Wild Shadow Studios

Wiki Launched

Yesterday our buddy Ryan Szrama launched a new wiki for Realm of the Mad God at our community site.

 

Want to write articles about scorpions, paladins, the Pirate Cave and the Golden Bow? I thought so!

Dungeons!

Today we launched the first major content expansion for Realm of the Mad God: dungeons!

RotMG's dungeons are multiplayer, instanced and procedurally generated. To enter a dungeon, you must first find a key. Activating the key opens a portal to the dungeon; everyone who enters the portal may adventure through the dungeon together. But the portal only stays open for a limited time, so gather your friends before popping the key!

There are two dungeons in this first release, a small low-level pirate lair (shown) and another larger, more difficult dungeon. We plan to add more dungeons over time, with special dungeon-only monsters and loot. Once you try the dungeons, please head over to our forums and let us know what you think.

3rd Place!

Voting has ended in the TIGSource Assemblee competition. Out of 73 entries, Realm of the Mad God got 3rd Place!

Thanks to everyone who played the game and voted for us!

The Story of the Map

Our friend Amit Patel did the map generation code for Realm of the Mad God. He just posted a behind-the-scenes look at how he did it.

I really dig the maps he generated for RotMG, and Alex and I always enjoy working with him. Amit, let's do another one real soon!

New Community Site

With a massive assist from our new friend Ryan Szrama, today we are unveiling our new community site.

Please drop by to discuss Realm of the Mad God. We really value your comments, suggestions and ideas.

Vote in the Assemblee competition

Voting has begun in the TIGSource Assemblee competition. We'd love to have your vote for our entry Realm of the Mad God.

  

Thanks for the support!

Realm of the Mad God

Alex and I just finished working our tails off all month for the TIGSource Assemblee competition. In the first month of the competition, artists and musicians created art and sound. In the second month, designers and programmers (that's us) made games from the submitted assets.

Our entry is a massively co-op fantasy adventure called Realm of the Mad God. It's a co-op MMO with fast action combat, and a live world filled with thousands of enemies that reproduce and migrate across the land, occupying any area left untended.The graphics come from an artist named Oryx, and they are a superb set of pixel-art characters and environments. We were so inspired by Oryx's art that we named the game's villain after him.

We did the client in Flash and the server in C++. Both client and server borrow heavily from our experience with earlier projects, such as GameHalf, Steel Chaos, Connected, and others. The game reached "first playable" after only a couple of days, so we were able to spend a lot of time polishing the technology and content.

For the last week or so we've been posting updates to the game's discussion thread on TIGSource. We got a big surprise today when IndieGames.com linked to our in-progress build and we got flooded with users, but the server lived to tell the tale and we got our entry in on time. The contest was intense, stressful and tiring, but we both had a lot of fun and we're proud of our game.

New Logo

After much iteration (we are indie game guys after all!) the great folks at Robot Creative have finished our company logo.

Alex and I are quite pleased with their work!

7-day prototype: Connected

I've been to a number of talks at GDC and PAX by some very smart people that have espoused the idea of building a series of 7-day prototypes as a way of generating good game ideas. There are two main arguments that are usually presented in support this idea. The first is that 90% of anyone's game ideas are crap (Sturgeon's Law) and the only way to find the good ones is to try them all out. The second is that game design is just hard anyone who wants to do it well needs lots of practice.   

I recently decided to put my current project on hold and try this idea out. The result of my first attempt at a 7-day prototype is below (click to play, needs a large browser window, sorry about that):

Overall, it was a really fun experience to build this.  It is challenging with lots of room for creativity. The time limit really helps to keep you focused.  

The game itself, I feel, plays well at the beginning but has a tendency to getting bogged down in the later game as borders are drawn the player and AI push each other back and forth with small attacks. In these cases, I've found that the AI, with its infinite stamina, will grind the player down and win which can be less than fun. Were I to continue with this game, I would probably try to find a way to give the advantage to big pushes instead of lots of small pushes.  Or, perhaps, make the game completely non-symmetrical.

Anyway, feedback is more than welcome.

Edit: Requires Flash 10.

Ad Hoc Grouping

Early MMO designers wanted people to form groups. After all, why play an online game, if not to interact with others? And what better way to interact than in a group, just as people had been doing for years in MUDs and D&D?

The problem was that those early MMO designers tried to encourage grouping by making it painful to solo. No single character had enough hit points, healing, or damage-dealing power to make much progress alone; only a group could adventure effectively.

But of course grouping is a pain in the neck. To join a group, you first have to find a nearby group of the appropriate level, with an empty slot, which needs help from someone of your character class. Once you've found a group, you have to risk rejection from a stranger by asking the group leader to let you join. And once you've been let into a group, you have to deal with immature players who call you a noob while making you wait until they finish their pizza before they ninjaloot the boss and log off.

In 2008, Warhammer Online introduced the public quest: a recurring combat challenge in a given location. Anyone that wanders by may join the public quest without asking permission, and everyone shares the rewards automatically. This mechanism is great for painlessly pulling people into co-op play, but it suffers from silly repetitiveness (the mummy will respawn in 4:59, :58, :57...) and the ghost-town effect of not being able to gather enough people of the right level.

The main grouping dynamic of Steel Chaos is more or less "holy crap we've got to attack/defend location x RIGHT NOW!" I call this "ad-hoc grouping": players working in close proximity on a common cause, but without a formal grouping mechanism. Steel Chaos is massively co-op, so the players are already working on a common cause. The game has neither XP nor loot, so the issues of mobcamping, killstealing and sharing rewards with freeloading strangers just aren't there. And since anyone can play any role and everyone is always the same level, there should be fewer problems gathering people to help.

I want Steel Chaos to break down the barriers separating MMO players from their friends. My hope is that ad-hoc grouping will painlessly provide the social benefits of grouping without the problems that normally attend formal groups or public quests.