Hello folks,
This is the first of a weekly blog where I'll talk about my journey towards developing a text-based MMORPG in the style of Mob Wars: LCN or Torn.com. The setting will be Fantasy, and the hope is to have a primarily player-driven economy for resources, and support various playstyles from questing and slaying to crafting and selling. I've been developing it for around a year so far, over a couple of hours each night, but there still isn't much to look at right now.
Before beginning the project, I started by researching various technologies to implement my game in. I decided that to be able to compete with Mob Wars and Torn, I would need to be able to target both Web and Mobile platforms. I was tossing up between Typescript and Flutter for my front end, when I came across a Flutter keynote that detailed the advances made with its WASM export, and I was sold at that point.
I then looked into backends and felt the contenders were Serverpod and Supabase. I opted to go with Serverpod after reading through their documentation because it felt more familiar to my understanding of how the server-client architecture would work with games as opposed to figuring out Cloud Functions.
The first 2 months I spent developing some mockup screens in Figma, to give me an idea of how the application will look like, and what things I need to consider for each screen.
I took about 6 weeks to model the backend using ER diagrams, and then started to implement the models in Serverpod's yaml files. I've iterated on the design for the backend several times while implementing these models, and I'm now at a state where I need to start populating my database with data.
To do this, I'm implementing an Admin app in conjunction with the game client. The Admin app will allow me to enter data, and define locations, enemies and rewards among other components. The game will frame that data into an experience for the players.
My goal for this week is to implement page within the Admin app that will allow me to define a world, the realms that make up its continents, zones within those realms and finally locations within the zones. A lot more will be needed to setup the locations, but for now I just want to be able to define the name and description for each in turn.
Next week, I'll review my progress towards this goal. If you stumbled upon my post and read this far, I'd like to thank you for following along!
Cheers,
Magipunk
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