Hi guys,
As I’ve been saying a while, if you keep the concept small enough, an MMO is possible. Some of you may feel very motivated to read about one successful unity mmo developer, so I post the link here for the MMO crowd to chew on and enjoy…
You’ll particularly enjoy the closing remark from the developer!
Yep.
Though if you play DF you’ll note that it is not some fantasy game that magically does everything - there are some very real world limitations that the game simply builds around. Oh - and the dev made some single player games before hand 
Thats right. I recall him being active when he was just a kid though, years ago on indiegamer forums, making shootemups. To find he is now 24 and married with kids comes as a surprise to me. Either I’m getting old or something horrible is happening to my RAM.
But, inspirational I’m sure. If the kids making mmos here follow his example of making single (finished) games then perhaps there is hope for them in the future.
Very inspirational. It is true that this is very different MMO than usuall fantasy MMOs but still hands down to his achievement.
This is indeed inspriational.
However, I setup an account and started playing. Went to the marketplace, 1200 credits for a “special” halloween piece of gear, which is about $50 “normal price” ($38 on sale). Ok, no big deal, I don’t have to buy.
Then I went into the city to play. Could only move my character in one direction. Hit shoot once and it started firing over and over again, chose to go to fullscreen, and the game crashed.
So…maybe he should spend a bit more on making the game work. 
Ah yes,
The young rogue all we programmers see ourselves as in our own minds. I’m glad you posted this, inspiration is very important in any situation, and in programming it is possible to get discouraged quite frequently. We need stories like this to keep us going and creating the next great MMO. 
I noticed it kept trying to make me install an older version of the webplayer too. Could use a touch of polish, I’m sure the author will stumble across this thread and sort the niggles out.
I think MMO isn’t such a taboo for Indie if you know EXACTLY what you are doing - the trick is limit the scope as small as humanly possible.
And it is indeed inspirational. Thanks for sharing hippo!
I believe if are organized, a decent programmer, along with 2 artists are more than enough to make a small mmo, as long as they dont try to compete with WOW. I think like most people here i too have tried to make one but failed. I decided to make a few other games first and gain lots of experience with unity3d before i try to tackle that task again.
Jin76
What are your previous projects?
That is some serious previous experience and yet 99% of the threads that start with MMO’s in our forums have next to nothing experience with Unity or making games.
Thanx for the post Hippo it should be a sticky for every new Indie with such dreams
wait Dead Frontier is made with Unity? that’s awesome, I play this quite a bit x
It’s great to see people realizing their dreams with Unity. You put in the hard work and anything’s possible.
Didn’t see any mention of the backend systems he’s using what would be the best of breed MMO backend for an indie Unity Game developer?
Poke him on indiegamer forums if you can, I think he still checks there often.
The article did mention it. It’s mostly SMF for the forum stuff, SFS for the multiplayer, PHP for all the game related stuff. We use some node.js for utility things (email address remapping, proxy server, more to come), and HAProxy for load balancing. I recently switched one of the webservers from apache+mod_php to lighttpd+fastcgi, and will probably move the rest over if it proves stable as early indications are that it performs a little better.
Backend servers are a mix of OpenIndiana and CentOS6. You really can’t beat ZFS for its flexibility (L2ARC, dedicated log devices, etc), snapshots, shipping backups to backup systems, etc. Packages tend to be a little more out of date on OI, and there’s sometimes some issues with compiling stuff, but it’s worth the trade off.
Database is MySQL, just switched over to a Percona build. Performance vs. stock MySQL seems about the same, but the extra observably and control it gives is very nice for tuning. Been looking at some other possible solutions like MongoDB or MySQL Cluster for future scalability (you can only scale up so much), but at the moment it’s not worth the trouble. MySQL Cluster would be the easiest route, but some bugs I encountered with it make it a no go for right now.
It’s still running off of Unity 2.6, we’ll start porting to 3.5 when it’s released though.
Some rough stats for those that are interested:
Over 4k players online at once during peak hours. This generates 300 HTTP requests for dynamic pages per second. Average page generation time is about .5 seconds, but it varies a lot. About 25% of online players are in the multiplayer game at any given time. The rest are browsing forums, trading in the market place, etc.
In other news, MMO threads on the Unity forums increased inexplicably by 12,000% this past week…
But in all seriousness, as bawss said: limit the scope and it can be done. It’s the same with any game genre.
If i were aiming for an MMO and not just a multiplayer game (starting with the singleplayer, just to prove to myself that it can be done) this would be even more motivating.
still, for a solo-project (since team-members that have joined in have dropped off the face of the earth) it’s had it’s frustrating moments and days where i’d rather not work on it (since i don’t do this full time) it’s still coming together… albeit slowly.
the hardest thing that i think anyone has to learn to deal with is the legions of naysayers… if i had a dollar every time someone expressed doubt that i’d have made it this far, i would be able to quit my day job 
Interesting article, thanks for sharing hippo.
One thing that’s often missing from such articles though is hard financials. What one person considers enough to live on varies depending on their quality of life expectations, and the number of people I’ve encountered who don’t take into account the cost of their own time before mentioning the word “profit” are too numerous to mention. Apart from the benefit of being your own boss - which has significant value - in the long run would such a developer have been better taking a career at a large games developer?
It’s an inspiration.
I always knew that no matter who you are, if you want to, you CAN make any type of game you want. You just need to learn and expand your knowledge.
The only thing holding people back is money. If I had enough money to spend I would love to create an mmo.
But anyways this is definitely an inspiration. I always love to read about successful developers with unity.
Yes it is very inspiring, but yes he also had alot of previous game design experience…