> start third year project that lasts full year and might extend to fourth year final college project
> decide we want to make a game where players program bots and bots play MMO
> three months later we want to get some external opinions
So, what does /v/ think about the idea of a MMO that is not directly played by players?
pic related.
>>319865739
Wouldn't it get a bit boring after a while?
It sounds interesting, but I'm not sure the average causal could get engrossed in it
An interesting idea with very little marketing potential. Sounds like a college project to me.
Please do it. This is the time to make those weird games nobody will pay you to make.
>>319865848
That's one of our main fears, The other one being the difficulty of programming bots itself.
The core loop is kind of designed to avoid this by using crafting / upgrading / territorial control / creating custom skills / theorycrafting....
Sounds interesting.
What's the setting? Is this gonna be military, corporation/economy or what?
Is it going to be an idle game like your trip suggests?
People are eating that shit and wants more so i don't think you have to worry.
normies can into programming games if you do it right
just look at tis-100 for example
>>319866329
The setting is shamelessly stolen from danmachi (forgive me for liking /a/):
You're a god that has been demoted from paradise, and need to create your own "race" / chimera to get back to the top.
We kind of settled on having a huge "empty" map focused on territorial control and resources and a tower set up on the center for "world" progression.
>>319866547
Well, yes and no; It will be idle in the sense that the bot will keep playing while you're offline, and that you won't need to actively interact with your bot.
>>319866606
Thanks for the reference!
Didn't know about that game, will check out later
>>319866809
>bot will keep playing while you're offline
So to give a hypothetical situation, you log off with your bot working on say, cutting down trees, can another players bot set up to hunt down other bots come by and gank your bot while they're woodcutting?
If i can program a bot to fist other bots im in
>>319867125
I think a prudent player would invest resources on protection for his own race/guild/religion/whatever, so a warrior caste.
I guess an important part of this would be to have a main NPC (or the player character's personality) that can lead and manage the rest depending on what happens.
>>319867125
Yes,
players are expected to sooner or later program their bots to check if someone is getting near them.
Also because you have more than one bot at a time and there will be either message passing or shared memory, you will be able to scout and alert if someone is pkilling their way into your woodcutter.
>>319865739
Sounds cool, OP. The only hurdle I could see is what monetization model to use. I'm actually fairly interested in the idea, but there's still no way in hell that I'd pay a subscription fee to play something like this.
Why not add the option to also play as a single character? Like your character could be the leader of your bot farm. If you could add some interesting combat the bots could make the world feel really alive compared to other mmos and most people would go ahead and create some bots since they would benefit in the "main" game from all of their hard work. The game wouldn't just be for autistic simulator fans then, and it wouldn't even have to be necessary to make a playable character, you could just do all bots if you wanted to while other plays might choose otherwise.
>>319867349
We've been talking about thematic arenas with very simple games (such as fistfighting or playing football), but we decided that would come after the game is released, and only If It's "self-sustaining".
>>319867575
We settled on having a gachapon that gives tradeable items such as "additional bot slot", "24h online", "broadcast server message", "dyes", "tournament tickets", "exp rate booster(non-stackeable)", "Bot Rename Token", "guild stamp", "crafting recipes"...
We're trying to avoid pay to win, so for example crafting recipes can be discovered by experimentation.
All gachapon items may be sold/purchased in a stock house (similar to the steam stock house)
Looks creative. Keep going.
>>319867775
We considered letting the players "control" one of the bots but we have two problems with that:
From a player pov, It's just too unfair and frustrating, bots do their job so well that a player has almost Zero chance to beat a bot in a "fair" fight; Still, this problem can be solved by the bots (stat-wise), but then bots would become kind of a "secondary" focus to the game (and we can't even begin to think about competing in the standard MMO industry).
From a designer pov, the main problem is scalability: by design we don't have to handle inputs, we don't have to predict and we don't have lag; therefore we don't even need mutexes and that makes the servers both affordable (in terms of bots per server) and scalable (in terms of cloud computing) so the game remains sustainable with a normal f2p player base (<0.5% people that pay)
>>319865739
Is the bot program based with already set-up parameters? I think it might b cool. I mean, I'm no programmer but I would love to tweak my bots (or people) whatever I like and see them interact with each other.
I would like to suggest you a theme for the game OP. Make it some religion building game and you're the god who set up your "creations" in any way you want and let them face each other with non-believers. Of course, it's all up to your "holy" book, the "AI program" where players can set their daily chore. Make it it's not all bad doing "bad" things and not all good doing "good" things. NPC mobs can be set as heretics, non-believers and shit. Just try to stay away from typical resource you need "x wood" and "x magic bubble thing" to make "y" so you can go for level 2 "z".
Goddamn OP, keep me updated.
>>319865739
I actually thought of something like this in the past month or two. My idea was more like you are a guild master and you have to program various characters to do stuff for you.
like you have a generated dude thats good at gathering professions so you have to try to program him (or just draw him the best route to farm on) to get resources.
Essentially building a factory out of adventurers in order to get better gear, get further into raids/dungeons, or just make your guild more well famous or something.
maybe something like WoW's garrisons but with much more fine control beyond "send dudes on missions and afk"
>>319865739
Make it so you can create a settlement and an army, actually just make an RTS MMO.
>>319868105
>gacha
Urgh I'm out
how much idle would it be? like at the start would i need to wait 10+ mins before doing the next thing?
>>319865739
It's not a concept I'm intrested in, but I really like original idea's like this.
Not really any advice, just keep up the good work.
>>319865739
This sounds exactly like something I would spend stupid amounts of time in. I fucking love programming games and games that have a sense of overarching progression.
>game where everyone bots
Isn't this basically just Runescape?
>>319868824
You could say so, because the programming language is based around "boxes" and boxes can have parameters you can click in the parameter, change it, and drag the box to your "creation"
About the "morality" and "traditional" decisions we want to stay away from them enough to give players the sensation that is "wits" over "level" but not enough to remove the sensation of "progression", so we're going for a model based around "specialization" rather than "snowballing"
>>319868841
>>319869340
The programming language is turing complete, so you can code a bot that works using a neural network; we kind of considered a setting where you manage an adventurer guild or a hero academy, but settled on being a god that creates a race (which will be programmed to do whatever you want).
Because programming is the core of the game, that means you could program a bot that farms/grinds/bounty-hunts all the day, or make a party of bots that raids dungeons, or build a guild of players that manage bots in order to control a map area.
Therefore you will be wait as much as you want, It's not that the game has a timer that makes you wait; but you who decides what the bots do:
So you could for example, have two bots farming/grinding and meanwhile you can be using a bot to participate in short battlegrounds(1 or 2 minutes) and improving your combat(PvP) code or in-game-skills.
>>319870082
whats to stop people from making programs so complicated they fuck your servers? like evolutionary algo based programs or whatever
>>319869943
Runescape 3? Almost every gets raped to pieces when botting?
RS Oldschool and Classic? Incompetent developers can't and won't stop it.
Darkscape and Deadman mode? A few bots because of the nature of the game, not really viable.
>>319870082
how do you get more bots though? having them be too easy to get might make the game boring.
>>319870304
might be a good idea to make more code unlockable. that way at start you would nwed to make do with simple code.
>>319869943
While IdleWorld will also be a browser game, there are three fundamentally differences from runescape:
1)The game is designed to be played by bots that play server-side for many hours after you disconnect and shut down your computer; that in turn means that a bot could also do things such as bounty-hunt.
2) You have a limited amount of skill slots (probably less than 5), and you can create your own "advanced skills" by combining those skills programming.
3) It's more of an "Eve Online" with bots than a "Runescape", because the stock house, territorial control, single world and even the time slowing down in an area if there are too many players there.
How friendly will the programming be to someone with zero familiarity with that kind of thinking, or games like Infinifactory/Factorio?
There is an obvious difference in power between someone who plays those games regularly and a typical FPS gamer/RPG fag, though that's not really a bad thing.
>>319865739
keep at it op and work harder do you have a twiter or something you post a dev blog to
Can't wait for OP to get tried of standard banter, get mad, move to reddit and casualize the game.
here comes agdg
>>319871126
no fuck of back to agdg you fucks
>>319870304
There will be at least three limitations imposed server-side:
1) The amount of bytecode (compiled code) is limited on a per-bot basis.
2) The amount of bytecode that is executed every server-cycle is limited on a per-bot basis that scales if multi-account is suspected.
3) The code cannot blow, if it reaches a position where it lacks arguments, uses the default ones, if it tries to jump outside the code it jumps to the start, if tries to compare invalid datatypes it jumps to the start, If it tries to access out of boundaries data it jumps to the start...
>>319870464
We want each bot to be really unique, with a different purpose, different AI, different looks, so It will be very hard to increase the amount of bots you can use.
We also considered having the bots to perma-die, but that would be a huge pain for the player (considering they might program a bot to be farming for 9 hours)
>>319870571
>>319870912
The tutorial and the custom-skills balance will probably be the most difficult thing to get right...
When you start you will have all the basic code operations (imagine the 20 core keywords from C), and the tutorial will tutor you as you build the first important "boxes/functions" (attack the nearest player, run if you have less than X hp, don't attack your own bots...)
That way players that don't like the game or casual players will probably end up as cannon fodder mobs while people who like the game, even If they don't know how to program, will be able to learn and keep playing.
Also we expect visual programming to be much easier to understand and debug (step by step as seen on the picture).
And If you're already a programmer, you can just ignore the tutorial and do whatever you want.
>>319871436
Curious programmer here. Are you using a custom VM? It looks like you made a blueprints style system ala UE4, can you talk about how your coding system works?
Got a site or googledoc or something I can check progress on the game?
Sounds like something I'd like to check out on release.
How do you plan on handling a player that just takes over the fucking world? Like his bot is just infinitely better than anyone elses, and gets too far ahead.
Will there be multiple servers? Resets?
>>319871087
Well, even banters might give us some interesting pointers about things to be wary about or things that might be tollish/fun enough
>>319871062
>>319871595
We will start the devblog somewhere around january, and the social accounts are already reserved.
Mails, domain and even hosting are already reserved and functional
Feel free to contact us at @IdleWorldGame or mail us: [email protected]
Just from what I've read I have to say I'd play the shit out of this.
>>319871595
Because bots are programmed, counter strategies will be the key, If something/someone is OP; as long as it's not the "equipment" what makes it OP strategies will force the OP to either adapt or die.
>>319871541
Yep, custom vm all the way down; we might JIT it if necessary, but our current performance tests show us that optimizing it is not necessary for now.
As for the programming language, we will probably end up with something mostly functional and focused on tail-recursion and iterators (albeit with a ton of side-effects/impure functions).
In early tests we observed that functional languages map very well to blueprints system, because things such as the IF keyword being an "OP jump" and the links acting as "variables";
It being graph-based also has a ton of potential for memoization, factorization, automatic non-gc memory management and compiler-optimization (because the programming language kind of is the AST itself)
>>319870082
sounds like it could be fun. Are you somehow limited in number of bots you can be running at one time?
Oh and I remembered what inspired me to think of this kind of game. I remember waaaaay back in the day from the black temple raid in BC WoW people were having so much trouble with the mechanics on gorefiend that someone game a flash game to simulate how to learn the fight mechanics. I thought it would be cool to have a bunch of preprogrammed bosses on a 2d plane (and maybe with the ability to make and share your own, but this was before steam workshop) and you would have to program a bunch of raider bots in order to try to beat the boss. See if you could make one program that beat as many bosses as possible or just see how complicated a boss you could beat.
I think you can still find videos of that flash game if not the game itself.
Calling it now, it'll be a chaotic mess for the first few months before everyone figures out optimum code, players will upload their "meta" code online and everyone will copy and paste.
Every combat bot will be perfectly designed, with infallible escape routes for every situation.
And it will be a fucking wonder to behold, the perfect machine.
>>319872612
While I've been calling them "bots" they are avatars, not zergs, meaning you will have a very limited amount of bots and It will be difficult to increase the amount of bots you control; you will have to name them and maybe (we're considering it) they would have some kind of "mental status" or "morale".
That doesn't mean we don't want zerg strategies, It's just that we aim for bots to have summoning or mental control skills, so we want a "bot-avatar" to be in charge of "zerg-bots" but not "zerg-avatars".
We also expect those skills to remain undiscovered by players for a while.
Will watch some videos of the flash game later, if anything to try to understand what kind of bot-boss-fights are more fun to watch.
On a side note, I just checked out the tis-100 recommended by >>319866606 and I think that If non-programmers can handle that, they will probably be able to handle our systems xD
>>319873191
It will be even easier than copying; Players will be able to sell closed-source code functions (or trade them).
But we believe that as long as there is not only one optimum code, people will find the way to counter it.
Also because we would have all the bytecode we could make stats very easy and see what needs to be buffed.
>>319872545
I just feel like the game might suffer from too high of a skill ceiling.
I have absolutely no experience in the matter of course. Nor much an idea on the game itself.
>>319873434
>closed-source code functions
>>319873434
So do the bots go with their own morals or can you mold them as you like?
I imagine you could have to dedicate resources into the education of your people so they develop just the right set of morals that better fit your interest. Neglect this and your bots might behave in ways you don't expect
Also
>xD
>>319873731
Dont worry RMS!
The client will be open source :)
Inside the game, trade and commerce of open source functions will also be an option,
I just think that from a game-perspective closed-source functions will be way more interesting.
>>319873479
We will do a few closed "non-programmers" beta test and then a soft-launch targeting university students before the open beta launch.
I mean, we can't expect to appeal to everyone with such a game, but we want our target (people who might enjoy theorycrafting, programming and socializing with in game-politics/backstabbing) to believe It's a good, fair game worth spending a few hours a day.
>>319869221
Things such as the gacha might seem unfair, but the aim is for someone who pays to be rewarded for keeping the server online while having a negative influence in the balance of power, therefore and because people will get things they might not like, focus will be on the buy/sell stock house that trades this items (in a way similar to PLEX of eve online)
We don't want it to be pay to win, monetization is necessary just to keep the server on from the poo of whales and (if the game is successful) to allow us to eat while we develop more content.
>>319874339
It's still a wip idea, but the bot will never ever go against It's code, that is the fundamental core idea of the game.
Still it might influence the bot in some other ways (less motivated/debuffs/ less damage/less operations per second)
>>319874832
Do you got a website or something? I wanna be able to check this out later.
>>319875267
Not yet, we have the domain:
http://idle.world
And we will start to announce things through social media, webpage and devblog in around a month, maybe two;
When this thread dies feel free to contact us at @IdleWorldGame or [email protected]
>>319874832
Treat it more like a "discipline stat." If you want to give your little guys some level of autonomy, it would be a big part on the player faction's personality if you could have for example a warband of barbarians that pillage and plunder on their way, and another that stays put and ignores everything until ordered so, but their god has to put the effort and dedicate part of his earnings on keeping it that way. A less military example would be civilians with poor moral upbringing drastically reducing their efficiency if there's a threat to their "nation" as a whole, while properly educated ones will stay confident an carry on with their duries.
Don't know shit about coding though, so it might be pure hell to actually make it work for all I know.
Another thing. You mentioned races earlier, are you gonna make the player choose from a list or create their own? If the latter, how much freedom in design will you grant? And how much in the way of graphics can be expected?
Finally, with how much "strenght" does a player start? I'm talking manpower here. You mentioned Danmachi, where god surround themselves with mortals that join their factions (I barely watched a bit so I don't know the details), so it might be possible to start with something as small as an 5-man group and from then it's up to the player to become an actual faction that owns territory? I'm saying this because your MMO clearly sounds like a sandbox, and the progress of one player will be limited by the stablished world of his predecessors, so you can't just give a new player a corner of the world and an army ready for battle and conquest.
I'd make sure your game has a good chat interface since while it seems like it can be pretty actively played, you're going to need a strong community to keep it going, akin to EVE. So definitely don't let chat hurt for the sake of gameplay.
>>319876742
Well noted, thanks;
We're kind of unsure about how the chat will work; because each player can have more than one bot; and each bot can go somewhere different, each bot will probably have a different "chat window".
Players will also be able to create their own chat channels for alliances, language, online communities and stuff.
>>319876183
We expect player alliances will end acting like "a barbarian nation", If a player builds a bot that attacks the nearest unkown bot or PKs a "party" member to get a new weapon you would already have a "barbarian" and probably will end up playing with more barbarians in a barbaric alliance.
Coding the bots so that they ignore instructions at certain moments in a consistent way might both too difficult and frustrating for the player who already is giving the bot a behavior (by programming it); I mean, expect bots that mine and run, that try to pk and loot, that request payment or kill...
The camera will be similar to Wakfu and Bastion, and for the graphics we're aiming for a similar aesthetic, as for the quality...
Expect it to start bad, then improve;
Because we're a small team we prefer to focus our resources to usability and gameplay, If the game generates enough interest will look into increasing team size, but for now (and per college subject terms) we would like to remain as a small team.
As for "player strength" the player will start with one active bot, and during the tutorial will create another one.
Because we want the game to feel more like a light novel MMORPG, XCOM or Eve Online rather than a regular RTS we want to make it so that players are don't increase the bot amount regularly.
>>319877805
>Because we want the game to feel more like a light novel MMORPG, XCOM or Eve Online rather than a regular RTS we want to make it so that players are don't increase the bot amount regularly.
Sounds comfy.
Regardless of any plot that might or might not exist, will you guys start the game with pre-made world or just wilderness with tribes of barbarians and let players organically develop civilization and nations?
>>319878556
Wilderness, there might be mobs, there will be bosses, but there won't be any npcs.
