6 screenshots of the nengi beta 2 demo (unreleased, WIP)
I’m using Tiled Map Editor, a spritesheet from BrowserQuest, and Pixi.js. I’m not too good at actually making the maps yet, but I’m getting better.
It is a magical experience to go from the map editor, which is essentially a drawing program, to refreshing the browser and seeing my new additions to the world immediately. I could get used to this type of workflow... it is very content-centric, but it is wildly productive. I feel like I could make a very elaborate environment in just a few days. That said this isn’t my usual type of game with procedural terrain generation and destructible buildings. I’m sure I’ll eventually figure out how to hybridize these methods.
This is the first game intended to show a multi-instance world. A player will be able to walk around on the overworld (which is an instance), or walk into a cave and explore the underworld (which is another instance). The overworld and underworld will exist as two separate nengi instances and can be hosted in a very flexible ways. In the simplest case, the overworld and underworld can live together within the same server. But with nothing more than an ip:port:id these instances could be separated to two different machines. There could be one of each instance, or a thousand of each instance. There could be ten players, or there could be ten thousand players. The remaining limitation is how many players can fit in a single instance -- which depends heavily on what the game actually is and what hardware it is running on, but for nengi can be in the range of 50-300 players . So I hope some people wanna make some MMOs! And I’m talking about real MMOs, not just “we have a lot of players that exist in totally separate servers and can’t meet each other” -- nah, that’s a very loose meaning of mmo and was already easy to make in nengi beta 1. This time the players can actually walk/portal/teleport/travel-by-some-means from any part of the game world to any other part, even though the game world is potentially an aggregate of multiple servers.
I’d also like to mention that these instances can be created and associated in very dynamic or very static ways. We could just open one overworld instance and one underworld instance and say that the cave in the overworld goes to the underworld, and that the ladder in the underworld goes to the overworld. Or we could be fancy and create a server that goes to the cloud and turns on whichever instances we need and wires them up a bit abstractly. It could create an overworld instance.. and then when it starts to get full of players it could create an ‘overworld2′ instance and send players there instead. When a player in overworld2 walks into the cave to the underworld, perhaps the instance asks our fancy server where it should go. Maybe the the cave goes to underworld1, or underworld2, or underworld305, or somewhere totally illogical. It is entirely up to the developer how these things go together.
http://www.mapeditor.org/
https://github.com/beeglebug/pixi-tiled
http://browserquest.mozilla.org/
https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest
https://opengameart.org/content/browserquest-sprites-and-tiles