Indie Browser MMO City of Steam

Community Showcases
1

Hey all, I’m Ethan and I work for a small games developer, Mechanist Games. We’re working on our debut title, City of Steam, a free-to-play browser-based MMORPG.

If you’ve heard of City of Steam and been keeping an eye on it since the game went public, be sure to sign up for our newsletter and follow our dev journals for up-to-date game development. We’re getting closer to a Beta launch.

To those that don’t know what City of Steam is (no surprise for this, we’re pretty small, so getting widespread recognition is relatively harder for us). It’s a browser-based MMORPG featuring a mix of industrial fantasy and steampunk elements, lightweight enough to play smoothly on even non-gaming computers and accessible straight from your browser. Even then, thanks to Unity 3D and a lot of in-house tools, we’ve managed to still make it look quite impressive,and all stored in but a few megabytes. You won’t believe it’s a browser game after you hit the fullscreen button.

Visit the World Machine page to take a better look at this animated world. Take a quick look at the world CoS is based upon:

For a better picture of the game, check our latest Closed Beta Trailer, a lot has changed and improved since then, but it can still give a good idea for what we plan to make of our game:

Edit:

Hello all, we’ve opened gates of Nexus again, Beta is now launched and ready to play. Visit the link below if you don’t have an account yet and start your journey in just minutes!
http://cos.r2games.com/signup

Thanks to your continuous support of our game, City of Steam has finally been approved on Valve’s Greenlight approval system. We are thankful for everyone who voted for us and who spread the word! If you want to know more, you can find the full announcement here: http://cos.r2games.com/news/view/?id=1731

Also, we wrote up a dev journal (though delayed!), along with a video, about the showcase of City of Steam at PAX East and GDC 2013. The video itself is here:

If anyone has any questions regarding the development (within reason) and how we went about doing things feel free to ask. I’ll get as much info as I can out of the coders/artists.

2

Very nice looking game, I look forward to following your progress.

The development Vlog is cool, I really like your in-house level editor, simple and clean. The video was really polished as well, you guys clearly know what you’re doing. Hopefully it doesn’t take too much time out of development to make these because I would really like to see more. :slight_smile:

3

I heard about this the other day. I’m a fan of Steampunk stuff and I’m an MMO junkie so I’m pretty excited. Hopefully I can get in to the beta. I’m even more excited to hear that it’s been built with Unity. I’ll be watching this closesly!

4

Oh they actually take an enormous amount of time but we love doing them. You can see how many tools we’ve made directly in Unity. While there are lots of limitations that we have worked around, the tools are getting to where things are streamlined.

5

While not expressively ‘Steampunk’ (we call it Industrial Age Fantasy) we’d love to get the word out more into the Steampunk community. Thanks for the support and do drop by our forums to join in on any of the discussions. Also, help us test play the Alpha version in July.

6

Hey, folks. My name is Joey, one of co-founders of Mechanist Games. If there is any question regarding the technical aspects, our technical director Johnny and me will be here to answer. Please feel free to ask.

7

Looking very good! and special things you do to minimize the drawcall? and is there a sorta limit to it?

8

Oh, yes. We did quite a lot of optimization to reduce the drawcalls. For each open scene(public area, which is quite huge with lots of objects), we aimed to control the cost on static scene objects under 400 drawcalls and save more for the characters. For a mmo, rendering cost is very dependent on how many players you want to display per screen, and the drawcalls will easily go crazy if you don’t optimize that part well. We make our character to use as less materials as possible and combine meshes dynamically on armor change. This way saves a lot. Still the best way to save drawcalls: wisely use the materials and combine meshes.

9

These images looks cool. :slight_smile: Are the system requirements available yet?

10

Plenty of steampunk forums for you to advertise on. I used to build and sell steampunk style lamps.
This is the look I’d love to have for my concept.

11

This looks awesome. The world needs a good Steampunk MMO; I hope you guys succeed!

12

City of Steam will scale to the user’s hardware and web browser settings. (This tweaking and fine tuning of this will not happen until the Beta test in Fall 2012) Currently, a gaming computer that is around three to five years old will run the game just fine. Older, non-gaming computers and/or old laptops will need to reduce the graphic quality settings to achieve an acceptable frame rate.

13

If you haven’t noticed, we already released the new redesigned website and forum with more original steampunk elements. Also, the long-expected City of Steam themed merchandise store is quite impressive. Head over the City of Steam website to access more updates.

14

This looks awesome. Best of luck! I will be looking forward to updates.

15

City of Steam Alpha test release dates confirmed. The test will start on July 20th and last for 3 weekends. Be sure to help us test play this game and provide feedback. Take a peek into Alpha through our new gameplay trailer:

16

Awesome! Simply awesome!

Cheers,

Galen

17

Looks excellent! I’m a pretty big fan of the Steampunk genre, so I can’t wait to see how this turns out!

Also, just curious, did you get the terms “warder” and “channeler” from the Wheel of Time series? If that’s the case, do the terms still have the same meaning?

18

No; although they share similar roles (Warder is a fighter type, whereas Channeler has supernatural abilities), the names were not taken from Wheel of Time. Warders in City of Steam are more like knights, and are independent warriors, not attached to having to protect a specific individual (unlike Warders in WoT that are directly connected to Channelers). Channelers in City of Steam channel the resonance of the Mechanism through sound and music, serving more of a “priestly” role (like clerics; buffs, healing, etc) in the City of Steam world…and male channelers here don’t go insane from using their powers. So really, aside from sharing the same name, they are very different from each other. Interesting comparison, but otherwise purely coincidental :wink:

19

We’re pretty close to a third round of Alpha Weekend launch now. If interested, be sure to sign up for our Newsletters and test play City of Steam on Friday! Can’t wait to receive more feedback!! Also, check out our new little video while you are waiting for the test:

20

Man this looks absolutely amazing, would love to get a hold of a key so I can play this game! I love seeing amazing Unity projects. If I had money I would throw it at you :slight_smile:

Edit: I hope there is class that can summon a pet or some sort, I am a big fan of summoner type classes.

Edit2: About how long did this project take, and how many people are/were working on it during the main dev process?