Hello folks, I need some opinion/advice.I'm a solo game dev developing an action MMO. The basic gameplay is done. I wanted to test it on public servers, but I don't have funds for it.I need around $800 per month for a decent server. I need at least $3000 so the server can run for a couple of months for testers to play around in.Is it possible to ask for donations on Patreon or Kickstarter for that amount? Would people be willing to shell that amount in exchange to be able to test the proof-of-concept gameplay online? Or is it too much to ask?Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.
google gives you free access to its cloud servers for three months if you have gmail, it also gives you $300 in credits so use them wisely
>>62584321Hey thanks for the advice, but I need some really fast server for the action gameplay. I did play around with some free servers and lower end servers, but for this gameplay, they weren't enough sadly.Was looking at Amazon AWS and they have what I need, but its just that expensive. Around $800 -$1000 per month. I wonder if donations can usually support that much. I don't know how much Patreoner gets usually.
>>62584337>I wonder if donations can usually support that muchIf people like your product then you can get the support you need from those people. Strange question. Why don't you structure your fundraising like investment round
>>62584337>Thanks for the advice (benchod bastard!!!) But I need money saar server too slow for my game saar! (Don't fucking ruin my begging thread there is no game at all)
>>62584337This is very much a loan situation. Fuck loans. Try making ads on yt (i.e. a game trailer), publish it on reddit and make the thing pre-order with guaranteed refunds if the game does not release (if needed, depending on the game price). You need to see what the possible market cap for the game even is before investing 800$ in it.As a dev note-could you cut down on traffic? Make it so that people can pick their own servers? Idk if you have a ping issue or a bandwidth issue. It might be possible in both cases to bundle the server v1.0 code with the thing, so that people can play with their friends before making it a MMO, and once you got the funds, open a real server. Make sure the server code is proprietary(and potentially encrypted) with a player cap though to not fuck around in court in case someone tries to steal it.
>>62584310>Is it possible to ask for donations on Patreon or Kickstarter for that amount? Would people be willing to shell that amount in exchange to be able to test the proof-of-concept gameplay online? Or is it too much to ask?You need some kind of youtube channel streaming some games like WoW or something, then doing hottakes on games, then you shill your NEW! BETTER (TM) GAME to your retarded fans.
>>62584385Unfortunately I couldn't estimate it at all, because none of other dev disclose their income from Patreon.They did tell us if they make zero money though.If 100 people (thats a lot) donate 15 bucks per month, I'll be in the clear. 100 people would be like a healthy number of users for a well-known private server MMOs. But thats for a well known MMO.Problem is I can't really estimate these things, since I have no experience. My game IS based on /inspired by a popular game though. So hopefully that would get some attention.Wish I could do Youtube to add more fund, but I suck at videos. Most I can do is making some short gameplay videos without commentaries.
>>62584310mmos are dead why even bother
>>62584427Thanks for the plan/roadmaps.I had a rough idea of shilling the game on Reddit, show some screenshot and gameplay videos.Then, if there are interest, I'll use my own money to host a server for maybe like 2 days on the expensive server, for people to test, and get more Patreon.Then, depending on how much I get, I'll spin up more server days, while continue developing the game, and continue shilling the game to get more Patreon.The proof-of-concept gameplay will just be the players being dropped into the persistent world to kill each other, or chat, or hangout, no real goals, just simple gameplay for now. Just messing with the action PVP gameplay.The limitation will most absolutely be the ping. Since the architecture is client-server. The server will simulate all the movements. Had to be, or it will end up like Dark Souls P2P multiplayer where people hack each other freely. The architecture nost definitely will lag more than souls multiplayer though, that's another thing that needs to be tested, whether the players can accept that kind of lag in exchange for security.
>>62584443It won't be like 'quest and story' type MMO like WoW. It'll be more like agar-io battle royale, or souls-like drop-into-the-world-and-start-killing kind of game, with customizations and itemizations of course. The goal is to test/develop the action gameplay to be tolerable in the face of latencies.Then maybe the gameplay can be used for something else, something grander. But that's a little bit too far off into the future.
>>62584310Is pitching the game to a publisher possible? They may be able to fund a development/test server, especially if the game is in a late alpha/beta state.As others have suggested, you can also pitch instead to Kickstarter. See: Star Citizen. This option makes less sense if you intend for the game to be a monthly subscription, unless you are OK with early backers receiving lifetime access.
>>62584492Will it have classes? or do everyone start with same default class and start roguelike building from there?
>>62584508No class, just generic humans for now, you can equip what gears you want like souls games, distribute your stats, so your gameplay will be based on your gears.But the character graphics will be a little bit different. Can't disclose much, but it'll be kind of realistic looking, but animu looking, like figurines, so I was hoping people who like animu would like it too, since it won't be dark grimy fantasy characters.
Holy shit... is this a real business post on /biz/?
>>62584533Oh and the game world currently is pretty shitty, since everything is made of boxes. I don't plan on beautifying the world much further for now, just the gameplay. It does look clean though. Low-end graphics, any PC can run it. I hope that won't drove people away.
>>62584481This might help with the ping issue.From what you write I think your flow looks like this:1) client input2) local temporary client movement2) send input to server3) server analyze input (for all users)4) send ack/rej to (each) client5) if rej, render last accepted move + some consistency logicinstead of watching the game, wait for a cheat report and then analyze the game/user. You might get away without even analyzing a lot of games/users that way. An added bonus is that you can process each game on a different/stronger machine.I used to miss this type of thing, hopefully it helps.>>62584546Remember, gameplay beats graphics pretty much every time.
>>62584506Nah, the game is at a very early stage, I don't think the game is at the stage where publishers would see that they can make a quick buck out of it on an easy-to-see timeframe. MMO seems to be a dangerous investment, even if its a full blown one and 'finished'.That's why I'm trying to be realistic and just focusing on making the barebone gameplay right now, a proof of concept, that people who wants to play the unfinished game, can donate money to.I don't think I should promise things beyond my ability. With that limited scope in mind (for now), I'm not sure if anybody would be interested enough to pay for it. Interest maybe, but enough to pay for the server cost? I don't know. That's why I'm asking around to get a rough idea.Kickstarter, maybe after I can do "3000 bucks total pool, pledger get to play the game for 3 months" kind of thing. And launch another Kickstarter later on after the server money ran out.Is $3000 on Kickstarter achievable for this kind of thing?
>>62584751The first iteration of the game was like that, it's client-authoritative. Its fast, and responsive, but not secure, looking at Dark Souls multiplayer, this kind of architecture is a guaranteed way for client to hack themselves.That's why right now I'm changing it to be totally server-authoritative. Even the movements and hit detections are done server-side.The flow is like this:>Client press button to request server to go forward>Server receive and process. Server move its copy of player and simulate movement>Server sent that character movements data to clients in range> Clients calculate interpolation and extrapolation/dead reckoning with the aim of mimicking server-side movement.So its harder to hack. But its going to be quite laggy, the farther you are from the server. How laggy? Idk. Because I don't have money to test on top-tier server. On the same continent it'll probably like 100ms ping time. Amazon's top servers are like 20 bucks per hour. The 800 bucks per month estimation is for the moderate 1 bucks per hour server. I don't even dare to touch the top servers right now even for an hour, I'm poor, that's why I'm begging people for it. So I don't really know how it will perform online on optimal server. Locally it's alright though. I tried to ask other hosting service hoping to find cheaper servers, but the one answering my questions can't even speak English, and provided me with wrong and false infos about their server, I don't think I can trust them.
>>62584310Run it locally using a shared bitcoin database and charge micropayments to enter a match. User installs game and supporting node software like bitbus or a custom planaria node that pulls block data specific to your application. Then all parties have a shared event log in case of dispute. It would make the game cheap as hell to run and you'd actually start making money as soon as people start playing. Make it cost like $1 per life so that it filters Indians.
>>62584816I did have that idea of charging players everything instead of subscriptions or Patreon. Sort of like of like, pay-to-live. You're dead? 1 dollar for a new life. Want a sword? 1 dollar. Want a shield? 1 dollar. No dollars? Then you can get the basic weak equipments to test out gameplay.But then this maybe can only work for an already-popular game, oike GTA Online. For an unknown game thats not even finished, I might be branded as enemy of humanity instead lol
>>62584812Also half the reason why I need a good server is not because of speed, but architecture. I can't get into details, but to even start to run the host application, I need a good server with certain 'qualities' that makes it more expensive. Cant found those 'qualities' on cheap servers.
>>62584812You limit your market by a lot if you do the server-authoritative approach. Don't forget that in such a model you depend on the players internet as well.I think that for a game just starting out hacks are a smaller issue than bad (or in your case for most players-not very responsive) gameplay. You lose a lot of attention with that. To get hacks you need attention, and if the game gets big enough for hacks to become a problem, you should have earned enough money to patch it up.I don't have a better argument so I hope you prove me wrong and succeed.Good luck.
>>62584869Yeah...there's a good reason why the souls games did it using client-authoritative P2P approach. I'm sure they tried the server authoritative method and its just not fast enough.And there are reasons why this sort of gameplay for mass multiplayer was not done by big companies using server-authoritative approach. The internet infrastructure today are quite fast, but not quite fast enough for this purpose. The companies just won't take the risk with server-authoritative.I guess I'll just have to just try out the lag when hosted for real for 1 hour on a top tier server. Will have to find the money somehow. If I cannot accept the lag, then I'll accept reality and let the game flop.If I can tolerate the lag, I'll let other players test it. If the lag is indeed intolerable by other players, then I'll accept reality and let the game flop. And move on to the next project that I am actually working on right now and excited abour actually.If players can accept the lag, then I'll beg them for server money.I do actually have some ideas on how to make it client-authoritative but still catches cheaters automatically, but, you guess it, it'll still need an expensive server, and there will be a lot more bugs and mismatch between server and clients that needs to be reconcilliated, basically playing eternal cat-and-mouse.Thanks for the ideas. I need them for brainstorming. Or I will just get stuck inside my own headspace.But man, if only humans doesn't cheat, these all will be very easy...
>>62584972>humans doesn't
>>62584310Obviously I don't know the first thing about your game or how it's designed but I will say this. I have a somewhat successful Dungeon Crawl RPG on Steam and I only pay $60 a month for its server bills. You need to really rethink what kind of data your server needs to process and how much of it can be done on the client instead. Personally I separated the server architecture into the database server and a server explicitly for websocket traffic. If absolutely necessary I can scale that up to multiple websocket servers but it is generally not necessary unless there is a huge traffic spike. Another option is to Simply slow down the gameplay so that so much data doesn't need to be sent. Look at Phantasy Star Online as an example.
>>62585281The main cause for the server needing expensive hosting is because of the architecture 'limitation'. I literally cannot let the client handle movement and physics and hit detection, or they will most definitely try hacking themselves, just like what happened in souls multiplayer and For Honor and several others that rely on clients to handle movements. So the server needs to primarily handle these, and the client will just mimic server's movements.But, If I want the server to do this, because of the server app 'requirements', it need to be hosted on something like Amazon AWS EC2 G5 instances for example. The cheapest will be $1 per hour. That's around $800 per month. If the server doesn't need to do all these (thus delegating movement and stuff to client), and only handle database, I can use a far cheaper hosting.The movements are critical, because it's a PVP-always-ON game. If this is a PVE-only game, the server doesn't have to validate as much, and many things can be delegated to clients, because it doesn't matter if the client is correct or not, nobody will get hurt.Granted that this is expensive partly due to it being Amazon's service.I think I've seen some other hosting services offering a better (on paper) service for $300, but after enquiring them, I've decided they cannot be trusted with my payment method. In fact, another hosting service I used to use got hacked, the hacker even sent email to all customers to notify us lol. Luckily I've long since removed my payment method from their website.I am still trying to find alternative trusted hosting service.Which hosting service are you using?
>>62585357I use AWS, but I use two very cheap servers. I have a special rolling client key method to ensure that client requests are valid for important database interactions, but I don't validate much else. I haven't had major problems aside from botting which I kinda look past because it's too expensive to police.If you're gonna validate all that then yeah you're gonna be shutting down your servers within a year after launch. Good luck though!
One option is setting up a sort of client-side "police" that monitors important values. In my game, gold is pretty important, so I encode that when storing it into state. That was you can't use cheat engine to search for your gold value. But when the game gets your gold, it decodes it updates it, and encodes it again. Little stuff like that can make your game difficult to hack.
>>62585389Client-side checking by 'trusted' client would work on paper, but in real world in live action game, it will introduce a significant lag, and if the checking is done by a trusted client, that implies the server is not the one doing the checking in the first place (aka the movement is done by the normal clients), which means the trusted client and the server will be running a game of cat and mouse forever to catch new hack, new way of fake movements, new way of moving accross wall.In my item system, the server validates all items, its impossible to hack the items such as duplicating or client fudging up fake values. If the client tries, then the malicious client will be the one getting unexpected response, while the rest of the world is still sane.Its basically a choice; either to run a strict ship with no leak but slower, or to run a fast ship but leaking all over. It's because I've seen what happened to games that tries to give power to client; DDOS of players in For Honor to prevent them from playing, DOXX from P2P UDP connection, teleport hacking in Dark Souls because the server will never be able to check movements for sure without calculating it itself, super-sprint in RUST, which all could be prevented singlehandedly if the server do the work, as it should.We could take the 'easy' route; let the player move by themselves unchecked, let players send UDP directly to each other to increase network speed, let player check hit detection, etc, but they will all collapse soon regardless as we have seen many times before, because they are built on a house of cards.I want to take a different approach this time. If it fails (for example if the game is too laggy lol), then let it fail honestly, rather than failing because of shortcuts that we know are full of holes.But yeah this is entirely dependent on the type of games. For my first multiplayer game some years ago, everything was done client side, because its just a social hangout, no PVP.
>>62584761How good is your internet? Can you try hosting it locally and inviting a few friends to test it out? Maybe make a discord server to drum up interest, and get the person in your region with the fastest internet to host it?
>>62584310You definitely need a kickstarter and to market it. No one ever got rich spending their own money.
>>62585468Sadly I'm poor and don't have internet that can host /port forward things, I only have phone internet in fact, that's why I was thinking of getting the server funds through Patreon.As for local test, I've tested it on local network and yeah naturally it has almost zero lag, but that doesn't count because its local.I have a couple of Discord friends offering to test-host it, but nnnahhh I'm too paranoid about letting other people hosting it right now lol. But maybe I will, maybe I will, after I brushed up on it some more. Currently I'm still trying to port the code from being client-authoritative to server authoritatize, adapting everything to the server side, so its going to take some time before I can let somebody host it, or it will be a shamefur dispray. But honestly I don't want anybody I know to know what I'm doing or hosting online.
>>62584310id say polish it more visually then throw it on kickstarter
>>62584310a game server that hosts the non graphical components and only I/O components of your mmo does not need a 800 monthly cost. I spin up private servers all the time on computers that are 300 dollars... one time fee. Especially if you are running it in a test environment you are looking at an old PC with decent RAM and an SSD to run it on to test shit out. You are larping and begging for drug money>t. Technological ConceptualistI bet you dont even know what that is, which shows how low a level you are in the world of technology
>>62585527>I have a couple of Discord friends offering to test-host it, but nnnahhh I'm too paranoid about letting other people hosting it right now lol.Paranoid of what? This is the answer, if you're so broke the $2500 isn't workable.
>>62584427I also would like option to play offline so the server 1.0 idea sounds great. But I completely understand if he's afraid people might decompile the server and steal the code, I've seen several game codes decompiled from their exe on Youtube and the fans criticizing the codes, for example in the case of Yandere Simulator.Or perhaps make an 'white room' offline demo, no server, just the client.
>>62584310post a video faggot. also>action mmolol
