MMORPG without unnecessary details

Hello, my name is Alexey and I am an independent game developer. Two years ago I quit Wargaming to experiment a bit and make an MMO toy that I would be interested in playing. Over time, I was joined by a couple of wonderful people - Alexander and Elena Dedkov. Now I will briefly tell what came out of this venture.

Pro toy

Fairy Tale is a multiplayer browser-based Zero Player Game with a working model of the fairy-tale world.

As it should be, the central figure of the fairy tale is the Hero - Ward of the player. Heroes are independent personalities with character and preferences. They operate autonomously and do not depend on whether the player is in the game or not. The main occupation of the characters is the execution of tasks, each of which has several options for development and changes the world of the game. I have already told about the generation of tasks in a separate article .
')
The player can influence the hero only indirectly: choose the option to complete the task, indicate his preferences (for example, with which NPC he will be friends, which city to consider to be native) and abilities. In addition, the character of the hero depends on the player's actions: ideas of honor, peacefulness.

Tasks for the heroes are not taken from the air, but are issued by the NPC, who are on city councils. The advisers have their own interest in this - they are fighting for power. The change in the influence of the participating NPCs depends on the results of each task. The advisers who are helped by the heroes strengthen their positions, the same ones that the characters interfere with over time lose their influence and leave the game.

The economy of cities and their racial composition depends on advisers. The cities themselves (and other buildings) affect the world map . Due to this, it always changes: on the site of the plains there are mountains, arid deserts are replaced by swamps.

The game has politics - players vote to pass laws affecting the game world. You can rename cities, make deals and do other interesting things. The presence of guilds gives political life an additional urgency.

Due to the independence of the heroes, only truly important actions remain for the player, which significantly reduces the time required for a “normal” game and control the fate of the world. Those who want more participation can seriously take up politics and lead disputes with other players.

In addition to the interesting gameplay in the game, there is an original world, which we do in every way possible and cherish (mainly Sasha and Lena are doing this). Players get acquainted with him through fragments of stories of legendary personalities, for example:



And, of course, during the existence of the toy, we have formed a small but friendly community (I also wrote about working with it), which helps us in every way (thank you very much, storytellers and storytellers). Join us :-)

A loose set of interesting facts.

• development took 9 months of evening prototyping + 2 years of full-time work of one programmer;
• the toy is completely written in Python (Django is used as the web framework);
• for 2 years of development there were 41 releases, which is approximately one update in 2-3 weeks;
• about half of the code consists of tests (there are more than 3000);
• “Clean” code (without tests and migrations) takes 40k lines or 1.5 megabytes;
• the game code is gradually laid out under the BSD license, over time, the whole will be opened (a list of selected libraries can be viewed, for example, here ), now these are name generators, maps, text, quests;
• There are currently 2400 registered players in the game, of which 450 are active, 90 are subscribers;
• about 30% of the players were brought into the game by friends;
• since the inclusion of payments (August 2013), we have earned $ 1800 :-)
• in the entire history paid 190 players (8% of all);
• average payment: $ 5;
• more than 60% of the income is subscription;
• development took about $ 1500 for 2 years (food and accommodation are not included here).

And some more text

The purpose of the development was the creation of an original toy and, if possible, its monetization. Therefore, we are now at a crossroads: leaving the game as a hobby or continuing to develop it without slowing down - there are still a lot of ideas.

Of course, we really want to continue, but for this you need your support. Therefore, this post can be considered not only a story about the game, but also an invitation to public funding. Our game currency - cookies - come ;-)

We will also be happy to talk (and we can also cooperate) with all those interested in the technologies and mechanics used in the game.