Fourteen Years of Development in Screenshots

1/4/12

Beginnings of the quest system, which forces new players to learn how to play (see how the tutorial area exit got blocked off on the left?)

1/7/12

Traps!

1/9/12

More buildable items

Chairs never happened though because their collision was too complex to deal with for a one-off item, so they became stools:

1/13/12

I posted this on twitter: “900 registered players? Woo! >:D”

Heh.

1/20/12

First ever sale made!  At this point, I think the only thing you could buy was gold (plat didn’t exist yet).  It was a huge relief… if one purchase happened, more can follow… right?

1/24/12

Towns officially launches, along with anti-griefing in the wilderness.

Townstones cost a whopping 90 gold…. Heh.

At this point, having Capital cities (Origin) made sense.  You still spawned in the center of the world, and you just needed to walk to wherever you needed to go.  And if you died, you respawned back in the center of the world.  Not a problem yet, but soon people would soon be having to walk twenty minutes to find a building spot and forgetting where they built.

2/1/12

New frontpage:

2/8/12

Referral system

2/10/12

Map of game world:

It wasn’t too crazy to still walk everywhere, but it was starting to get to be a bit much…

2/12/12

Load testing for better server performance

2/17/12

Released a new trailer:

I posted it to reddit, where IndieGames.com found it, and then Rocket Paper Shotgun found it from there.

Immediately the server got super-full (at the time, that meant ~40 concurrent connections).

This was the first big appearance of 8bitmmo anywhere, and it felt like a huge accomplishment.  Still nervous about my finances, but at least I had accomplished something in my time away from AAA.

2/18/12

Options box w/ volume tuning added.  Originally the game played at MAX VOLUME always, which was pretty annoying.

2/20/12

I launch the 8BitMMO suggestion box via Uservoice.  Though some players prefer the forums since it allows for easier centralized discussion, the suggestion box has always provided valuable insights as to what players want the most.  In the past few years, a great many ideas have been implemented from suggestions there.

2/21/12

With so many new users in the world building stuff, the world was a much bigger place.  Getting around was hard, so telepads were introduced:

2/22/12

A lot of players would get killed by LawyerCats in the tutorial and immediately quit (at some point before this I added analytics to find this out).  So Lobbyist Slugs were added, which don’t cause damage:

2/29/12

Fancy shop screen.  Mmm, fancy tooltips.

From some expert guidance, I decided to split the currency into gold and platinum.

3/1/12

Watching people play the game, they were getting confused that they needed to talk to the NPCs in the tutorial.  So quest icons:

Also added big signs to help with basic controls:

3/2/12

Starting to see cool fan art:

3/5/12

New chat window:

And it looks like that’s the first usage of the new font we all know today.

3/8/12

5,000 users reached.

3/20/12

Quest reminder window (at the top) to help remind players what their next step is.  No one reads it.

Also: “You have gained 1 gold.”  I know how much everyone misses that.  Right?  Right?

4/1/12

First of many April fools pranks.  In this one, all players are lawyercats.

4/4/12

Trading system

It did not yet require both parties to accept after a change, so it was immediately used to scam other players by removing items at the last second.

4/9/12

World is getting bigger… walking now impractical

4/10/12

Beginnings of character customization:

Everyone is still naked though.  Such is life in 8bit.

4/11/12

Kongregate launch – the biggest flood of new players yet!

I love Kongregate, because the team working there always have really insightful advice which they’re happy to share.  I’ve yet to work with anyone else (as an indie, at least) who is willing to take that much time and write up such good feedback for your game.

4/12/12

Town doors

4/12/12

20,000 registered users!

4/12/12

Supporting all these new users is getting overwhelming, so it’s time for the first ever community moderator team (includes Grim).

4/18/12

Megamap v1

It uses the google maps API and a bunch of prerendered map tiles.  It includes a system to find your stuff in-game.  Using that system sometimes causes the server to crash.

5/3/2012

8bitmmo fanfiction starts becoming a thing.  Eventually, novels worth of it.  Even fanfiction about me personally.  It’s cool, and terrifying.

Later a fanfic someone writes about me ends up in the top ten google search results for my name for the next year.  No one tells me that though for a long time.

5/4/2012

Zombies.  Every game needs zombies.

zombie autotranslate:

5/14/2012

Pixel pistol (first ranged weapon)

5/15/2012

Town expand system added.

5/17/2012

Player customization

5/22/2012

Better player font

5/23/2012

Fee door added:

5/26/12

Working on The Trailer.

5/27/12

I get screen captures of The Dragon Of Creation that El Dromedario built, which becomes the dragon everyone is familiar with.  It later gets tragically torn down, but eventually rebuilt in several variations.

5/30/2012

Launch of ‘S8’, which bundled up the above changes since S7 into a nice press release & trailer:

At the time of this, we’re up to 30,000 registered players.

6/3/2012

Demoed at iFEST in Seattle — was my first time meeting a fan IRL!  This is also where I met a contact at Amazon, later leading to distributing there.

6/6/2012

New tiles

6/8/12

I submit the game to Pax 10.  They happily take my $50, but don’t bother to redeem any of the game tokens I provide.  Maybe they didn’t play it, maybe they decided they didn’t like it after five minutes and didn’t bother checking out the premium content.  Either way, they were the only festival to not bother looking at the complete game.  Gee, I wonder why they’re also one of the festivals that don’t provide anonymous feedback from judges?

A great learning experience for me though, and over time I adapt my festival strategy accordingly: only submit to festivals that offer free submission, or at least paid ones that provide anonymized feedback (the feedback itself can be worth the cost of submission).  Anything else is a scam.

6/12/12

Fade out on tiles that are far below you

6/29/2012

As people build larger and larger buildings, the limitations of Pulpcore become more obvious.  Software rendering was a poor choice for such a complex game, so I announce… another rewrite.

Yep, this time moving over to a hardware accelerated engine.  This ends up taking a huge amount of time over the next year, and still hasn’t been released (for reasons that will become apparent).

7/12/2012

8BitMMO launches on Amazon Game Connect.  The dev team over there is really great to work with, and my quick integration of their API paves the way to be the beta partner for their In-Game Purchase tech.

7/30/2012

Demoing the game at Seattle Indies Expo:

8/12/2012

New mob added: Hipsters

8/20/2012

Psy’s dungeon becomes an official game dungeon:

8/30/2012

We launch on Greenlight as one of the first titles on the Greenlight system.  We spend the next year hovering in the top 30~50 titles on Greenlight:

8/31/2012

T-shirts I got my friends to wear at PAX.

PAX wouldn’t sell me a booth (not that I could afford one even if they were willing), so I stood outside the convention center by myself, next to the ticket scalpers, the hired booth babes, and the unmedicated hobos.  I wore my crazy 8bit hat and handed out shady looking black & white fliers with gold tokens on them to anyone who would take them walking past.  Yeah, it was MAXIMUM INDIE.  Although… I did actually made some business contacts that way.

9/14/2012

Hardware accelerated engine continues to develop, but it still lacks a great many key features.

9/26/12

Starting to get into the swing of doing seasonal events, now introducing the Halloween/Pumpkin Block:

10/10/12

Cash is running short since I left my full-time job.  Thrifty living combined with game sales has made it last longer than I expected though.  Just as I’m starting to get worried, my friends at Amazon offer me a contract gig.

I’m still smarting from my Microsoft experience, so the idea of working at another large company makes me nervous.  But, it’s a short term job and I know the people involved, so I decide to take it.

Obviously, less time to work on 8bit = slower updates.

10/26/12

More cool buildings being built:

11/28/2012

Snow

12/2/2012

Gold/HP notifications over player heads.  No more “you got 1 gold” messages.  Much rejoicing!

12/28/2012

The first mention of Root that I’m aware of.  Originally, you got dumped into Origin after finishing the tutorial.  But players tended to get lost and distracted in such a wide open city, so Root was created to provide a smaller intermediary space.

This day also featured the addition of player-built PvP arenas: