pokemmo 개발자가 올린글

I don't like doing Dev Blogs for a few reasons. Mostly because I prefer to let actions speak instead of talking about what we're doing, because sometimes, we're not able to fulfill our goals. There have been times where an idea we've talked about gets scrapped late in development, and I can recall a few 8 month periods where everyone was very upset over things that didn't come to fruition for one reason or another.

Other times, it feels disingenuous to build anticipation over something relatively mundane. It's scary to address a community as large as PokeMMO's all at once and I don't want to be a Peter Molyneux or a Sean Murray.

Regardless, we're projecting this patch will take a while for a few reasons. Earlier today we deployed a minor one for Halloween, but the meat of our work will go unseen for a bit more. So with this I'll do my best to explain what we've been doing and where PokeMMO's going in its development.

2016 in Retrospect

I remember one post from 2015 which stood out to me: "I wish they'd stop working on breeding and work on something new."

Yeah, me too.

I'd like to consider 2016 a decent year when looking back. We've spent a lot of time working through  very core issues like EV training, Money/BP gain, PvP automation, and bringing PokeMMO to more people around the world. Most of these topics are boring though and I can understand the sentiment. I don't have a lot of fun working on them either.

Many of these were just a consequence of converting a 10 year old remake of a 20 year old single-player game made for a handheld console into something multiplayer for a modern PC. The formats are not very interchangeable and we've had to reinvent the wheel more than a few times while working on PokeMMO, but it's always required a lot of trial/error. There are no books written on the subject, though I may be qualified to write one now, and there's nothing else to really study.

I consider most of the very core loop done at this point, since that 6 month blitz. That is not to say we do not still have problems to overcome: Difficulty scaling, meaningful player co-operation, and more rewards for common tasks are things I'll personally be working on throughout the next year, some of which I'll talk about in this post.

Client rewrites and you

The largest timesink we've had over the past few months is a rewrite of the game client, nearly from scratch. The libraries which we started PokeMMO on (LWJGL2/TWL) have been deprecated, and we've been maintaining our own fork for several years. But by using these, we encountered a lot of overhead when developing the client, even for simple tasks. Part of this is due to the "low level" nature of LWJGL2, although a lot can be blamed on inexperience at the time.

Early this year we had set a plan to rewrite the client using LibGDX, a newer and well supported Java-based game library. This is looking to solve several problems, including general client performance, better RAM management (down to ~60MB core), proper Android support, improved handling of scaling the UI for large resolutions, and giving us an excuse to detangle the codebase of the client, while making everything in the future easier to work on at the same time. It's rare that we can say something solves all of our problems, but this comes close.

There are still several challenges to overcome with this. Our main problem at this point is the UI, needing to be rewritten to use LibGDX's Scene2D for Android. Depending on network quality, we may also need to expand scope to IPv6 due to cellular carriers. But the first LibGDX-based client is intended to be released some time around December, on Android and then on Desktop later next year. We'll have more info on this in the coming months.

The End of The World of Warcraft PokeMMO

I'm sure many of your eyes glazed over when reading that last section. What's exciting for us isn't necessarily for you, especially not for the discerning person owning an iOS device. So let's talk about The End instead.

As I've mentioned above, a few of our main problems are meaningful player co-operation and difficulty scaling. We've worked briefly on the latter with the Elite 4 scaling added earlier this year, but our main end-game content is intended to extend the storyline and provide a natural progression of it.

This is what I've personally been focused on the past few months, in the form of "Legendary Dungeons", a concept we've flirted with since 2013. These are intended to be multiplayer experiences, scaling to 2 or 3 players, depending on the instance. Most importantly, each of them will be long and hard. I want you to lose. A lot.

Of course, the Legendary itself won't be the only prize within them. There are a few goodies you won't be able to get anywhere else, too.

Unlike Android, I can't give a definitive ETA on these. Even the very basic core concepts like "How do we handle overworld damage" are not explored in FireRed (outside of Poison in the tutorial forest, which was removed in later generations), so we need to find what is/isn't viable in this gameplay type beforehand. I've taken to calling these "growing pains".

Whether it's weaving a coherent storyline, handling (2/3)v1 gameplay, or designing maps for co-op, there are a lot of them ahead. Perhaps a robot could help.

The Future of PokeMMO

Brutal end-game PvE isn't the only thing I'd like to work on in the near future though. There are several other areas which need attention, such as "mid-game PvE", when players are building their teams. One of the ways we wanted to bolster this was through the Emerald Gym Battle rematches, although they ended up being overbuffed and were too easy to farm for older players. This type of PvE, repetitive NPC battles, is difficult to balance due to the ease of trading character progress between accounts.

In the future I'd like to have a more social PvE experience in the mid game. It is difficult to connect to other players simply because the game doesn't promote opportunities for it. I have several approaches I want to work on, though they're currently on the backburner and aren't suitable for this post.

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I've expressed my disdain for new regions in the past, mostly because they don't offer enough return on the time invested, but they're the natural progression after a significant amount of Legendaries are available. We'll be looking at our options here throughout 2017 as well.

That's all. Happy Halloween, everyone.