Fourteen Years of Development in Screenshots

1/13/2013

Demoed the game at Power of Play in Seattle, where I spoke and was honored to win the Seattle Independent Game Competition.

I also had some better booth equipment by this point:

This event would also introduce me to the team at Reactor, who would later become a big part of 8BitMMO.

2/13/2013

Left handed doors:

4/1/2013

For this year’s April fools, I changed the game into a text based mud for one day.

Around this time, I finished up my contract gig.  I could have stayed on longer and taken on more work, but I had successfully finished the work that was originally spec’ed and was eager to get back into full-time 8bitmmo dev.

I’m really glad I took it though.  I was worried about working at another large corporation again, but I actually enjoyed my time at Amazon.  In a way, it was very cathartic.  Both my coworkers and the management were great, the work was interesting, and it was nice not to subsist on ramen noodles.  It was a really tough decision to leave and be indie again, but I knew if I didn’t do it then, I’d never finish this project.

Once I was full-time again, the difference in 8bit update frequency was immediately obvious.

4/3/2013

Water tile added (you can drown in it)

4/4/2013

Added the homestone to let people set a home spawn point.  This was a hotly requested feature in the suggestion box.

4/5/2013

Early in the game, it was a simple matter to walk to the edge of Origin and build where you like.  But as the world built outwards, it has become harder and harder to find the edge of the wild.  Thus enters the Wildepad, which teleported players to a spot in the wilderness instantly.

4/16/2013

Food (heal without respawn)

 5/10/2013

Reward blocks added to give a goal for completing player-made areas (this would later expand into player-made quests)

5/14/2013

On a slow Friday I was bored, so I decided to add Potatoes as a playable race in-game.  I made an image to go along with this, which Reddit enjoyed (90k views)

I probably should have put some more noticeable branding on it though, because most of the comments were ‘what game is this?’
5/13/2013

Fee doors

6/4/2013

Public telepads added to help further ease transit through the world:

6/17/2013

“We just crossed 70,000 registered users!  Wow! >:D”

Officially move into Reactor (a Seattle incubator program) offices and begin working from there.

7/5/2013

Based on the mentorship I receive at Reactor, I decide to backburner the New Engine and instead focus on improving the existing game.  There’s still a lot of problems with new user retention, which means the project is still rather unprofitable.  This is a problem since I’m full-time on the game again.  Just porting the same gameplay to a new engine won’t help me break even financially, so I embark on a quest to see if there’s any improvements I can make to keep new users engaged & happy.

I begin thinking that retention might be improved by adding more character progression into the game, as well as bolstering up the combat side of the game.  So my first step is to add a leveling system:

And you have to level up to unlock new blocks:

In the coming months, I also spend a lot of time retooling the client engine to be much more performant.  I end up diving deep into the now abandoned-by-its-original-author Pulpcore engine code.  Within a year, I will have rewritten huge chunks of Pulpcore.

7/10/2013

New users still seem to be getting confused in the tutorial… so I moved the quest reminder window to be big and on the right.  It’s a lot easier to read now… but still a good chunk of people are missing it.

7/18/2013

Continuing on combat/progression stuff, added weapons that do more damage:

7/23/2013

Two new mobs announced.  Not sure whatever happened to the block troll… one day…

Explaining game reviewers to IRL game reviewers over the next year always proved to be fun.  (FYI Lawyers love LawyerCats, because lawyers love lawyer jokes ;)).  As they say, parody is the most sincere form of flattery, and so most game reviewers enjoyed this good natured in-game tribute… but I did have one get super offended.  Ah well.

7/27/2013

Map continuing to fill:

8/6/2013

Went to Casual Connect and won an award:

8/14/2013

Keys & Doors added so players could create more interesting dungeons (even though no one ever makes dungeons).  People did use these to make some cool challenges though.

8/28/2013

Almost exactly one year after submitting to greenlight, we are approved.  This was a really good day.

9/1/2013

Now that Steam is a reality, my focus shifts entirely to be “get the game Steam-ready.”  The big thing is ensuring the servers are stable & performant enough, along with integrating the Steam APIs and making a real Desktop build.

I launch a funding drive (Octoberbit) to get some funding to ensure I have enough servers online to handle demand.

This was a good plan, because by launch, I would by paying more per month in server bills than rent.

9/4/2013

Finally get to show 8BitMMO at PAX via Reactor’s booth.  Was really awesome to meet more fans of the game, as well as show it off to new players as well.

9/24/2013

Bitcoin is added as a payment option.  Not many people end up using it, but it did get enough use that I’m glad I added it.

10/10/2013

Aware of how much work I need to get done, I agree to make use of Reactor’s intern program, interview some candidates, and bring on Dave (kartud) for 20 hours a week.  He proves to be a super smart guy.  🙂

It was weird for me at first.  I have a ton of project management experience from my time in the AAA industry, but having someone else on the project, even part-time, was a bit of a trip.  Fortunately, we were both super excited to help each other, and having a bug tracking system set up and doing some task planning ahead of time made this a surprisingly smooth transition.

10/25/2013

Load testing

I’ve now hit the limit of what the load tester app I wrote can tell me, as it caps out around 100 concurrent users.

While demoing at a Reactor event, I’m introduced to Pat Wyatt who gives some amazing advice on many things, including load testing.  My mind is blown with the insights he shares.  Dave & I set off to write load testing inside the server software, so test packets can be replayed and multiplied to better simulate server load.  We find a bunch of performance bottlenecks this way and optimize them.

11/19/2013

I set up a beta sign-up page and get the steam page publicly viewable.

Reddit independently takes note of our humorous system requirements on Steam and we make it into the top 10 posts in one popular subreddit.  Over time, this actually gets reposted a couple times too.

I’ve also been working on getting the game desktop-ready.  Pulpcore has a debug desktop player, but it was never intended for end user usage.  So, I polish it up and bundle it with a JRE.

But, the client game jar will still need to be updated frequently.  I could update the jar via Steam, but then I’d have to update them in two places.  So far, I’ve managed to have all distributions of the game pull from a single jar file on Amazon S3, and I wanted to continue doing that for ease of development.  It was time to write another launcher.

I briefly considered pulling out the same launcher from 2002.  But the Archive Games code hadn’t been touched in ages, and I really wanted the launcher to be able to render HTML pages.  So I decided to start fresh, and wrote a launcher/updater in Java.

After the launcher was written, and had basic steamworks integrations in the game, I began sending waves of steam beta keys out.  There were many initial builds of the launcher, as testing on so many machines helped find various problems.

12/2/2013

The wilderness is filling up, and a lot of folks just don’t like building around a bunch of other people.  I introduce Pocket Universes so people can build in their own isolated space.

12/3/2013

Noobs continue to wander off into the the great expanse of the wild and get lost/bored.  So I further restrict Root for level 1 players — now after the tutorial you can either build in your pocket or fight in a basic mobs in a dungeon.  Once you hit level 2, the game opens up again, but this gives a longer introduction.

12/7/2013

90,000 registered users.

At this point I had been working pretty much every waking hour on the game.  I had done crunch, but never like this.  I normally sleep 7, 8… sometimes even 9 hours.  But in the months leading up to launch, I never had more than six hours rest.  Despite that I had a constant unnatural energy propelling me towards this launch goal.  And unlike a lot of times in past, I wasn’t getting burned out — although I was plenty nervous about total abject failure.

12/12/2013

12/13/2013

Early Access launches on Steam.  I was very worried that the influx of users would totally crash the server infrastructure, so the original plan was to only open the game up to players who bought a founder pack.  The Steam community hated this.  Not many packs sold, and I was flooded with negative comments.  I was no stranger to getting internet hate, but this was a new level.

12/14/2013

The next day we changed it to to fully free-to-play, but the damage was already done.  There was less traffic on launch day than there was during the beta.  Even after it was made free the traffic wasn’t much better.

The launch was toast.  It felt like I had wasted years of my life.

That night was by far the darkest of my life.  Late at night, I climbed the fire escape to the roof of my building.  I stood at the edge and stared at the ground below.  I almost jumped… but I thought there was a chance I might survive and end up in horrible pain.  So I went back downstairs with the intention of getting directions to a more deadly spot.

While I did, I saw someone playing 8bit in a window I had left open.  They were talking about how much they liked the game.  It may have been the first positive thing I read since the launch.  I thanked them, while in real-life I broke down to tears and decided to keep on going.  They have no idea they saved my life that night.

12/15/2013

There’s an old proverb, it’s always darkest before the dawn.

I wake up to a sudden influx of players.  24,428 in one day!  Steam has favored us with some frontpage placement over the weekend, for which I am infinitely grateful.

Server infrastructure weathers it like a champ, no downtime.  All the performance work has proven worthwhile.

12/24/2013

Bitmas 2013.  Santa hats!

This was made by Link

12/27/2013

Made the quest reminder window much more obvious, complete with a visible pulse whenever your objectives are updated.  This finally seems to do the trick of players knowing what their next steps are.