TLDR:
I’m a experienced fullstack/devops engineer, started getting a team together. A lot of the serverside stuff is done (unity client will stay relatively simple). The game will certainly go live (ideally a first test-version in ~5-6 months), that of course does not mean it will make profit (it could). We need atleast another skilled unity dev.
What are we looking for here?
- A experienced Game Dev (atleast ~5hrs/week of freetime available for the project)
- be part of discussions regarding features, implementations…
- implementing user interface
- gameplay & some basic game mechanics
- maybe some particle effects
- a few animations (maybe not needed for the first version)
(I can probably do all the data handling & communication with the servers)
- Motivated/skilled people who like to join in any other role
Our Team:
For the past 6 months I’ve been working alone on the project. In the past few days I found a unity developer, and talented artists (one for 2D work the other for 3D models).
My Skills from my daily work:
- development: developing productive scalebale distributed systems using besides other techs spring boot, nodejs and ASP.NET
- operations: kubernetes, helm, cicd pipelines…
- system design & architecture
My Motivation:
I’m working fulltime in a big coorporation for about 6 years as a SE. Typical for big companies the development is slow, a lot of annoying processes, each new features is tested in 3 environments by different parties before it can go live. I’m working with a lot of different technologies (partly old/bad code bases). In contrast to this I really like to work on personal projects, where development & testing is a lot faster and where the architecture & technologies enable efficiency. Most people reading MMO in the title will immediately think “a beginner with to much ambition”. And as most devs I have my graveyard of unfinished projects too, but after putting 6 months of work in the project and doing a lot of work on the deployment automation of the serverside components I’m certain this will go live! 
Game Architecture:
- simple client-server architecture using mostly https (maybe some grpc & tcp) → since this is a strategy game this should work fine
- scalable decoupled small services (not fully microservices)
- relatively dumb unity client, little game logic in unity
- Example c4 model of the building service on component level:
(implementation done as with 8 other services) - workloads in the kubernetes namespace which handles a gameworld:
(sry for the quality, had to cut them together since the forum doesn’t allowed me to post 2 pictures)
What I’ve done so far:
- developing services to handle certain aspects of the game (players, villages, units, buildings, attacks, resources, quests, research, spatial map requests) (8 services, about 60 endpoints)
- api gateway, kafka integration & a graphQL aggregation layer
- automated most the deployment process into a local KIND (Kubernetes in docker cluster), which can be used for local development and will also be used cloud deployment e.g. into AWS or GCP
- very rudimentary POC of the unity client: data fetching, caching, map rendering
- created about 30 integration tests
The game idea:
- a real time strategy MMO somewhat similar to games like rok, tribalwars…of course initially with a lot less and some unique features
- mobile first
- buildup of villages, units, technology research, quests and fighting other players
- little annimations/complex game logic in the client, ping & performance won’t matter
- I coded the servers as generic as possible with config options → I’ve things in mind but the concret gameplay & mechanics are still open to discussion to some extend
- game atmosphere (mood, tone & setting) is not fully decided yet
Outlook:
In case that this makes profit, it will of course be shared by the developers. If it does not, it will atleast be a lot of fun, learning and an awesome portfolio project.
Contact:
If you are interested to join or to get to know us & the project first, please either write me a private message or share e.g. your discord user below this post.