Site Launch and MMT Online Project Announcement
I think many of you will be curious about the reason for the low activity on this blog over the past six months. Oddly enough, it’s not a loss of interest — it’s because we’ve been hard at work on our own game project.
Our site went live a few days ago (http://runserver.net) and today the RunServer team is officially announcing the MMT Online project. Read the details in the news section on the site: http://runserver.net/ru/mmt/19-mmt-anounce
Let me explain in a few words why the project is called a “demo” project.
The project’s main goal is to showcase the capabilities of our server platform, and of our team as a whole. That means all our effort is going into developing one or two locations while showing off as many server-side features as possible. We’re not planning hundreds of continents, multiple races, dozens of dungeons, and so on — at least not yet.
On the other hand, our game designer Ippolit came up with a pretty unusual world (or rather two worlds), and it would be interesting to realize his ideas down the road. That could change if we find an investor.
A bit of history.
We’ve been in game dev for quite a while (since at least 2004), but our main focus was always the server side, though we did experiment with client-side work (the now-frozen Heroes Offline project, various WoW addons, some work on Ogre 3D, and so on). Even so, our first attempt at 3D game development was, as usual, a flop — a project on the Unigine engine (http://unigine.com) started in early 2007 but was frozen and shut down six months later. Lack of experience and content took their toll.
At the end of 2007, the company MSM Online (a subsidiary of the ISP WNet) started developing the Syndicate Online project (http://syndicate-online.com) using the RunServer platform, and gradually started supplying us with 3D content. That let us start developing our own game in the fall of 2008. We used the same engine, Unigine, but rewrote the software side from scratch. That’s how MMT Online was born. On top of the high-quality content we were given, we started adding our own in-house creations. In some places it looks good, in others — pretty rough 🙂
I hope participating in KRI 2009 will show how far we’ve come toward our goal, and whether we managed to draw attention to RunServer and our team.
Originally published 2009-04-27.