on game AI, ever. Also destructible ground always leads to being able to burrow to win, wasn't fun in PvP.

[Vllad]

As someone who published board games in the 80's and 90's (TimJim Games) I understand your desires. I still help put out content. Arsilon and I have put content out on Table Top Simulator and Arsilon has published additional content for Savage Worlds for Fantasy Grounds. Dophuz was my partner at TimJim and helped us along the way.

The reason you get good perspectives from Purge guys is at least 5 of us has pushed out our own content at one time or another.

If you have any questions let us know.

[Zeddash]

As someone who published board games in the 80's and 90's (TimJim Games) I understand your desires. I still help put out content. Arsilon and I have put content out on Table Top Simulator and Arsilon has published additional content for Savage Worlds for Fantasy Grounds. Dophuz was my partner at TimJim and helped us along the way.

The reason you get good perspectives from Purge guys is at least 5 of us has pushed out our own content at one time or another.

If you have any questions let us know.

Thanks Vllad, just trying to figure out where to go right now while I keep hammering away on the multiplayer server.