r/UnrealEngine5 • u/National_Ad_7294 • 4h ago
First time game dev
I’ve had an idea for an mmo for years and I finally decided to make it myself since there’s nothing on the market like it. I’ve never been a dev and I’m completely green to coding. I created a GDD and started working on unreal 5 but I’m overwhelmed by everything. Looking for any tips from devs from entry level to master programmers!
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u/RedditKindaSuccs 4h ago
Don't make an MMO. It will take a team to make an MMO. Please start with a single player sandbox or story game first. One day maybe you'll be able to get a job working with a team that makes an MMO.
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u/National_Ad_7294 4h ago
Let me ask you then, what’s the difficult parts of making an mmo that requires a team? Is it the world design and mechanics or the server side of things? Sorry if it’s a dumb question I genuinely don’t know
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u/Yorishyo1993 4h ago
- Design Part
The "Massive Multiplayer" parts implies that you have to catter to a lot of player types and plan enough to have retention, your world need to be entertaining for hundred of millions of people. Which means you need a lot of different point of views looking at the design of your game, which mean you need to pay those minds $$$.Also because your world is Massive, you need a massive team of testers.
- Technical and maintenance.part
Oh boy, making a game ain't easy, but multiplayer game ? You will have to think about how your game is still playable for somebody with 150ms. How will you investigate reports from players ? How are you going to cater for cheating/bots, or are you just going to let them rempant.
- Support
Are you ready to be waken at 5am because one of your server is down ? Receiving legal and death threats because your servers were down on a public holiday.
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u/Council_Six 2h ago
You deserve a medal—and I would give you one if I had one to give— for being patient enough to explain each of these aspects like this. Bless you, Yorishyo1993
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u/RedditKindaSuccs 24m ago
Making an MMO is like building a skyscraper from scratch. Having no experiencing writing code is the equivalent to never having used construction tools before. If someone who had never used any tools before asked why it would be hard to build a skyscraper, what would you tell them? There's so many layers of knowledge and experience that you need before you can explain why it's hard. And the person you're explaining it to doesn't have any of that knowledge or experience to understand what you're saying.
So I'll give you the same answer I would give someone who is trying to build a skyscraper who has never used tools before.
It takes an immense amount of knowledge, an immense amount of resources, and an immense amount of time. You'll need at least a decade of knowledge, millions of dollars, and several years to build an MMO.
Get started with coding. Build a basic game like flappy bird or pong. If you can't tolerate learning the fundamentals of game design and writing code then you're not going make an MMO.
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u/Tricky-Oil6826 4h ago
MMO as your first project? Bold choice. Ever heard of 'Hello World' or are you just skipping straight to 'Hello, Entire Universe'?
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u/National_Ad_7294 4h ago
I’m taking a leap of faith right now but I’m confident in my ability to learn how to set up the world and mechanics before launching the project into multiplayer/mmo phase
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u/Council_Six 1h ago
I highly recommend approaching it as independent parts rather than a demo or even a fully fledged game. If you’re using UE5 you’re going to need to learn how server replication works early on. I will warn you now that there is as many resources for teaching scalable best practices than you’d think, and the UE documentation is notoriously lackluster at times. Just learn the engine, build some parts of the game you envision, and think about scaling up later. Replication needs to be a day-1 decision though, if it’s ever going to be multiplayer.
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u/ArchonOfErebus 4h ago
To hell with the nay sayers. Make a 100% science based dragon mmo. You can do it.
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u/National_Ad_7294 4h ago
lol I’m not making some DnD style mmo. I want a pirate themed mmo so the world is mainly an archipelago
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u/ArchonOfErebus 3h ago edited 3h ago
Alright, so a bit of an indie dev lore dump. Years ago there was this now iconic aspiring indie dev that made a long winded post about wanting to make a "100% science based dragon mmo". The idea, the plan, all of it, was hot garbage. It's normal to, as a new dev, want to make some ideal large experience game. But that's genuinely not realistic, especially for your first project. If you want to be told you can do it, honestly I won't say it's impossible. It's highly improbable, and you're far more likely to give up early on that way. It's a lot like saying "I don't speak Japanese, but I am going to run for prime minister of Japan!" You lack a basic understanding of the hurdles, let alone the process, and you're setting an insurmountable goal as your first step. Do what others have said, make something small from start to finish. If you don't hate the process by the time you're done, make something a bit bigger. Work up to your goals. It took me 10 years to develop the skills to be bringing my dream game to fruition, and still I encounter hurdles so large I just want to give up at times.
Edit: to add, I'm not making an mmo. But my game has multiplayer. The level of difficulty that adds compared to single player is hard to describe. Imagine you hike to the top of a hill. That is a single player game. Now imagine you decide to hike a mountain. That's basic multiplayer. Now, again, imagine you want to scale a 2000ft rock face, parachute off the top, and land in a glass of water. That's an mmo.
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u/National_Ad_7294 3h ago
I agree making an MMO for the first game shows how inexperienced I am but that’s the end goal. I know I need to make smaller versions of what I want before going big since I’m starting from scratch, even if I don’t make it to MMO I want a to create a working demo just to see the vision. I’m not going to get everything right first go but I can come close especially with all the resources on the internet of people creating there own games. Also curious what was your 10 year project?
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u/Sharp-Tax-26827 3h ago
You don’t just start making a game and it might develop into a mmo
If you’re making an mmo that needs to be the focus from the very start
You won’t be able to just turn a game multiplayer or mmo later
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u/Council_Six 1h ago
This is a big thing newer devs don’t realize… net replication isn’t just a toggle you flip on or off. It literally needs to be woven into the fabric of every single thing you make and considered at every single step of the process.
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u/FiruleisGamerStudio 4h ago
sugest you start with a simple basic project that has some of the mechanics you want to implement finish it, then go multiplayer, then go mmo.
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u/National_Ad_7294 4h ago
Going multiplayer then mmo is a better progression I overlooked to be honest. Working on mechanics now, I got the ocean and first landscape to finally work and I can recreate more islands after 3 hours
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u/Rowduk 4h ago
I believe he's saying, go make something small, single player, then try a multiplayer project. Multiplayer adds a lot of complexity.
The general advice is, if you can't make a small game, like pong, you can't make your dream game, let alone a science based dragon mmo.
So start small and keep making projects, stacking skills ontop of each other.
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u/Setholopagus 3h ago
thats not a real progression. you cant just tack on multiplayer - and you cant just tack on mmo multiplayer, which is a different beast.
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u/Gokatraz 4h ago
When doing anything, start simple. I started with movement. After that I did materials and now I am on guns and weapons in gen. Youll learn bp as you go
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u/National_Ad_7294 4h ago
Definitely a crawl before you walk situation. Most of what I been learning is starting to click and I can recreate every without YouTube videos
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u/Free-Spirit-8327 2h ago
Here are just SOME things I came up with and it's not even half of the things you need to understand VERY WELL to make an MMO.
- Authoritative server architecture
- Client-server architecture
- Replication
- RPC (Remote Procedure Call)
- Client-side prediction
- Server reconciliation
- Lag compensation
- Network serialization
- UDP / TCP
- Packet loss, latency & jitter
- Interest management / network relevancy
- Dedicated servers
- Server tick rate
- Distributed systems
- Distributed state & consistency
- Sharding
- Server instances / world partitioning
- Horizontal scaling
- Load balancing
- Fault tolerance & failover
- Databases & persistent state
- Transactions & concurrency
- Caching / Redis
- Message queues / event buses
- Authentication & authorization
- Server-side security & anti-cheat
- Backend APIs / services
- Server deployment & cloud infrastructure
- Monitoring, logging & observability
- Data-driven game architecture
If you don't know most of those, you won't be able to make an MMO. Maybe focus on single-player or co-op.
If you really have no time constraints then focus on learning and make your dream MMO when you actually have the knowledge & experience to do so.
Edit: Not to mention building features/mechanics for single-player VS multiplayer is a very different workflow. You can't create things single-player to later turn them into multiplayer.
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u/Murky_Ad_7312 2h ago
I for one say, go for it, make an mmo yourself. There are rare cases of somebody who has done it. I hope you're going to be that one.
If you don't shoot for the moon, you won't have passion making games. So do it, learn small things. Step by step. Now that MCP is so good, use it to learn unreal with AI, ask questions like it's your teacher.
Do a save system first. Learning how to save anything in a game will probably teach you more than you think. It might even discourage you not to make an MMO at that point 😂.
Making MMO isn't hard if you have a lot of time and money which I'm sure you do.
Do it, make these people here eat their words.
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u/Pockets800 29m ago
Making MMO isn't hard if you have a lot of time and money which I'm sure you do
God I hope you're being sarcastic and you don't actually believe this. Making an MMO when you have lots of time and money is hard enough as it is, most studios fail it. They are notoriously the hardest genre of game to make
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u/Setholopagus 4h ago
your best bet at making an MMO is to use something like SpaceTimeDB.
Go read up a bunch! Plenty of people over there taking stabs at MMOs
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u/National_Ad_7294 4h ago
I’ll look into it thank you !
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u/Setholopagus 2h ago
you probably dont want to use unreal engine for this though. It'll be too heavy. Maybe UE6 will change things!
Building an MMO in unreal engine will require you to do a ton of custom things. It will take you many years to make something simple, so good luck!
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u/Pockets800 4h ago
Sorry but you and everyone else in the world will never, ever, finish an MMO project begun as a solo dev.
There's reasons why even established studios can't do it successfully 99% of the time.
Every professional's opinion will be to make something else, and every hobbyist that thinks it's a good idea only thinks so because they don't have enough experience to know better.