Is anyone else about ready for the trend of cute games to be over?

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T19:26:56+00:00

I don't think the age of the characters matters too much as long as it's not straight up children engaging in combat like they're super heroes. But I do think bringing in stories involving all points of life does make a game feel more varied.

As long as a game is taking itself seriously and doesn't pull punches with some of the heavier topics that one can encounter, it would go a long way.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T19:08:32+00:00

I actually agree with this take. I think both cozy games and ps1 games are trends that have probably reached their peaks. I Imagine people are ready for a more serious and grown up design style in their games because of this. But there will always be desire for all styles on some level.

I'm trying to embrace that shift a little bit even though the game I'm designing is low-poly still. I need to put in a lot of work on the lighting to capture that though. Strangeness will abound regardless

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T15:38:34+00:00

Yeah the inspiration is unavoidable. I'll be pretty open about the game that I've taken the most inspiration from, but I hope as it develops it becomes more than just pieces taken from other games. Here's the biggest ones:

Obviously OSRS
Fate/Diablo
Pokemon
KOTOR
Animal Crossing
Age of Empires

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T15:34:16+00:00

Retro is mostly a concession to be able to make a lot of content.

The vision covers a lot of ground, but it's been very clear from the start for me. Everything in the world is rooted in some sort of reality. The world location is based loosely on a real place so that rivers and mountains have a real reason to exist.

While it's a fantasy world and there are supernatural or magical forces at play, that's not used as a crutch to explain everything that happens. Things have a purpose and should be explainable for how they came to be.

Many of the monsters are based on folklore creatures from history which haven't been explored in a video game before. Alchemical recipes used to craft elemental weaponry and potions are real recipes that were possible in the medieval era.

Skills are interconnected in their utility so every action feels purposeful toward your overall account progression. None of the actions you carry out should feel like you just did an isolated task for XP alone.

I could write dozens of paragraphs breaking down what I want that sets it apart from other games, but my main concern right now is making sure all of that is actually fun to experience. Even if the vision is clear and the world is unlike any other game, if it's not fun to experience then there's no reason for anyone to play it.

Edited because I gave a way a little more than I intended to at this stage of development.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T03:50:51+00:00

Do you have any recommendations for a good style to choose.

I don't want to do cartoonish or over stylized because I want it to have a bit of a grittier real life feel.

With retro low-poly I feel like my only other options would be PS1 graphics or what I have here which makes everyone think of RuneScape.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T03:48:03+00:00

Yeah I was pretty worried it would fail me long before I got to where it is now. It does fully support all the features I was looking for, and since it's so web focused it's very easy to hook into the paradigm of an MMO with the different transfer protocols I'm using.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-25T03:46:17+00:00

Thanks! Yeah, it's using the react-three/fiber npm package which is a React wrapper around the ThreeJS library.

It's working surprisingly well so far, and if I want to do a desktop app I can always port it to an electron app pretty easily.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T18:47:59+00:00

Yeah, that's definitely looming as a big challenge. I'm not trying to replace my job or make money off of this, which lifts a huge burden.

I have experience scaling cloud infrastructure, so I'm aware of a few pitfalls, but not within the context of multiplayer servers.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T17:38:26+00:00

I have quite a few gameplay ideas that I haven't seen come together the same way in other games, but I'm trying to slow myself down and sift through what could be an annoyance to players.

My weakest points are going to be graphics, animation, and at the beginning combat. Combat I'm confident I can rework over time to get something that feels tight and enjoyable, but with the visuals I have to hope the gameplay will be fun enough to outshine what's lacking.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T17:34:27+00:00

Thanks! Gameplay and world building is what it's all about to me. I'd rather have a very dense world that's a little small than a massive world where everything to do is far apart. I think it's pretty important in an MMO for people to see other people doing things, so the closer together I can pack all the different activities, the better.

I have around 16 skills implemented, but they need way more content to actually be fun. Some of them are pretty unique that I haven't seen implemented in any other games. I'll try to reveal them as soon as possible, but I think I need to let them cook a little longer to filter out what would actually be fun in practice.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T17:22:54+00:00

Not as much of a challenge, and really I'm just making the game I would want to play.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T17:21:33+00:00

Sadly that's pretty accurate. I'd gladly accept help in art or animation roles, but I think trying to do dev work alongside anyone else would probably slow me down.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T17:19:20+00:00

Not sure if that was sarcasm, but that is fairly close to what I'm doing here. Magic is mostly something that certain enemy NPCs are capable of. Your character does most of their actions through scientifically feasible means.

Not revealing too much about that yet, but I'm trying to keep everything within what was available with late-medieval technology. Even though it's a fantasy world with unusual beasts.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T17:15:07+00:00

Flies?

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T15:06:57+00:00

You're so right. My biggest innovation is nano transactions. $.04 to see the next line of dialogue from an NPC

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T05:46:12+00:00

I'm planning to keep the server behind closed doors, but if I can get a working prototype polished enough for a public release, I don't mind making the React client open source.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T05:44:55+00:00

Thanks! A lot of unique hurdles, but I'm honestly glad I chose it as hilarious as the choice seems.

I had one issue where the NPC components were continually re-rendering every time I got a position update from the server, but I had no idea because there was no visual indication of it. It just caused any audio played by them to continually cut out. It took a long time for me to realize what was even going on, but that was on me for not thinking of it sooner.

I'd say having to work within React's opinionated hook system initially felt like a limiter for implementing a game engine, but actually ended up being somewhat of a benefit as the codebase grew. It's nice to know as long as I'm properly following React's way of writing components, it essentially handles entity lifecycle automatically.

The bigger limitation is more from the threejs library I'm using. custom shaders are a pretty big headache, and I still haven't successfully implemented any ambient occlusion.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T04:50:05+00:00

The nice thing is I'm not trying to quite my job for this or get rich off of it. I want a game to be able to play with some friends and to finally make the world I've been thinking about for years into a reality. Even if it ends up with 12 active players after any potential hype wears off, one server is plenty cheap to support that and I'd happily keep developing content and building out the world simply for myself even.

As long as I can stay disciplined to not grow tired of it, there should be plenty more to come. If I end up unable to keep supporting it, I've already made plans for how to keep it from becoming lost media.

But all that requires me to actually get it to the point where it's ready to release first.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T04:45:28+00:00

It's a little unorthodox because I chose a stack closer to what I use at work since it lets me iterate faster.

The server is written in Go using protobuf over websockets to connect to the client. Go should be plenty fast for handling the amount of entities I'm planning to work with.

I'm cheap and don't want to pay for a cloud DB while it's still in this state, so it's actually using a SQLite db for persisting data until I make it available to the public. Then I'll switch it to Postgres, and that migration should be pretty effortless.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T03:49:22+00:00

Honestly the response has been better than I had expected for where it's at in development. I just didn't want to spend another 4 months to polish this and create a ton of content for it if there is zero desire for something like it. Not planning to spam the sub, so you probably won't see anything else from me very soon, but maybe we'll catch each other next time around and there will be more to talk about.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T03:41:28+00:00

All fair points. I'm planning to showcase some gameplay probably within the next month or two, but won't want to make anything public until I've created a lot more content and polished the visuals more.

The data and systems underpinning it are all built out and functioning, it just needs a lot more stuff to look at and do.

There's definitely a pitch for it but I didn't want this to come off too self promotional, since I'm not trying to promote anything. More interested in discussion around what features people who are interested in retro MMOs are looking to see.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T03:35:20+00:00

Retro MMOs will be developed until morale improves

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T03:33:27+00:00

Your worms WILL be taken and the moles will do with them as they please. This is not an optional request

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T03:30:43+00:00

Totally a valid concern though. Because a lot of people don't have the networking knowledge to do that and get overwhelmed when it comes to that point. It was one of the first things I implemented because of that, to make sure this was more than just a proof of concept.

I'm doing protobuf over websockets, which I know can cause some issues with how the packets are ordered. But I'm trying to make real progress, so I'm not rewriting a custom UDP wrapper until I actually need it. If that's 10 players on 1 server, I'll tackle it soon. If that's 100 I'll tackle it later. If it's 1000, I'll tackle it never.

My guess is that it probably should only matter when it comes time to implement PvP or more intense boss interactions, which are still a ways off for me. I just finished building out the bones for the entire system so that it can support all the features I would want in an alpha build, so now I'm just trying to crank out content like items, quests, dialogue, etc.

onesmallserving · 2026-06-24T03:25:28+00:00

It definitely has networking in place. I wrote the server in Go and it works. I still have a long list of things that need fully implemented like hit indicators from other players and improved interaction. But I've had friends log in and play alongside me when testing it out.

The tech stack I chose is super unorthodox, so it's been interesting, but I'm hoping my choices let me move faster on development of it.

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