Gamemaking

Wherein I talk about games I am making

Wishlist STARS REACH and its living world

 Posted by (Visited 2763 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Jul 032024
 

Over the years, I’ve tried many ways of making living worlds. This video here explains how we are doing it on Stars Reach. Which you can now wishlist on Steam.

The Living World of Stars Reach

As you can see if you watch the video, we’re already pulling off something a bit unusual: modelling a world at MMO scale using cellular automata. What that means: we know the humidity, the temperature, the material, the viscosity, the adhesion, for every cubic meter of the world.

In gameplay terms, it means that you can dig a pond, fill it with water, watch the plants around it green up, watch the dirt in the pond turn to mud, get slowed down by the mud when you trod through it, watch the pond freeze over in the winter and slip and slide when you walk on it.

It means you can drown a monster who breaks through the ice. You can heat up the pond and watch it turn to steam, and float away. That’s OK — it’ll precipitate somewhere else.

Everything does what you expect it to do. Which sounds sort of ordinary, until you realize it’s also kind of magical.

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Announcing Stars Reach

 Posted by (Visited 14771 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Jun 282024
 

It’s been years of work, and we are far from done, but I am super happy to finally reveal what I have been working on at Playable Worlds: Stars Reach.

This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years. It is the spiritual sequel to Ultima Online and to Star Wars Galaxies. It has in it all the lessons of all these decades of online game development — and it looks forward, not back, to reinvent what an online world can be. I believe it does things that other games just can’t do.

The most alive game world ever made

Stars Reach uses simulation to a degree never seen in an MMO before. We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.

The whole game environment is modelled this way. It gives us not just those examples of gameplay, but many more. And it makes the whole experience that much more immersive, because everything acts like you expect. Melt the sand on the beach, and it becomes glass.

A video on the vision for the game

Humanity’s second chance

Long ago, an incredibly powerful alien civilization we know only as The Old Ones terraformed arms of our galaxy to make their Garden, a place where they could play with their superscience powers and their genetically engineered creations — such as us humans. They’re long gone now — and we should probably be pretty terrified of whatever chased ’em off.

But they left behind robot Servitors who roam the spaceways tending the planets and their various lifeforms. The Servitors fight off the tentacled spores of the hivemind Cornucopia that infects worlds. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of worlds, each with their own unique gravity, minerals, creatures, landscapes, seasons, and even lengths of day.

Unfortunately, we humans have ruined our homeworlds. Nuclear winter. Peak oil. Climate change. Even global pandemics, if you can believe that one. And so it is that the Servitors have felt obliged to let us out of our cozy planets and into the wider Garden.

It’s our chance to do better this time.

STARS REACH announcement trailer

A classic sandbox world

This is a sandbox online world featuring all the things that players of those games love.

  • A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat
  • An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune
  • An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting
  • In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house
  • A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want
  • The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all

But we’re also doing a lot of new stuff. Like, we are aiming for sessions as short as five minutes. A fresh take on horizontal progression. Making an MMO with hardly any HUD!

We’re not done yet

We’re announcing today, but that’s because we are finally ready to decloak. It’s time to move from stealth to bringing the community along on the journey. We have a lot left to build, but we want to do it in public, with the help of the players that this game is for.

The graphics need a lot of work. Combat isn’t balanced. We haven’t fleshed out all the skill trees. But we’re going to start testing with players this summer. Because this game is for you, and you should be involved in the choices we make.

The stars are yours

You’re being given a galaxy. The question is, what will you make of it?

Follow along with the project at any of the links on this linktree: https://linktr.ee/starsreach — and I hope to see you in the Discord or on Reddit, or just in the comments here! I’ll be doing an AMA at 10am Pacific today in r/MMORPG and answering questions, too.

Ultima Online’s 25th anniversary

 Posted by (Visited 36778 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 242022
 

Well, twenty-five years is a long time. Half a life, in fact!

Given that I actually started work on UO on September 1st 1995, it’s actually more than half. The fact that the game is still running is a testament to the devoted community and the ongoing maintenance over the years from countless people.

I note a lack of thinkpieces and articles, this time around. The fact of the matter is that the most frequently targeted gamer audience wasn’t born when UO came out. A lot of the folks streaming about games weren’t born yet either.

I saw a post on Reddit yesterday that asked “how come no other MMOs have done open world housing, besides ArcheAge?” Ah well….

In many ways the influence of UO is so pervasive that it isn’t visible. Whether it’s Runescape, Minecraft, Eve, DayZ or Neopets, those younger folks probably played something that was inspired by UO in some fashion, and don’t realize how big a shift from prior games it represented. These days, when people say they are sick of crafting being in everything — it makes me want to apologize a little bit. Won’t apologize for games that let you sit, decorate a house, or go fishing, though.

I’m running low on specific stories about UO and its development, so instead, I’ll just point back at older ones:

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Ownership: How Virtual Worlds Work, part 5

 Posted by (Visited 19680 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , ,
Oct 212021
 

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Ownership of anything digital is illusory, and always will be.

How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership

Then again, it’s illusory in the real world, too. Ownership is a convention, not physical reality. This is why we have sayings like “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” which basically means “you can claim you own something all you want, but if you don’t physically have the object, it’s pretty hard to enforce.”

In digital settings, of course, you never physically have anything. At best, you have a physical container of data.

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Object Behaviors: How Virtual Worlds Work part 4

 Posted by (Visited 24675 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , ,
Oct 142021
 

Making objects in a virtual world actually do something is way harder than just drawing them – and as we have seen, drawing them is already fraught with challenges.

How Virtual Worlds Work
1: Clients, servers, and art
2: Maps
3: Object templates and instances
4: Object behaviors
5: Ownership

Items as pure data

Once upon a time, in the old days of DikuMUDs, every object in the game was of a type – ITEM_WEAPON, ITEM_CONTAINER and so on. These were akin to what I referred to as templates in the last article. But they were hard-coded into the game server.

If you added new content to the game, you were limited by the data fields that were provided. You couldn’t add new behaviors to a vanilla DikuMUD at all. That item type defined everything the item could do, and a worldbuilder couldn’t change the code to add new item types.

To extend the behaviors a little bit, there was a small set of “special procedures” also hardcoded into the game – things like “magic_missile” or “energy_drain.” The slang term for these was “procs,” and to this day players speak of weapons that “proc” monsters. You could basically fill in a field on a weapon and specify that it had a “spec proc,” choosing from that limited menu.

If we look back at the previous article, and think about what this means for portability of object ownership, one fact jumps out at us: the functionality of a given object in a DikuMUD is inextricably bound up with the context in which it lives: the DikuMUD game server. There wasn’t any code attached to the item that could come with it as it moved between worlds. Instead, it really was just a database entry. The meaning of the fields was entirely dependent on the game server.

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