The current state of the Early Access build

[VectorStorm]

Hi, everybody! I'm Trevor, the designer and programmer of MMORPG Tycoon 2. This has been kind of a labor of love for me for a *long* time, and now that we're only a bit over a day away from our Early Access launch, I'm really excited (and a little terrified) to finally be showing the game to a much larger group!

First, a few technical details about the game: MMORPG Tycoon 2 is running in a custom game engine written by me, mostly for this game. The "VectorStorm" engine is open source under a very permissive license; feel free to check it out on Github, if you're interested! I've written pretty much everything in the game right now, apart from the third-party libraries we're using; SDL2 (window management, input), FMOD (sound), and PhysFS (file access).

Anyhow, I've had small groups of people testing the game over the past few years, but we're finally to the point where I feel like I'm ready to throw the gates open a little wider and let more people in to give feedback, suggestions, and report issues! The core game simulation is there; at this point it's just ("just", lol) a matter of adding a bunch more content, to really fill the game out!

As development has gone on, we've almost entirely maintained save game compatibility; with only a few exceptions, you can take a save game from three years ago and open it up and use it in the game today! The only bit that's been a little unstable is class/monster costumes; every time I change the way our animation retargeting works, it slightly breaks old character costumes, so they need to be touched up again when you open up those really old saves. I'm trying really hard not to have to do that again,though! It's all working pretty well now.

I wanted to call out a few exciting things which are in the development plan for soon:

1. Dungeons. For me, this is the really big one; I'm really looking forward to getting dungeons into the game! The challenge is how to represent them, since these are 'instanced', and so it's not obvious how to draw them to the screen! There will probably be a lot of experimenting with these!

2. World-Map Raid Bosses. You might have seen the huge dragon visible near the end of the game's trailer; that's *nearly* but not quite in the game yet; it just needs some combat effects and a few missing animations and it'll be ready to go!

3. More disasters/events! The game needs more scripted events for you, the player, to respond to. A lot of the events of the game come from the underlying simulation, but having some authored events adds a little spice!

4. Player organizations! Players should group together and begin making demands (which you can of course ignore!) This is going to be the foundation that support for guilds eventually gets built on top of.

5. And just a whole bunch more variety in buildings, character class models, terrain types, combat effects, and so on.

And of course, I'm really interested in other people's ideas and suggestions. You can leave comments for me here, or over on our Discord or Discourse servers. I'm usually pretty active in Discord while working on the game, and often post a sort of running commentary of what I'm up to there, so if you're interested in that sort of up-to-the-minute devblogging, please join us!

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/4evvAcc
Discourse: https://discuss.mmorpgtycoon.com/

I hope to hear from you all soon! :D

[Snoopy]

ahiiii

[Sparka]

Maybe in MMORPG Tycoon 3, you could find a way for us to play each others RPGs. Players could make single player adventures or up to 4 players that progress through the game together, or even a true persistent world MMO that you can save characters on. I know thats a pipe dream but thats what I would find fun...oh and do it in VR! XD

[VectorStorm]

When I was first speccing out what would be in MT2, the idea of letting people actually connect to and play in the MMOs was the very first thing I put on the "That'll be in MMORPG Tycoon 3" list. :D

[Sekij]

Mod Support, so fans can add content as well :> ? At least for assets like Inn Models and stuff.

[yxxxx]

There will be extensive mod support according to the dev

[krackzsan]

Are we going to have the ability to hit high levels in this game? I guess you can say I'm a fan of the Hyperdimension Neptunia games and Disgaea games, haha.

I'll probably take a look at this game every now and then to see how well it's reviewed. For me, buying games is kind of a gamble since I'm a streamer. This game does look like it'll bring a lot of good video content for me, though. But still, I have to make sure it'll be a good investment for me :)

[Neiana]

Originally posted by krackzsan:

Are we going to have the ability to hit high levels in this game? I guess you can say I'm a fan of the Hyperdimension Neptunia games and Disgaea games, haha.

I'll probably take a look at this game every now and then to see how well it's reviewed. For me, buying games is kind of a gamble since I'm a streamer. This game does look like it'll bring a lot of good video content for me, though. But still, I have to make sure it'll be a good investment for me :)

A great streamer can make the worst thing into the best content ;)

[VectorStorm]

Right now, the game has a hard level cap at 20.. but there's no particular reason why it has to! I'm very open to changing that, and I *definitely* have to expose the XP curves so that you can tweak what's required for players to gain levels!

[Zike]

With the dungeons although I know it would be a lot of work with assets and etc. It would be fun to have a entrance that would bring you to another scene that you design with assets you connect together similar to the scenery buildings. Or use the scenery buildings as some dungeons that after being placed and customized to the liking of the player then could be entered by a main door and customized further with enemies locations. Personally even though I know it is probably being worked on already it would be great to further customize enemy camps, and in some way have guild battles if they are introduced.

Thank you for all the beautiful work you've made. Speaking for a lot of people, we love this game and it's concept! I'm extremely excited to see it grow into something amazing.

[Schags]

How about a workshop? Seems like this type of sandbox would be amazing to have that.

[dad the rapper]

If the dungeons are difficult to script as far as becoming a new map or a zone you can enter and customize yourself, have you thought about it being edited through a minimap type thing? For example, editing a dungeon would pull up a window kind of like a minimap where you can draw the players' path and place little mob locations. You could then set the loot and exp drops through a number screen similar to the way you edit abilities and their damage output. You could also then maybe choose party size, numbers and classes required, etc. Maybe there could be a list of parties currently in and you could see their progress?

[magna]

The idea is nice and this game could get very popular with mod support.

[VectorStorm]

This game absolutely needs mod support! I haven't released the tools yet, but that's definitely going to come during our early access period!

[𝕄𝕣.𝕊𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕟]

Doesn't really matter much until parties become a thing, but a healer class seems like a must.

[Centipede]

So far man i think you're doing phenomenal. I had a blast learning to play today. It would be kind of neat to have a system where you could permanently highlight players you choose, to be able to keep easy tabs on them after you've amassed a large sub base. That, i feel, would make it seem a little more personal, ya know?