3D iPhone MMO (+ Mac/PC) in Development

You will buy your skills with points, and that will raise their starting values and also affect how much exp they need to raise. They will raise as they are used, and you can speed this up by assigning exp you earn to skills also. As you gain skill points you can get more skills, and indeed you can keep levelling up and get all the skills eventually. That would take a ridiculous amount of time though, so it's highly unlikely. You can still use a skill even if it's untrained, unless it's an unusable type. If you decide at creation time to specialize in a skill, it will begin with an even higher value, and go up even quicker than a trained skills. You can't specialize after creation though, so that really dictates what you'd be using most often/the type of character you are.

It will be segregated off into zones, there will be underground areas and underwater areas too, no doubt. As far as how big it will be, it's designed to grow infinitely large, and there is a special gameplay element that relates to this, and I'm not saying what it is yet!

There's a good reason for that: performance. No one likes lag, or needing a super beefy PC to play every game. Which is a big concern on the iPhone, obviously. But for our needs, you will see all the major changes happen to the character. We are optimizing our visual and character design for the lower performing devices, so we won't be needing to show a zillion pieces, it's much more of a toy-look than WoW is, for example.

There will be players, and many types of monsters to fight. There will be lots of random monsters out there to hunt, and some may be a big part of the storyline and be intelligent!

I don't think we're going after a subscription model just yet in the same manner. What we will have is downloadable content, and we may also have a monthly plan available for that as well. There will be new episodic content every dev cycle (4-6) weeks to add features and advance the storyline, these won't be paid updates, they come with the game.

You will buy your skills with points, and that will raise their starting values and also affect how much exp they need to raise. They will raise as they are used, and you can speed this up by assigning exp you earn to skills also. As you gain skill points you can get more skills, and indeed you can keep levelling up and get all the skills eventually. That would take a ridiculous amount of time though, so it's highly unlikely. You can still use a skill even if it's untrained, unless it's an unusable type. If you decide at creation time to specialize in a skill, it will begin with an even higher value, and go up even quicker than a trained skills. You can't specialize after creation though, so that really dictates what you'd be using most often/the type of character you are.

It will be segregated off into zones, there will be underground areas and underwater areas too, no doubt. As far as how big it will be, it's designed to grow infinitely large, and there is a special gameplay element that relates to this, and I'm not saying what it is yet!

There's a good reason for that: performance. No one likes lag, or needing a super beefy PC to play every game. Which is a big concern on the iPhone, obviously. But for our needs, you will see all the major changes happen to the character. We are optimizing our visual and character design for the lower performing devices, so we won't be needing to show a zillion pieces, it's much more of a toy-look than WoW is, for example.

There will be players, and many types of monsters to fight. There will be lots of random monsters out there to hunt, and some may be a big part of the storyline and be intelligent!

We haven't talked it over yet, but it's likely. I love pets!

They're all good questions. This *is* a different type of MMO, believe that. Many things will be familiar, but it's not a clone game in terms of style... at all. We're going for original, and absolutely, irrevocably, cool.

 

It's up to an alliance to create their own politics, but I am almost positive this is the kind of thing that will happen. An alliance will choose a specific game location as their home base, and need to defend it. For things like this, no extra coding is required, people create their own politics sometimes!

 

Baitntackle, you have the skill concept down very well!

The names of these things come from the game world, and our world building team is writing them down as we try to understand what they mean. So far they all seem to have pretty obvious equivalents to things we're all familiar with.
Examples:

• Fangler: a sword, or one who uses swords. To fangle someone means to really mess them up good with a sharp fangler.
• A Fizzler is a player who casts spells. Sometimes those spells fizzle and don't go off! The device he uses to cast a spell (wand) is known as a fizzlestick. Fizzling is the art of casting magic, in general. And a fizzler who casts blasting spells is very good at... Fizzbanging.
• A ganker is basically a rogue. His typical fighting skill would involve using a Nicker, Diddler, Diggler, which are all types of.. daggers!

I hope you get the general idea

When you die, everyone cries and your enemy laughs at you. Then, you return to where you were bound to last. There will be binding locations scattered about the game world so you can always pick a bind location closest to where you want to respawn at.

There will be PvP safe zones where PvP isn't allowed. Otherwise, if you're a PvP character, you can attack any other PvP character.

 

Still being discussed. This is a very important thing to get right!

Absolutely there will be a difference in quality. We need to design for the iPhone as the lowest common denominator, so that has a major effect on visual and gameplay design. We can do dedicated mac/pc/linux, or also do a web-based version. We're trying not to screen out any of the functionality for iPhone, though there might be some things that can't be done, I just haven't found them yet. The larger version will have more enhancements obviously, like an easier to use interface and chat system with more visible at one time And graphic quality is better on the computer tremendously, of course. We can use shaders on the computer, and beautiful water. The iPhone may have pretty fake looking water, while the computer version would have gorgeous water.

We are using a tap/click to move system which makes this game possible to do at all. It is very easy to use, does not use up any screen space for move controls. We will have a free-look also, which should work as you described it.

 

Well, for example, different weapons with high bonuses might need a certain minimum skill to wield. And that weapon/item might have special abilities tied to it. So a lot becomes possible with this kind of system. Fizzlers will have multiple 'schools' of magic to specialize in immediately. And gankers will have their own specialize skills like poison, picking locks, etc.

However, everyone will have those skills available to train too. So you could be a lockpicking fizzbanger who also fangles, for example. Just sayin'

 

50 Robust? Hehe, which do you mean?

 

I wouldn't worry about it. I'm working on the movement controller and testing on the device with 70 AI bots, so there is lots of little downtime between compiling, building and deploying. Perfect for answering posts. Also, I *love* this stuff.. this is the game I have dreamed of making, and is the reason I learned to code to begin with.

 

It's the best because it's the most recent... I've been making games for a long time but it's taken all this year to learn how to develop decently for the iPhone. So the first couple had their issues...