...My MMO with changing seamlessly tiled maps you can get lost in

Soo… against your better judgement, it’s always been a dream of mine to create an MMO with a sprawling capital city and a world outside that is wild and dangerous. The outside being a world destroyed by a huge war between two factions of mages so all the creatures have become mutated by the aftermath of the war and the last of mankind is refuge in a huge capital city with immensely high walls and a force which repels the stray magic of the world outside (and which also prevents man from ever weilding magic again).

I want to create maps which change every time you are spawned into it along with your friends who must join a party to together so that you can easily get lost as the enchanted forest shifts and changes.

This is obviously a massive undertaking but is there any way I could make this work in a way that wouldn’t require a persitent world and a ton of servers?

I guess it could have an unlimited time on each session and be for exploratory purposes only, not really requiring other players to join to still enjoy the world. With this project, it gives me the opportunity to also model and texture all the assets myself to make a beautiful world to play casually with friends or alone.

With the combat system I plan to adopt, this could open p the chance to have timed PvP battles in an arena type environment held on a separate map.

Would this be the best approach for a sole developer like myself?

For now I think it would be realistic to just focus on two “maps”, the city and the forest biome. Then I could add some creatures with some simple AI (of which I have no idea as of yet) and start filling it up.

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I have no answer for how accomplishable this is for a sole developer. but i really love your concept for a game and would definitely have a lot of fun playing it! i really like your approach on ever shifting enchanted forest.

i think the best thing is to start small and work on core mechanics of the game and get those down and in place, i think starting with two maps is a great starting off point as well keeping it small at first that is still fun to play! the city map i believe would have to possible be persistant …almost like a loading lobby map if you will… and then you could have your arena map which would be a real time session and then the forest biome that is also a real time session and could have leaderboards in the main city map that says who has gotten the farthest/ who has killed the most enemies/ etc.!

Either way you take this i hope you are able to see this to completion it sounds like an amazing game!

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That’s an interesting idea while developing the game (having a leaderboard of some type for the explorers that venture furthest into the forest) until the next map is created haha

Thanks for the suggestion!

I know I am very late to the party here but this is a lovely idea. I am no developer so I have no advice for the technical question, however, the game concept is very interesting. Valheim, a game that came out recently, I think would be a good inspiration for you to expand upon this idea. In that game, the map is procedurally generated and unique to every server that is made. The map starts at a center point and the further away you get from the center point the more difficult the biomes become. Thats more of a survival game though, and it seems that you are thinking about more of a dungeon crawler sort of game. but just food for thought

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One approach that might help is to make it less MMO. You could have one player be the host to a party of friends. If you wanted to have a bigger feel to the world, you could have persistent elements that get saved to a server and downloaded from the server when somebody else starts a session. This way you don’t need to worry about lots of people interacting in real time. Basically, you would only get the realtime interaction with your party but more turn based interactions with the rest of the world. Would that work for your gameplay?

Otherwise, you might want to checkout the Spatial framework. They have great integrations with Unreal and they are entirely built around scaling up to large simulations with many many concurrent users. That said, the default Unreal system can cope with 100s of users (see Fortnite). So that might be enough to get you started.

You will definitely want some sort of save system if you are going to allow persistent changes to the world. Otherwise, server restarts are going to cause the map to start from scratch.

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Actually this is a very interesting idea which can make logical sense - as players venture away from a place where magic becomes weaker and the magic becomes more intense, creatures become even more enchanted and essential more of a challenge to players. Thanks for the idea. Also, procedurally generated is more or less what I’m trying to achieve but in a more controlled way where tiles of the map can be placed together randomly and are seamless making the map different every time.

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This is a very nice idea, the party leader being the host. Thanks for the advice!

The persistent elements being saved to a server and redownloaded on login could also give the feel that the game is alive when the host is no longer online. Definitely a valid option for a low key early stages version of the game. This is great!

The Spatial framework is something I’ll have to read up on. Having to rebuild the networking side of the game from scratch sounds like a lot of work if the game shows any potential of being scaled up later on and if the Spatial framework makes that process easier, then I’m all for it! This is all very new for me.

This will obviously require a lot of planning beforehand to avoid major problems later on haha!
So, again thanks for amazing insight!

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Perhaps you could explain it as the walls of the city are such powerful anti-magic that the further away you get from the walls the more magic corrupts the creatures. Anyways, good luck on game!

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