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The Project

The task is to build what some may label as a mini sci-fi sandbox single-shard MMO.
It won't be big but it will exist - and that is enough.

Control Variables

We can control what the game will be, how we write software, draw art, and customize experiences. We can't control how it will be received by an audience. Knowing this we are under no illusion that this will launch into some wild overnight success. At best, people we never met find joy in a shared experience we provided. If the number of those people is non-zero, we have met our wildest expectations.

Scope

We'll discuss more of the game internals in a following blog. But for now we want to talk broadly about scope, and what that means for what we do.

In terms of tech nor game design, it will likely be nothing novel. At best we can design for future growth and maintainability.

For content, we have an idea of a few tiers of "MVP" the most immediate being some nascent pre-alpha atomic unit of game content to demonstrate the fundamentals of the systems necessary. Maybe we should call this a "prototype" but we intend to build directly on it, so maybe that's not exactly the right term.

For performance, we have numbers, but please bear in mind these are ceilings about the technical capabilities of and not real traffic we hope to serve on a regular basis.

Playability. If a member of our target audience finds they can do the things they intend to do, and can understand the operating environment - we will have achieved this goal. But much like the content tier of "mvp"/prototype, this is a sliding scale of effort/opportunity afterward. Much like the performance criteria, knowing when is "enough" per-unit effort to sink into a particular problem is going to be the guiding principle.

Because if we over invest in any of these areas, it will come at the expense of another.
So setting the floor on each of these will help us know when we achieve that "prototype" baseline quality and scope.