So, I had some resources lined up to work on a Lila project (not *the* project, but a cool something nonetheless), but things didn’t work out. Such is life.
Meanwhile, I got hired to work on social games with some legendary game veterans, and now I’m in the middle of moving across the country.
When all of that settles, I’m going to make a dang MMO. I don’t mean a simplified Facebook game, I mean a real life MMO. If it’s just me, and it takes a year to get something playable, then that’s how it is. But it’s going to happen.
Having gainful employment means I am freed of the shackles of earning money from the project as it develops. Food will be on the table, regardless. Which means I don’t have to trim my designs so small that they are no longer what I wanted. It also means I can use some funds out of my own pocket to get assistance. I don’t want to wait a year!
I’m not sure yet if this means *the* MMO, or if it means something smaller first, but all of my spare time will be focused on this MMO–whatever it becomes.
Prepare!!! 
5 comments ↓
With a friend, we began working on a personal game project about the same time I first heard about Lila Dreams.
We are having so much trouble lifting the project off the ground! I feel your pain.
We are not giving up (even though after all this time, our project lost a bit of it’s appeal to us, and it’s hard to keep from commencing something else).
It is inspiring and encouraging to see that you are not abandoning either.
Good luck, and just know some people are still eagerly waiting for Lila Dreams to happen!
Thanks, xananax! You’ve been here with me for a long time, and I always appreciate your interactions and support.
I hope you will work on something for yourself, even if it’s really small. It will be worth it! Games are so satisfying to finish.
Looks like this will be something called Kingspire, which is… well, it’s someone in the Lila universe in a time before the Lila Dreams MMO takes place.
I have a nifty plan forming, and despite everything happening right now (like uprooting and moving to California to make games for a living), I’m excited about this.
It’ll be 2d, top-down, kinda retro, and focused around the combat and exploration systems initially. I’m at the stage of pooling together various “favorite” ideas into a list that I can pare down to a manageable feature set. I have some tech in the wings (tilemap rendering and such), and more on the way.
It’ll be kinda slow going, since this is now a spare time project, but I’m very happy with the direction because it seems like something I can finish on my own without compromising.
Also, I may talk about the project more often on the Otherwhere blog (which is also rather quiet lately), so maybe check there if this site hasn’t seen an update in a while.
Oh, gosh. I need to get rid of those stupid ads. Dunno what I was thinking.
Just be really careful to keep the manageable feature set manageable!
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’ll give some basic tips that we use:
I feel from following your blog that you have a tendency (like me) to go overboard. Remind yourself constantly to think *really* small…
Also, we try to stick to our technologies. When we began, we were thinking AS3, now the temptation is great to go HTML5, but this would mean a lot of design decisions that took a lot of time and care would be tossed away, as well as a big chunk of development already done. Changing technologies mid-way might lead to a DNForever syndrome.
Lastly, the whole development is broken into independent, replaceable plugins. The main game engine is basically a plugin holder that runs all those plugins. The plugins follow a particular interface, is all. This allows us to develop, say, a quick game loop for testing that works on framerate and a pseudo-physics engine that uses ticks from the game loop, then replace the game loop by a more sophisticated without touching the physics engine. It also allows us to break dev into small, manageable, and hopefully reusable chunks. We then categorize these plugins into “core”, “important”, “optional”. When all the “core” plugins will be done, the game will be released as version 0.5, getting to version 1 when “important” plugins will be done. “optional” will bring the game to 1.5.
If these tips aren’t useful to you, at least hopefully they will be to some newbie game dev reading this blog.
I dunnow which ads you are referring to, but if it’s your reply you are talking about, don’t feel bad. This is good, honest, to the point and useful advertising.
Will be waiting for further posts…Good luck!
It’s good advice that you give.
I do vigilantly fight to keep things in reasonable scope, but I think I won that battle when it came down to the choice of finishing or eating.
I’ve been with Flash/ActionScript for 3 or 4 years now, and I’m not planning to switch until there’s a reason that will impact my potential income.
I’m updating some older code as much as possible, and I use open source libs whenever sensible (which is itself a fine line). There’s a lot of good stuff out there for Flash these days, though.
About ads, I meant the Google ads that were on the rigth sidebar. The fact that you didn’t notice them is a testament to their (non-) effectiveness.
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