New week, new dev blog. Episode 2: Why would we try to make an MMO? fantasticpixelcastle.com/new-detail/?...

I look forward to changing the name of every body of water and military base every 4-8 years. That won’t get old at all.

I like to write a lot about our game and the industry in general, so our studio is kicking off a weekly dev blog! I won't write them all but I'll probably write a lot. fantasticpixelcastle.com/new-detail/?...

We are really going to do this Friday! Join in or watch later!

dev_stream_announcement_final_FINAL_actually.png Come join us on Friday 4/4 at 11:00 AM PT to take a look at the progress we've made on the Wychwood! We'll be live on our Twitch and YouTube channels - you know where to find the links.

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We have a melee class in our game now. It’s not shippable of course but directionally it’s ours and not stand in. Starting a healer next. Then just 20 or so to go! :)

We are at the stage of combat where some folks on the team are like oh no will it ever be fun? I’m not worried. I have been here before. Combat takes so many little things to get right. 1/

Stop being surprised at the hypocrisy. Their worldview is that they are good so their actions are by definition good, and we are sus so our actions are by definition sus, even if they are the same actions

Since I live in video meetings so much now, I try to show my hands on camera so the other people know I'm focused on them and not multitasking. This is not a natural position so I have defaulted to steepling my fingers like some kind of Bond villain

Wrote this on the other site. At the root of it, quests are never that interesting, mechanically, in any game: get this, kill that, go here. It’s the context, story, writing that makes them memorable.

Playtest went really well! This was a test of three different blue zones with really different gameplay (we can only vary the look so much with out limited assets so far). Lots of laughing among the players, which is always a good sign.

We are doing a public playtest tonight! I share this not to cause fomo (because we just can’t get all y’all in quite yet) but as evidence the game dev is going well. Hoping we can remove the NDA later this year.

Thanks for folks who have reached out with NetEase in the news. FPC has not been affected. We are still funded, growing and hiring.

Our game isn't a "procgen" game in the vein of Spore, No Man's Sky, or Caves of Qud. We use random maps for a lot of our content, similar to Age of Empires or Civilization. The monsters, terrain, POIs and quests are all handcrafted. That said, there is a lot we are learning from the procgen games!

What do I enjoy more - hunting for the perfect Steam game I’ve never heard of, or actually buying and playing it?

Ghost MMO’s devs talk pre-production of blue zones, red zones, and character progression in latest podcast @fpcstudio.bsky.social

Design all of your game's characters for cosplay

Had a red tailed hawk try to grab a chicken right in front of me and the dog, like 10 m away. Everyone is okay but it was scary. Had this problem last February too, so maybe the hawks are particularly bold and hungry since it's their breeding season. Anyway no outdoor foraging for a bit!

About 50% of US households have a dog, 30% a cat, and 13% chickens. Chickens are likely the third most popular US pet. (Mine are pets. I’m sure some people just think of them as food.) (Pet fish and reptiles are sub 10% of households)

In the world for our MMO some dreadful things happened in the past but it’s now sort of post-post-apocalyptic and civilization is growing again. We settled on this for a couple of reasons…

Hawks been hanging out at the henhouse (which sounds like a movie title). I don't think they can get in, but it scares the girls. I purchased two fake crows, because hawks are scared of crows. Will report back! I know you have to move the fake crows regularly so the hawks don't learn they are fake.

Every automatic sink: that’s all you get. I’m trying to save water. Every automatic toilet: imma flush 5-6 times

Upside down jellyfish (with the delightful genus name of Cassiopeia) LARP as coral, sitting on the bottom with their flat heads down and photosynthesizing. But they can get up and swim away too. Ubiquitous in tropical mangrove shallows.

Morning preening. I can watch my girls from 800 miles away

Don’t make single player narrative games, live service multiplayer games, or indie games. got it

Overheard at Home Depot: I thought I was done but now I gotta work another shift. They didn’t show up. I don’t blame them. This timeline sucks. If I were them I wouldn’t show up either.

The freeze has ended and supervised foraging can resume. They are ferocious to things smaller than them and chickenshits (heh) to anything larger.

We'll probably end up with some kind of group finder / matchmaking in our game, but man, I am so tempted to try without it just because I think groups work a lot better when there is some friction to just dumping someone and replacing them with another anonymous healer or whoever.

Me, a broken record on worldbuilding: okay guys I love the detail but don’t make them so awesome that you’re going to make players feel guilty when they have to butcher hundreds of them cuz it’s an MMO

Today I polled the team to see if we should call the main currency in our world gold (familiar, boring) or something else (flavorful, potentially off-putting, potentially cringe). I’m talking main currency. It’s an MMO so there will be exactly 10,000 other currencies. Some will even be cringe.

What this on ground?

Overheard on my morning jaunt to brunch: “As I get older, I also get more European.” (I am in Texas, not Europe)

There are only two kinds of game design books: “I am an elder sage weep ye peons” and “IDKWTF I am doing but I have made a ton of mistakes so please don’t make these same ones” I’ll let you guess which is me

Why do I feel like our new studio can make something as titanic as an MMO faster than the big boys can make? The three things that take the longest on big games are in my experience: making a new engine, making a shit load of content, and stabilizing the design. 1/

Crunch is a weird concept for our studio. We will never mandate crunch time like I did at Blizzard and Microsoft. But it’s a remote global studio so we can’t easily track how many hours someone does work. And we are a startup and we do need a sense of urgency.

My actual contribution to yellow paint is that, as in most aspects of game design, you want players to feel smart. If they are fumbling around for too long to accomplish X they get frustrated. If they are trivially solving every challenge, they won’t feel smart because the challenge was too dumb.

In addition to getting rid of yellow paint in game levels, we should get rid of health bars because it’s unrealistic I know exactly how much more damage I can take

Our blue zones seem to work best with about 3-5 players. We’ll support other sizes, including solo, but that’s what feels good right now. Question for you all is whether you think we should allow any kind of “comps” or really build around the assumption of a tank and healer or 2?

I discovered Tactical Breach Wizards on Steam today. Great XCOM like with really clever dialogue. Recommend.

I finished Veilguard last night. I agree the tone is a little different from the other DAs, but I enjoyed the combat a lot, and I am having that “I miss my protagonist” feels that I got from say BG3 or Cyberpunk.

Merry Christmas Eve. Hope you too enjoy a good dust bath

I’m still having trouble getting conversations started here compared to that other social media app, so if you have questions about our game, Ghost, or our studio, FPC, hit me up!

End of the year toast with the best team I’ve ever had. I have so much to be grateful for. This has been such a tough year for the industry but I still haven’t given up on it.

I know some of you are here for my chickens and not our game so here is my lovely Baguette.

I know our gameplay video with its Unreal boilerplate assets can look a tad generic but our world is anything but. We’re building a new IP, which is amazingly freeing! Working in an existing IP you could never develop a multi year story plan. There would be too many conflicts down the road

The gameplay video is up!

To set expectations, the FPC Ghost video tomorrow is 5 minutes not like 2 hours of raw footage or anything. But it does show real gameplay

It's been one year. What did we do in that time? Find out Monday! We have NOT added 1000 hours of MMO content yet. But we have vowed to share early and often!

Y'all all get to play the real campaign when our RPG launches