Hey guys! So for the past 3 years my friend (PastyWhite) and I have been collaborating together on our first game and we figured it was about time to show you guys what we have been up to. We created a company called Ghost Mantis Games LLC, and this is our first project.
The project initially started off as a competition entry into the DX Studio 2008 Winter Games Competition. After the competition the game was put on hold for a few years until we decided to collaborate on it and finish it. Since then we obviously made the jump to the Unity engine and have been grinding away at it ever since.
We are going to be updating this thread regularly as we progress!
A bit about the game:
It’s a fully networked web based MMORPG with heavy emphasis on combat. We wanted to put a fast paced fighting system into an MMORPG, since we haven’t really seen that before. Think Devil May Cry meets World of Warcraft.
What has been completed so far:
Database setup
User account creation and login
Character Creation
Lobby System with Chat
Players can create a mission and others can join
Enemy Spawning
Networked Enemy AI
Attack System
Item Drops
Experience System and Player Level ups
Player Inventory and the ability to equip items
Wepaon system with the ability to link attacks to weapons
Player movement prediction for smoother gameplay
We have recently switched from baked vertex lit shaders to using the built in Unity lightmapping. Since our game will be played from the web player, we wanted to keep the file sizes as small as possible. There was a concern about using lightmapping but we have managed to keep the scenes light weight and the results look infinitely better than baked vertex lighting. Once we get everything converted over we will post some gameplay videos.
Keep in mind everything you see is a work in progress. During development we focused on fleshing out the game play mechanics first, and making sure all the server side code works and is as optimized as possible. We are now going through and creating final assets for the game.
Hey primus88! I’ve updated the first post with a bit more information about where we currently are with the game. We will be posting videos soon which should give more insight into the mechanics of the game and how it plays.
I"m new around here so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m the concept artist on this project. It’s been a ton of work but it’s also been very rewarding.
Here are a couple of pieces I did. There’s a rendering of a health/maybe potion capsule and some warp design concepts, as well as a really loose sketch of what could end up being an environment that our heroes will visit at some point in the game.
Really? I’m surprised by that. M59 is the grandfather of all MMORPGs. First one to use 3d graphics. Probably wouldn’t have WoW without M59 paving the way.
I heard of Meridian 59, but honestly not 'til we came up with the name for our game and I was looking online to see if it had already been taken. Then again, I didn’t have that much money growing up and we didn’t have a computer in the house. I never owned a computer 'til college and by that time Diablo 2 was already out.
