1 Year of Game Development : Noia MMO

my name is Dane and for the past year I have been making my own MMORPG neuya I'm gonna take you on a journey of all the progress that's been made in the last year I'm also gonna total up all the expenses that went into it along the way so let's get into this [Music] now Indie Game Dev is not easy there are many hats one must wear to keep track of all the design and code marketing networking bug fixes and Etc a lot of Indie devs get burnt out discouraged or lose interest along the way so to keep myself on track I made two rules first and most important no zero days I will do something to move my game forward every single day and keep a record of it now nobody wants to play an online game with no players so in order to grow the player base I needed to show this consistency and progress publicly which leads us to the second rule I must release a devlog every two weeks no exceptions I hope to form Rock Solid habits to continuously push my game forward as well as show constant progress which would in turn hopefully draw a large player base to my game with these two rules and place I made my first devlog and got to work hi my name is Dave and I'm going to make an MMO I started off with a very basic MMO framework off the unity asset store called ummo RPG 2D remastered this asset jump started my game as it provided basic functionality for all of this stuff think of it like buying a small studio apartment and then adding rooms and features to it in hopes that one day it'll turn into a mansion I was also subbed to two artists on patreon Final Boss blues and Clockwork Raven this gave me some monster Sprite sheets and map tile sets to start with one of the first things that I wanted to do with Noya is make it 2.5 D which means it uses 2D Graphics but it uses a 3D camera this gives the game some nice perspective where you can see larger objects move with the camera and have a bit of Parallax now a problem that I ran into with getting this perspective set up was Shadows the objects that cast Shadows work just fine but when one of those Shadows needed to be projected on an object that could be transparent it failed I wanted objects like this bridge here to become semi-transparent when the player walks under them only the Shader that the bridge use and the Shader that the tower used were not compatible so to fix this I updated my project from the unity standard renderer to the universal render pipeline or urp for short at first all my textures were broken and I was living in a world of bubble gum but I dropped a new Shader onto all of my game objects one by one and slowly everything started looking better now that I had nice Shadows I needed to do something with them enter the day night cycle using gradients and a simple scripted time function Noya now had a day and night cycle that I was really happy with a little bit more of the Clickety Clacks and I had a function that limited monster spawns to day or night now I could have spooky ghosts that only appear year after dark now UMO came with an experience and leveling system already but there was nothing to indicate to the players that they had actually leveled up at all so I had to build an achievement system to notify the player when something cool had happened this was the first time I really had to wrap my head around how the server syncs data to the various player clients an interesting problem that I ran into is when one player leveled up all the players got the notification for it once I wrapped my head around how to only send these messages to the individual player clients everything worked great and now I had a system that I could pop up these notifications when players did something cool like level up or get a new skill June saw the creation of NPC dialogue system I wanted the players to feel like they were actually interacting with the inhabitants of noya so I mimicked a dialogue window from an old game that I used to play on the Philips CDI called laser Lords certain keywords would be highlighted in the NPC chat and by clicking on these words it would move the conversation along later on I could come back and add voice lines to these dialogue options and give it even more life to these NPCs now I wanted to get some attack animations in Noya for the various weapon types that I had planned but when I started digging into what it would take to make all the animations I want I ran into a problem math see 3D games use models that can be moved around easily and essentially record animations you only need one model and you just move the bones around a 2d game uses Sprite sheets for animations each frame of an animation is a complete re-drawing of the character and while a simple walking Animation Sprite sheet looks like this a Sprite sheet with just three additional animations looks like this my workload was going to exponentially increase if I couldn't solve this problem I ended up going with a hybrid solution the walking animations would stay Sprite based but the weapon animations would be bone based this way I only had to draw 16 Sprites for the character while all the various weapons would only have to be drawn once I could rotate that one weapon image in 3D space to give the appearance of attacking perfect crisis averted I made some basic attack animations from each weapon as well as new Walking animations now that I had attack animations I needed those attacks to actually do some damage so in July I came up with the damage formula for Noya and devised a way to road map how those stats would progress with the power of spreadsheets with this I can check how high a player's stats should be on average at any given level and then plan gear progression accordingly for example if I wanted to give a player a chess piece that was rated for level 25 content I know that that chess piece should have roughly plus 19 stat on it easy peasy one of the things that Noya absolutely needs is the ability for players to customize their character and equipment I broke down each piece of armor to individual colorable regions and then added a Color Picker in game with this players can now dye their equipment now August rolled around and neuya was looking a little Bland in the UI department so I decided to purchase a UI package from itch.io to give Noya a more fantasy field I converted all the UI windows from the dull gray or the default ummo blue over to the new UI I couldn't be happier with the new look I also created a new character creation scene taking inspiration from a moment in one of the greatest games of all time Chrono Trigger I would like to have more varied character creation scenes that the player can choose from in the future so if you have an idea for one leave a comment down below combat Neo was feeling a little clunky as well so I decided to add a bit of spice to it and gave the monsters the ability to call for help any monster that gets touched by the red circle will join in the fight in doing this I also made an aggro system now monsters would be able to keep track of which player does how much damage to them and decide on who's the bigger threat in switch targets down dynamically so if that wizard in your party decides to Fireball the wrong target they're gonna get eaten first now that monsters had a quantifiable way of knowing who was the biggest threat to them the server would also know who that kill belonged to and also who the loot belonged to just because you got the last hit on a monster does not guarantee the loot belongs to you the one who did the most damage is the one who wins now in September I made a major decision I had been working on this Forest as a starting area for quite some time now when I heard something that struck a nerve with me most MMOs start off in quaint little Forest Villages I don't know why it resonated with me so much and it honestly wouldn't matter if I still use the forest map for a starting area but it did get me thinking what if I circumvent that expectation what if the player was supposed to start in the forest but something went wrong so I decided the player will start off dead in the Underworld a tile set I didn't have so I reached out to Clockwork Raven to see if he'd be willing to take a commission for an underworld tile set and he did with a new tile set in hand I got to work on a new new starting area October saw a massive combat update I didn't want neuya to just be a simple click on Monster click on skill continue until monster dies so I made charged and channeled abilities channeled skills could be held down to constantly tick damage to the monster so long as you had the MP to do so and charge skills could let the player decide do I want a level one Fireball or a level 3 Fireball monsters also now had telegraphed attacks and the ability to charge the player as well both of these types of monster attacks gave clear indication to what is happening so now I would be able to create much more Dynamic fights instead of just standing in front of a monster and clicking the button until it dies it was also at this time that I made the decision to cut back on the amount of weapons that I was going to release to the game I had all these weapons planned out but I realized that not all of them were really necessary to have in the game on day one and I really needed to focus on a minimum viable product so I cut the list of required weapons down to just four sword the wand the bow and the staff I can always add those other weapons in later speaking of weapons in November I added weapon skills to Noya just how in Dark Souls certain weapons would give you a special move Noya would have the same as I was adding these new skills in though I started to see some minor performance losses when the game was searching for a skill this was due to how the game stored all the skills in memory the more skills I added the longer the game would need to look for that one skill in particular I knew if I was seeing performance hits now it was only going to get much worse later so I converted the skill system from using a standard array to a dictionary while this doesn't necessarily free up in memory the speed at which the game can now reference the skill data is instantaneous this gives me the ability to add hundreds or even thousands of skills to the game without causing any noticeable performance loss December was all about monsters now finding monster Sprites that fit the art style of noya was not exactly hard but finding Monsters that fit the art style of noya and also had an up and down facing perspective was impossible I spent most of this month exercising my artist's brain and trying to add these additional perspectives to these monster Sprites some worked but some didn't and I had to enlist some additional help from Fiverr while I was making these monster and NPC Sprites I was also hard at work on the various quests and how they would all tie into how the player escapes from the underworld while the underworld map was coming along nicely there was something missing it was quiet too quiet I searched a bunch of sites for decent music that would convey the idea that this place was lonely and dead but that it was also the start of a new adventure for the player these two ideas clashed so hard that I just couldn't find anything that I liked in the end I commissioned reckoned for the background track for the underworld and I couldn't be happier with it February rolled around and uh I broke my game okay not really but Unity had updated several times since I originally started the project as well as ummo and mirror the network code side of ummo so I really needed to update to get all the latest features and I was not looking forward to it thankfully most of the changes in unity and UMO were just variable names so it was pretty easy to fix I used a program called code compare to put a copy of my code next to the updated code and I was able to see exactly word for word what each change entailed and decided if I wanted to import that change or not this was painstakingly boring work but it did give me the opportunity to essentially review every line of code in the game so it was a nice refresher after all I was also getting ready for an alpha launch of neuya I needed to get the game in front of people so that they could play I needed a place to put my server and my office was really the only place problem is servers generate heat and my office is small I ran the server in my office for a day and even with the door open I still felt like a baked potato so I purchased a portable AC I had to do some minor work on the window in my office to get it to open in the right direction but once all that was set up it's ugly but it works now March saw one of the biggest improvements to the game mechanically with the creation of interactable objects up until now neuya had been using NPCs which were glorified friendly monsters the NPCs had health and inventories and animators and movement agents and none of that was getting used at all but all of that stuff was constantly being checked up on by the server and it put a huge drain on the server resources so I made interactable objects by removing all that junk that the NPCs weren't using these interactable objects would have the exact same functionality of an NPC but without the server having a checkup on them every single tick it was another major resource Improvement I was also able to use these interactable objects to create new Quest objects that the player could go around into the world and find and the player could interact with them I was able to play around with another Shader for these interactable objects as well and it gave the player the ability to win moused over see the interactable object highlighted this gave me the idea that I can now hide certain things around the world of noya that the player would have to seek out and there would be no indication that there was a clickable object until the player actually moved their Mouse over it so this was really exciting for me it also gave me the ability to make new quests that the players could then go out and collect static objects as well well as create other interactable objects such as teleport locations or dungeon entrances adding these into the game made Noya feel a lot more alive that there was a lot more to do in the world and I really really enjoyed that April 1st this was it the big day the alpha launch I took the whole week off of work for this and on the morning of April 1st Noya went live there were a few interesting bugs like PVP getting left on accidentally but otherwise there was really only one other game breaking bug that occurred and that was fixed within the first hour it was a wild time there were over 400 accounts created that day you all logged in and helped put Noya through its paces and I can't thank you all enough I spent the rest of the month improving the user experience taking in the feedback that you all had given me on launch day I added more settings more key customizations and added tool tips to everything I wrapped up the month by creating Noyes first cut scene of the player streaking down from the heavens as a bright ball of potential energy only to die eye on impact and wake up in the Underworld riding high off the success of the alpha launch I wanted to get Noya in front of more people and itch.io seemed like the next logical place to go itch is a great site for Indie devs to release their game even for free so it seemed only appropriate that Noya should have a presence there I got to work on a game release page when I ran into a problem I didn't have a logo yet so I reached out to the one person who was already responsible for most of the art Noya already Clockwork Raven and over the course of the next few days we put together a brand new logo for Noya the release on itch.io was pretty successful and I really like how they aggregate the data together to be easy to read so I can track where players are finding out about my game having gone through two releases of noya now I took off the publisher hat for now it is exhausting and I put my Dev hat back on and continued working Noya was missing a key feature of all MMOs group dungeons having built two large Maps already putting together this small dungeon map was pretty quick and I was able to take some of my previous Telegraph monster abilities and modify them to work for the bosses of new dungeon now the players had their first group oriented content and a place to earn some Loot and upgrades hopefully this first dungeon won't be too hard on the new players and it'll serve to teach them about the game mechanics and there you have it one full year of Game Dev hey if you made it this far thank you from the bottom of my heart why don't you leave a comment down below with your favorite hamburger condiment just to confuse the people that didn't make it this far and if you like what you're seeing consider subscribing it really helps grow the community and get the name of noya out there so that we have a full community of players to play with I gotta get back to work but again thank you and I'll see you next time bye thank you [Music]

Channel: Noia Dev

Views: 489,613

Keywords: free to play, f2p, free mmo, free mmorpg, indie game dev, game developer, 2d rpg devlog, 2d, unity, gamedev, devlog, game development, adventure rpg, 2d mmorpg, game programming, game process, First Devlog, Devlog #1, game dev, mmo game dev, new mmo, unity devlog, 2d mmo, pixel art mmorpg, mmo design, dream game devlog, making my dream game, dream game, solo game dev, new mmo 2023, 1 year game dev, 365 days game dev, josh strife hayes, asmongold

Id: 0wKo5WSImYY

Length: 19min 1sec (1141 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023