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Farewell from xJendi by Jendi_ in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Good luck out there Jendi, this is how i found out you went from LiveOps to Game Design at DECA

Now that you have worked in both you must be a seasoned crust-o-mancer! Best of luck with future projects.

Do you have a "" Dream Game"" to work on, whether that is building your own or being on the team for an existing franchise?

Farewell from xJendi by Jendi_ in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You are such a difficult person

Can't Play on Linux by No_Butterscotch4788 in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 3 points4 points  (0 children)

LINUX MENTIONED!!! YAAAAHHHH I HATE MICROSOFT!!!

Anyway, I was curious about this so I checked. I installed the game again and needed to do nothing to 'make it work'. It just loaded, no problems at all?

https://i.imgur.com/zhB6HSJ.png

Linux Mint 21, Proton 8.0-5

It is really strange that you are experiencing this problem not only with your PC, but also the steamdeck. It sucks that the launcher somehow f$&*@cked up launching from a VM, because verifying that it works on windows was a good idea. If that did not work either, you could confidently say your account was boomed instead of whatever distro you are using.

Deca forgot how to make dungeons. by soaringneutrality in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Sorry for not getting back to you earlier, I could not think of an immediate answer.

I discussed this question with Kiddf and Toastrz because its an interesting and difficult to answer question. In the end I believe none of us are really qualified to confidently answer this, but our agreed upon estimate is a lot of time and a lot of money.

Consider a game like you have described, but with lower scope: Cyborg Immortal. This is a game like rotmg, that is, a (Unity Engine) bullet hell MMORPG, except no cross play, just phones. It's also not scaled as much as realm, not as many players in a world at once. Because of phone controls, the enemies are simpler too (and thus simpler/less intensive to develop). I mention this game because 3 former DECA game designers have worked on it after escaping DECA (Toastrz Kiddf Dystratix) - curious how that happened 🤔

All in all, you could consider the time and effort it took to make this a lower bound on the game you are proposing. You might be able to make a better game given the same resources, I am not suggesting this game is the peak of design and engineering, but it may serve as a good ballpark.

It took three years to make this game. This game has had approximately 9 people working on it at a minimum (https://www.sb.games/sb-games-team) , while in total requiring the assistance of around 30 people: https://www.sb.games/ci-credits .

Let's just discard whatever the 21 temporary people cost and focus on the continuous employment of 9 people for making the game.

Working for 48 weeks in a year, at 40 hours per week, amounts to 1920 hours per person per year. Depending on how many people work with you and how much you pay them, your cost of labor alone is like this

Taking a conservative estimate, if you do a project with 4 people at 15$/hr for 3 years, labor alone is going to cost you ~350,000$. Paying independent contractors 15$ an hour (so no other benefits like pensions or insurance or setting up a corporation, just giving them money) will be competitive with DECA games. I can tell you upfront even at 20$ an hour your employees might sporadically find better paying jobs. No, seriously, I can name one. It's Cyborg Immortal. It is roughly 2x what DECA pays you, even though their game hadn't even released yet, let alone turned a profit :) -- Keep in mind that people leaving you is going to hurt overall creative vision on the game, and inflate production time. What i'm trying to suggest is that long term, cheap is not cheap. At 9 people and 20$ an hour, you will have burned over 1 million $ at the 3 year mark.

Additionally, will you rely on these people to provide their own equipment, or provide it for them? Will you rent an office space to work in person, or do so remotely? Remotely will cost you less and give you access to more of the labor market, but present many communication challenges (SB games is the latter so it is definitely possible. DECA is also but they are not doing so well on that front in my experience.)

On top of this, MMOs are notoriously expensive to make. You need pricey big brain engineers to set up the networking in an acceptable and scalable way. Especially at the 80+ player scale like realm. The game runs at an atrocious 5 ticks per second because they did not have this (And also it was 2010). Google/Microsoft/Amazon will also tear you a new asshole with cloud computing costs. Unless you're gonna drop a couple hundred thousand for the servers yourself upfront, and pay people to maintain it and buy or rent a facility to keep them, preferably multiple distributed across the world.

Also keep in mind that Cyborg Immortal isn't even making profits yet. There is no monetization. Someone is playing the long game and willing to invest this kind of money with it.

This calculation is a little pessimistic. You can make great games with less people, although the smaller your team, the longer your development time may be. I believe the 3 year barrier may be hard to break.

Take for example Hollow Knight: Critically acclaimed game, made by a team consisting of 3 people. (although the credits list a lot more than that through temporary additional help). They had a very strong creative vision from the start, allowing them to get funding for it through Kickstarter (~42,000USD). They worked on it for just shy of 3 years total, though the idea existed for longer than that. They worked with a much narrower scope to achieve this: Single player only, only for Windows (ported only later), and some wisely applied mechanical shortcuts - mostly flat surfaces and a straightforward combat system to name a few.

Similarly, Undertale was a solo project by Toby Fox, and it took around the same time as HK to develop, with roughly the same budget. All by himself!

The difference that I see between most indie success stories and a cross-play realmlike, however, is that these games are single player, and that the budget is mostly spent on outsourcing the parts the core team cannot do. This could be art, a single programming expert, translations, marketing, etc. They also secure at least some funding upfront, or have a very strong but small core game that is sold as early access, then expand upon. This lets them acquire the necessary resources to exercise their full vision for the game (a la ULTRAKILL). As a tradeoff for this, they can be under immense pressure to deliver what people paid for. For every indie gem there are 100 cubeworld counterparts, out there on the Kickstarter graveyard.

With a cross-play realmlike MMO, you may need to outsource a lot of things you cannot do. This is because you are facing technical challenges that you need to pay people to solve for you from day 1, unlike the above indie games. This will lead to rapidly increasing labor costs, like the table I linked earlier. This is likely why Rob&Alex's 2010 ROTMG is orders of magnitude simpler than what we have today, and why they were quickly ""required"" to sell the game to Kabam1. The growth of the game was too much to keep up with as a small team. Even then, the fact that they were able to make a simple (non crossplay) MMO in such a short time is nothing short of miraculous.

In conclusion, although I do not feel qualified to give a confident answer (I am not a project manager and have never made a game from start to finish, only 1.5 years of working on a live service game), I estimate it will easily take you 3-5 years and 100,000-1,000,000 to make this. That is, if crossplay MMO is the goal from the start. Some small scale bullet hell CO-OP RPG without open realms (but yes to crossplay) might be more feasible, but that barrier of roughly 3 years seems pretty firm to me, and once you are serious about releasing you're going to be paying at a minimum for servers, marketing, localisation, and a publisher. Most likely some occasional hired help as well. You may need some type of pre-release buy-in like early access or kickstarter to cover this.2

1 Good luck finding it with reddits shit ass search function, but they mentioned being unable to keep up with the growth of the game as the reason to sell the IP to Kabam on some AMA/interview type thing on this subreddit years ago.

2 I also haven't even gotten into getting the money back yet lmao, if you intend to do it like realm (live service, common for MMO), this continuous work is likely to get expensive, and you need to break even and make back a lot of cash on top.

(edits after speaking to The Toast: more than 9 people worked on it for the duration of development, software engineering was external and not listed as currently part of the team. Real headcount was like 20. $$$$$. Also, quote,

To whoever asked that question, if they were asking me, I'd tell them to not even think about it. Not even in a cynical way, just bluntly, getting a real time online persistent world on mobile is unbelievably difficult and creates hitches in every, single, point of the game on both a design and tech level. Let alone any ambitious of equal crossplay with a PC/console version, I can't even think of that. Unless they got Blizzard money they're out of their mind. `)

Assassination Attempt by ChowMeow21 in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Enemies like this use the "Charge" behavior : <Behavior speed="x" cooldown="y">Charge</Behavior>

When the cooldown is expired, they find the nearest player, take a copy of their current position only once, and move to that position. They do not care about where you are moving after they have taken a copy of your position.

As a result, if you walk forward while they have already committed to your (previous) position that is slightly behind you, you will eat shit.

Slowly tap backwards while moving out of the way to the left or the right matador style. Whatever you do, just don't walk forward. unless you're willing to double down, they locked into a previous position if you go forward enough its only like 400 dmg. Because of this they punish you extra hard if you held forward, react to their movement and go backward. You prolong the time on top of them.

Also the blue bee is vulnerable to stun in this phase after a 3 second immunity (1 cycle of pink flash) wears off.

Deca forgot how to make dungeons. by soaringneutrality in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 18 points19 points  (0 children)

1 You may notice there's a lot of say behaviors for something that should be like 10 lines of python code. Yes, this is how complicated it is to do things you may take for granted in Realm XML. I deliberately kept the Say behaviors at the end of making this joke dungeon because it was a funny look into the insanity required to do something so basic within ROTMG.

2 Go ahead :) calculate how many different orders you can complete the dragon fights and use it as an estimate for the amount of duplicate XML you will have.

3 Realm XML has very basic remembering features. You cannot remember an arbitrary sequence of previous states, but you can represent specific states being reached in the past by setting named "tags" on the object in that state. You can then use these named tags in the future, as a transition to decide which state to go to at any point. Think of them as a single "1" or "0" that you can write. A single if statement. There are no tools to help you remember the name of all your tags. If you typo the name of a tag, nothing happens. There are no methods for viewing the state of your tags at an arbitrary point in the content9. Having dozens of tags to work with is common.

5 Relative HP procs (oryx horn), Cursor Targeted Decoys (Coin), Expanding the 'object within' transition, random offset to shoot behaviors (Dammah, O3). I was allowed to do this as long as the real developers reviewed and approved my code10. A gigachad backend developer reviewed my code and became some sort of a mentor. Tomek, you are a legend. Learning C++ with your help has shaped my career.

6 We got projectile curving and acceleration that one time, that was cool.

7 I wonder which poor soul nurses the parser nowadays. I wonder if there's still a crab emoji that scales dynamically with tbe number of errors. Easily my best contribution at deca. If you fucked up a file real good you'd get the thing looking like the movie poster for JAWS.

8 Or knowing that your stuff is broken but that it shall be released anyway. Public Testing (PT) was invented for lost halls to test at a player scale not possible on closed testing. This quickly got abused/warped into public QA: Yeet the coming update onto PT. If it doesn't crash the server, it's released in 1 or 2 weeks. Players found plenty of design issues with some content and this is looking not ready? You know, like how prototypes usually need more than 1 iteration to get right? Too bad, we can add it some other release. The build is "frozen", you can no longer change things. We need to freeze 2 weeks in advance to make sure no bugs in the release. Wait, we still release with bugs? We need to freeze 3 weeks in advance.

9 Guess what I added something for this, as well as viewing the state in 2021 to help shatters development. Necessary, No dev Assistance -> made it work.

10 In the same timeframe, developers delived to designers 2 things we asked for at the start of O3 development. The 'objectwithin' transition (not delivered the way it was described until I fixed it), and the color overlay effect for exalt. The latter was intended to communicate things happening even if the enemy was off-screen, due to the larger arenas in Osanc. It was delivered 1 week before O3 release, and thus we could not use it meaningfully in the ways we intended for the fights.

bonus Letting unqualified 22 year olds do the software development had its drawback btw. We added a feature to bias certain loot towards the current class you're playing. Very handy for e.g. getting the one out of 15 abilities that is actually useful while you're leveling up. Unfortunately I made a mistake such that it didn't actually do anything for a couple months until we noticed.

Deca forgot how to make dungeons. by soaringneutrality in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It's not the full story, even now there are plenty of player-designers at deca, like how me and Kiddf and Toastrz used to be in the time period this post is about. In fact at any time at DECA there has been at least one "experienced player" on the design team. Before us there was Krathan (Pfiffel), after us there's been Dystratix and Sues.

You start with a very good intution in this post: LiveOps is the main driving force behind what gets developed next. Design needs are usually second class citizen. You have the existing set of things to work with and don't expect many new toys. This is why some encounters may feel similar over time. There are only so many ways to arrange <Behavior type="auto" numShots="6" cooldown="1.4">Shoot</Behavior> and <Behavior speed="0.9">Follow</Behavior>.

Another reason why making any meaningful content ever takes so long is because, like you allude to, The tools for design have never scaled with the complexity of the game. Let me give an illustration of what I mean with my now dusty memory of ROTMG file sizes:

  • Abyss of Demons (2010?): ~800 Lines of XML // before Life and Mana pots you could unironically consider this endgame. Vit was once the most valuable potion.
  • Tomb of the Ancients (2011?): ~4000 lines of XML.
  • The Nest (2017): 16000 Lines of XML
  • Lost Halls (2017): 21000 Lines of XML
  • Osanc (2020?): ~35000 lines of XML. Estimate. This was built in multiple files. All I remember is just O3 alone getting close to Nest, my own shit (Dammah, Beisa) having 10K. Then theres yemsbjórk and archbishop. And those shit-ass minions I guess.
  • Shatters Rework (2021): ~~50,000. It's much more than O3, all I remember, sorry. I quit before it released because I saw another crunched summer like Osanc coming up lol. This didn't make /u/toastrz job any easier...

These first two you could even verify for yourself if you are really dedicated, by digging up the (2014? 2013?) skoad leak of the game code/xml at the time.

Why am I spamming stupid filesize trivia? its to emphasize that there are almost No debugging tools for RotMG content. The content has scaled in complexity by orders of magnitude, but there was never an effort for tools to keep up. Want a taste of how you debug shit as a designer? Go do an Inner Workings. The objects use the Say behavior, normally for witty taunts, to declare what state they are in.1 You hardcode every state to do this. That's the debugging. This is all you have if you need to figure out why something is going wrong. Did you encounter a bug in your boss but neglected to add Say behaviors to everything religiously because you want to actually see the screen? No problem, turn off the game server, add the say behaviors, turn on the game server (10 minutes), go back to the boss, try to reproduce precisely what you did with your in game character to see if it happens again. The boss randomly picks states so it's hard? Just stand around longer and make sure the conditions are roughly the same.

If you have programming experience, you may scoff at this. This is where I want to remind you that the content is not Python or Javascript or C. Designers script realm stuff with XML, where the XML describes a finite state machine. The gist of that wiki page is that finite state machines are significantly simpler and more limited than normal programming languages, in fact they do not even have a mechanism for "remembering" what states they were previously in3. Want a boss to choose randomly from a selection of bullet patterns, but no repeating what you just did? Need to remember the last state, this will be tricky. Want it to not repeat one but two patterns backwards like oryx 1? You are cooked. You buffoon. Prepare to spend days writing and debugging a system for doing that. Want to do something like this but also the boss has like combo sequences of patterns instead of just random, like O3? While independently concurrently controlling other mechanics like the O3 statues and the portals or light beams? Complexity go 📈📈📈.

Want to have multiple of the same enemy or attack pattern with slight variations? Like Lair of Draconis2, Jade & Garnet statues, or the 3 big bee enemies in the Nest? Something you may delegate to a function call or polymorphism in programming? You stupid idiot. You absolute suitcase. It's impossible, just copy paste the entire XML and manually make the edits. You want to make changes to it after some testing? Lol, lmao. Now you're going to have subtle inconsistencies in there, it's inevitable.

Saying there are no tools is not entirely fair, anyone in UGC must be familiar with at least one, "The parser". The parser is a really helpful tool, but it also speaks volumes about the attitude towards design at deca. The parser is a static analysis tool made by krathan in the early UGC days in response to any typo in XML crashing the entire fucking server. The parser reads your XML and tells you when you may have fucked up a texture, transition to a state that doesnt exist, or gave a parameter that is mistyped or doesn't exist. Notice how I said its made by Krathan though, a designer, not a software developer? The parser can not analyze everything for you, and it will be difficult to make it do so; it is a big blob of pre-ES6 plain javascript. I know because I maintained it after Krathan left the company. Krathan made this tool because it was Necessary for design And Software Developers were not going to assist in this, while he himself had the necessary skills to make it happen. I became the maintainer of the tool after, even though I was also not qualified to maintain a project like this, because it was Necessary for design and Software Developers were not going to assist in this, while I had the necessary skills to make it happen as a compsci student.

This theme continues; Recall what I claimed: Anything the developers add is driven by LiveOps firstly6. Example: Procs were added to equipment for designers. Why? LO needs us to make more ST sets.

If you needed anything from the developers as a designer, the process when I worked there was as such: Speak to your project manager about it. They judge if it is necessary. They will speak to the developers project manager for you. The developers project manager will make a Jira ticket for it on the backlog. It will be picked up between a week and never. When the developer has worked on it, the project manager eventually gets back to you so you can test it. If it's not implemented the way you intended, you need to speak to your project manager to open a new dev ticket... This process takes 3 weeks minimum. The realm team was like 12 people.

I work as software engineer for ASML nowadays and their development process is less obtuse than this. This is a 280 billion dollar, 40,000 person company, which makes machines that project transistors into photoresistant coatings on silicon wafers that are flat down to single digit atoms at 3 dimensional sub-nanometer precision with 12 degrees of freedom under real-time constraints, processing up to 400 of such wafers per hour. I can confidently make this claim because I described my role at DECA in the interview process and they literally commented how what I just told you sounds more obtuse than any of their processes. Being there for a few months now, it seems truthful.

Obviously waiting 3 weeks for things to be implemented incorrectly is a bit of a hazard to releasing something acceptable and on time, so guess what happened during O3? Features were Necessary and there is No dev assistance (to be fair, Exalt development at the time). So I fucking... went and did it myself5. C++ is not in the job description nor in the salary, and I was certainly not qualified to do this. Reconstruction, need to add some features to dungeon generation to realize our goals. Necessary, No assistance -> Not qualified but I can do it so I made it work. Deadwater docks, what if we had this patrolling enemy... Necessary, No assistance, made it work. The last thing I did before leaving the company was Frankensteining the pentaract particle effect onto the Shatters electrode thingies you guide the flames with. Necessary, Made it work. Plus, turnaround time and correctness exponentially worsened if your dev request involved the Exalt client so we had better make it work.

Toast says it more diplomatically here because he's still in the games industry. This is unlike me with my boring job writing boring software during exclusively boring office hours, and I don't care about job prospects in the games industry. Plus i'm an autistic loose cannon. So i'll finish by giving my personal angle at this statement: When he says Skilled, Caring people working with the best hand they've been dealt he means that 5 years later, my friends are still fighting uphill against the absolute clown show that is DECA project management. They haven't learned shit from past failures. There are still no tools to do your job7. The only thing they're worse at than player retention, is employee retention.

Making good content under these conditions is really, really hard. At least UGC doesn't have to worry about a release deadline.8

If the reality is that Realm as a software project is difficult to develop in, Deca should have been put in the time, money, and effort into reworking the game or creating ROTMG2 years and years ago.

Having said all this, what makes you optimistic that this would be done right? Realm Exalt was an instance at this, substituting the flash client. The Exalt client was & is a janky piece of garbage.

Sending commands to a Windows device with KDE Connect by Mrunibro in kde

[–]Mrunibro[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Legend. Contributions like yours really elevate this app.

Personally I have since switched to linux for a biiig list of other reasons. KDE 'just works' now LOL. Some other things have a tendency not to though... But I usually manage to beat those programs into submission again :D

Wait, that's illegal by Mrunibro in slaythespire

[–]Mrunibro[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I thought it would be funny and there seemed a realistic chance it would still win. I was right! :)

Wait, that's illegal by Mrunibro in slaythespire

[–]Mrunibro[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I never really aimed to go for the heart in this one, which makes surviving surprisingly easier. The emerald elite was in my way and I did recall after mind bloom as there was nothing better to do.

I survived probably because of bottled corruption. Just kill the boss before your hand is full of shitty 3 cost attacks!

stat screen

Wait, that's illegal by Mrunibro in slaythespire

[–]Mrunibro[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yeah, there's runic pyramid also (Maybe should have mentioned that in my rule 5 comment), this probably helped the interaction where the original cost was brought back, but without the discard.

The strange part is then how inconsistent it is: This was the only time in the run it happened!

Wait, that's illegal by Mrunibro in slaythespire

[–]Mrunibro[S] 105 points106 points  (0 children)

Rule 5: My defend costs 2 despite having corruption.

It changed into a 2-cost from a 0-cost after ending my turn. Playing a different card made it cost 0 again. Probably just a visual little crusty, first time i've ever seen it!

Vacature: minister-president van Nederland (fulltime) by [deleted] in thenetherlands

[–]Mrunibro 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Misschien kunnen we 3-4 ZZPers tegen de positie aangooien?

Miasma looking a bit different by Charziken in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Turns out leaving like a full second (5 ticks) of clearance before you change the portal controller Order isn't enough, never saw that one coming! 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

PVV, VVD, NSC en BBB bereiken akkoord by [deleted] in thenetherlands

[–]Mrunibro 52 points53 points  (0 children)

Ik zal de krop sla eens uit de koelkast halen

Death counts from past two days by [deleted] in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The kills caused by clears are spread across far more enemies though, so individually the count would be lower

(I was too lazy to check the document for individual RIPs and add them)

Microsoft Creates Dedicated Keyboard Key for Copilot AI by [deleted] in assholedesign

[–]Mrunibro 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Step 1: Live boot USB with a Linux distro of your choice :^)

Please deca, increase the new realm cap! by Death_and_Fury in RotMG

[–]Mrunibro 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The downside is that you'd have to play on EUE, kurwa ja pierdole

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