What I learned from (successfully) building an MMO in Unity.
News & General Discussion
Justei May 9, 2014, 6:11pm 1

Hi there, my name is Kristoffer Blasiak, and I’m the CEO and Lead Programmer at Rigid-Soft.

I just wrote a document, detailing what I learned after months of hard work on a project called “Lifeless”, which is a full MMO. Fully made in Unity. It’s actually gotten to the state where you can actually call it a MMO, because it’s just that. Not a couple of demo scenes slapped together, no it’s a fully functional MMO.

The original purpose of this document was internal use, but I figured that more people could learn from it than our internal teams, so I am posting it here for anyone to learn from.

The document covers a lot of topics, ranging from what our internal server architecture looks like, to what shortcomings we found in Unity, and how we fixed them, to the tools we used for things such as patching.

I’ll post the Introduction here, and if you want the whole thing, you can find it here:
http://rigid-soft.com/LifelessOverview/ (Not working anymore.)

Introduction

Let me start out by saying this is not a tutorial for how to make a MMO with 3 people, neither is it a shortcut on how you can get started on making your own MMO. It’s a documentation of the crazy journey we have been on while making Lifeless and the things we learned along the way.

But mainly this is a document meant to help anyone who is about to embark on the same journey, and needs to get a grasp of the scope of a project like this, also I’m going to disclose some secrets that I wish others would have documented a little bit better, and some things I wish I knew beforehand.

It is important to know that many of these things I am covering, may not be best practices for every case, and maybe not for your project! But in our case, they were the best solution.

If you have some ideas on how this could be improved, please let me know! It would greatly benefit everyone.

Justei May 9, 2014, 6:14pm 2

Since I appairently can’t edit my post, here’s a PDF version of the document:
http://rigid-soft.com/LifelessOverview/LifelessOverview.pdf

Hi guys, I was going to post an announcement about this (and still will, when it's time). But you guys managed to beat me to it regarding the topic, well done, I'm impressed!

Anyway, the thing is. Lifeless didn't do very well, that's no secret at all. And it didn't even do well enough to pay for itself, let alone lots of development and what it needs in order to be a successful game (because we all know, as previously stated in this thread, it's still EA and far from done).

We never thought Lifeless would be a runaway Early Access success like Rust, or any of those games that raked in millions within a short time. But we hoped it would at least sustain itself. As it stands now, it barely pays its own server costs (in fact, it doesn't and never did).

With that said, we had a couple of choices:

1. Abandon Lifeless altogether
   
   
2. Take other projects on, making it impossible to continue Lifeless at the same time
   
   
3. Do a hybrid project
   
   
4. Shut everything down completely, and call it a day (which also results in Lifeless dying).

The firs two, and last options were unacceptable to us, so we decided that we had to figure out a solution that would allow us to do something that still generated income (hopefully) but allowed us to improve upon Lifeless at the same time.

That ended up being SDA, SDA is a game very heavily based upon Lifeless, so we are able to take the code and bug fixes from SDA and implement them into Lifeless. As well as assets (SDA however only uses very few assets from Lifeless, pretty much just some weapons and zombies).

This was really the only way we could proceed that was financially viable.

We will post more information on the topic later. Hopefully you guys will understand, it's not ideal but it was the ONLY way that Lifeless could EVER survive and become a fully finished game.

Hello, we are the developers behind Lifeless, a game that was just re-listed on steam after being down for about 8 years.

Our reasoning behind this was that we never lost the passion behind the project, so me and the other founder decided to re-acquire the rights and have been fixing the game in our free time for the past 4 years.

If you are interested, here is a link to our steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/419520/Lifeless/

Ask us anything!

u/Merrill: How do you distinguish your game from others in the genre like DayZ, Scum, Surroundead, etc? What’s makes yours unique and worth trying?

• u/DesyncDonkeys
  
  Great question! Initially Lifeless was very much like these games, what we try to do different is that we try to focus on world building, and make the world actually "alive" and feel lived-in. Since we have transitioned into a singleplayer co-op model, we are able to do a lot more with the world itself in a way that was not possible before.
  
  This is a work in progress, but we believe we have the bones there and are now able to work on top of that. I hope that answers your question!

Lifeless is Going Free-to-Play!
We're excited to announce that Lifeless will soon (as soon as possible) transition from a paid game to completely free-to-play!

Why this change?
Simply put, we don't financially depend on income from Lifeless and our main priority is growing a vibrant, engaged community around the game.
Previously, server costs and operational expenses required the game to have an upfront cost.

However, with our current singleplayer and co-op model, these server costs are no longer an issue, allowing us to make this transition. By removing the initial purchase barrier, we hope to welcome more players into our world and build something truly special together.

To our early supporters who purchased the game, thank you!
We sold a very small, limited amount of copies before going free-to-play, and we're exploring ways to create a small token of our gratitude for your support.
While we're still deciding exactly what that will be, know that we deeply appreciate you and are actively working on something special.

Naturally, you might wonder if and how we'll monetize Lifeless in the future. To be honest, we're still figuring that out. If we do introduce monetization, we promise it'll be non-intrusive, focusing solely on optional cosmetics or DLC.

Our commitment remains clear: gameplay will always come first.

What happens next?
We are currently working on our 0.9.0 release (as well as doing some smaller patches before then), this will be a big update with some really cool new stuff. We don't want to go into too much detail yet, but any updates or teasers will be shared in our Discord.

Thanks for your continued support, and see you out there!

PS! Don't forget to join our discord!