An MMO will eat the team
An MMO is a huge amount of work, and almost none of the heavy part is what players see in a trailer. Server structure. Deploying that structure. An account system. Progression. Each of those is its own project. Together they can swallow a team of three before a single public match feels finished. Anti-cheat belongs in the same pile. In competitive multiplayer it is essential. A lot of plug-and-play tools only get you part of the way. The cases they miss, the player who finds the gap, the weekend you spend on something that is not a new tank: that remainder is still yours. We put an unreasonable amount of work into getting through that wall. It was not always fun, so be sure of that if you are going to tackle something similar.Pick vendors you can actually reach
Three choices carried a lot of the online side. We work with 4Players in Germany. They are a strong team, and we can actually talk to them. That kind of direct line is rare once the vendor is the size of Amazon, or another company at that scale. When something breaks, a person on the other side matters more than a status page. Nakama is the backend we built on. It is a solid foundation and a good place to start. The warning shows up when you grow. Costs need a hard look before you scale. A custom deployment and rented servers are different bills, and the difference shows up when the player count stops being a test.Players review the tree, not the label
Community is the part we were least ready for. Players judge what is on screen. If a placeholder tree is purple, the report will be that the tree looks bad, even when the texture itself says "placeholder." Expectation management is part of running a test. It is not a soft skill you add after the build is stable. Our early tests made that concrete. We were flooded. People arrived expecting a finished game. Our goal for those builds was narrower: get the netcode running at all. The players still left disappointed, because they cannot see the goal you wrote on a whiteboard. Running those tests is a lot of work on its own. The structure that held was simple. Keep the test small. Scale it only when that small version is actually stable. Set up bug reporting before you invite anyone. Many players do not have the background to write a deep report. What arrives is "the game doesn't work, what do I do?" If there is no path for that message, you do not have a test. You have a support queue with no one on the other end.Join the Open Play
From September 25 to 27 the gates are open. Download the game, register, and get a head start.Play Steel Aces
- Short video (opens in a new tab)
- Download and register (opens in a new tab)
- Steel Aces (opens in a new tab)
- Kickstarter (opens in a new tab)
