Three Students take their chance at an MMORPG
Hello, we are BrutalHack and today we would like to introduce you to our Team and our Project Aleron. In this post we will tell you a little something about ourselves and what Project Aleron is all about.
The design of our website is still under construction, so please bear with us. 🙂
Table of Contents
Outline of our Goals
- MMORPG with tactical combat
- Tile-based turn-based combat system
- Movement outside of combat is in realtime
- Each player controls 2 characters
- A characters skills are dependent on their equipment, no character classes.
Who are we?
We (Justice, Eike, Sergej) are three computer science students at the university of Oldenburg. We are currently in the final semester of our masters degree. Our emphasis lies on the development of complex software systems.
Why did we launch this project?
In the fourth and fifth semester of the bachelors degree course every student at our university has to pass the so-called “software project”: A team of twelve students develops a webversion of a boardgame.
In the course of this “software project” we noticed that we can hardly gain programming experience from university alone. This is why we decided to launch a private project.
Why an MMORPG?
We want to use and extend the knowledge gained in our studies at university, namely the long-term development and maintenance of complex software.
As the passionate gamers that we are, the decision to develop a game was obvious. We have thorough knowledge of the topic and game development leads to early visible results.
In fear that we could run out of problems elsewise, we chose the supreme discipline of games with nearly infinite complexity in all areas of computer science: The MMORPG.
The decision for a turn-based game came quick due to our love for such games as Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Advance Wars or Wakfu.
What is our current status?
We implemented an MMO architecture consisting of one login server, several game servers and an arbitrary number of clients.
You can:
- Create an account
- Select a game server and login
- Create characters and march into battle
We also implemented basic parts of our combat system:
- Start and join fights
- Choose your characters starting position
- Turn-based combat
- Move
- Attack
- Shoot
- Heal
We create maps using our own map editor.
(We’ll share details about the editor in a future article.)
Some technical details
We develop in Java using jMonkeyEngine 3. Our main IDE is IntelliJ Idea. Data is stored in an Entity Component System, both on client and server. Persistant data is written to a PostgreSQL database.
What are our next goals?
- AI for computer controlled characters
- Extend the combat system
- Spectator mode, Replay System
- Implement families, enabling every player to controll two characters
- Implement parties
- Implement inventory and items
- Show equipped items on character (Paperdoll)
- Add first weapons with skills attached to them (sword, shield, bow, magic)
- Chat system
Our next post will be about our master theses on the subject of artificial intelligence. Our game Aleron will be base for these works 🙂
We post at least once per month reporting on Aleron and its development. We maintain this blog in english and german.
Did this post kindle your interest in Aleron? Which topics would you like to learn more about?
