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Comment by craze3 | Hacker News Reader

Looks awesome! I actually created a MMO prototype before, just by myself. A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy.

I used Babylon.js for the 3D game/controls, and I imported free 3D assets from various asset stores for the content. The backend was a simple socket server written in Node.js with socket.io connected to the web frontend via JS using the standard WebSockets API. I got realtime character movement, turning, & jumping implemented pretty quickly. Content became a bottleneck so I stopped developing, but I hope to finish it up sometime in the near future.

Good luck!

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> A lot of people told me not it's impossible to do, but it was actually fairly easy.

A weekendware prototype isn't what people are talking about when they say gamedev/MMOs are hard. It's 0.001% of the work, it's trivial.

Just as you, too, stopped at the actual hard part: building the game.

I'd also observe that an "M(ultiplayer)ORPG" isn't too hard anymore; not trivial, but something the tooling has gotten a lot better for over the years and something a lot of people could put a prototype together for fairly quickly. In fact we've seen a number of "Show HNs" over the years that amount to this.

But the "Massive" can be a real killer. Even if there are to some extent off-the-shelf tech that can handle fairly "massive" communications, it still takes a lot of skill and effort to use them correctly.

This is where the fakery in most MMOs kicks in - they are not really 'Massive'. Most of them have sharded servers where only a few hundred players are actually in the same world together. Players think there are a lot more as the underlying chat system (originally just IRC in a lot of cases) runs on a separate server for all the players.

content is almost always the bottleneck in any form of gamedev

Well until you hire an army, then it's quality, and tooling to manage content, then it's back to creative direction as the blocker.

that's why I find self-limiting forms of gamedev more interesting than AAA games.

I'd rather play a half-finished roguelike, gamejam games e.g. itch.io or Ludum Dare , indie games, concept games.

You feel the creativity more.

I don't care for a scripted piece of entertainment.

I want to explore different game mechanics and explore ways of interacting.

AAA games almost never give you that.

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