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Indie MMORPG Development Ebook

Indie MMORPG Development Book

About:

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) are gigantic software projects, usually reserved for big businesses with lots of money. There is a new genre, the Indie MMORPG. The idea is for a small group of independent developers to make an MMO all by themselves.

This book is about my approach to the MMORPG challenge. It is very different from the traditional approach. We will not setup grand architectures with login servers, load balancers, database servers and handshakes. We will not develop our own website. We will not use Paypal. We will not implement DDOS protection. We will not spend the next decade writing the code. We will not write game design documents. We will not write assembly code for micro optimizations. We will not deal with C++. If you are interested in any of these topics, then this book is not for you.

Instead, we will follow the KISS principle: keep it simple and stupid!

We will go through all the major MMORPG development aspects and my take on them. All of the solutions presented here are optimized for simplicity to make sure that we actually launch successfully.

Content:

1. Introduction
2. About the Author
3. MMORPGs are important
4. What it takes to make an Indie MMORPG
5. Successful Indie MMORPGs
6. The Software Stack
    6.1 The Challenge
    6.2 Unity and C#
    6.3 UNET
    6.4 uMMORPG
    6.5 F#
7. Architecture
    7.1 Foreword
    7.2 TCP vs. UDP
    7.3 Quality of Service Channels
    7.4 Configuring UNET for Massive Multiplayer Games
    7.5 Concurrency
    7.6 Synchronizing Time
    7.7 Physics
    7.8 Areas of Interest
    7.9 Experience Reward Calculation
    7.10 The Deal Damage Formula
    7.11 The Health Formula
8. The Crowdfunding Strategy
    8.1 What to include in the Prototype
    8.2 Growing a Community
9. Art
    9.1 Art for the Prototype
    9.2 Art for the Full Game
10. The Balancing Shortcut for Skills, Items, Monsters & Classes
11. Quests
12. Server Hosting
    12.1 Linux Server Hosting
    12.2 Windows Server Hosting
13. Website
    13.1 Requirements
    13.2 Content Management Systems
    13.3 The Solution
    13.4 Hosting
14. Monetization
    14.1 Preface
    14.2 Donations
    14.3 Pay to Level Up
    14.4 Subscriptions
    14.5 One Time Payment
    14.6 Free to Play
    14.7 Successful Item Mall Items
    14.8 Implementing an Item Mall System
15. Distribution & Patching
16. Security Threats
    16.1 Wallhacks
    16.2 Item Duping
    16.3 Speed Hacks
    16.4 Auto Clicker Scripts
    16.5 Bots
    16.6 Goldfarmers
    16.7 DDOS Attacks
17. Client Protection
    17.1 Understanding Hacker’s Priorities
    17.2 Reverse Engineering common Games
    17.3 Packers
    17.4 Virtualization
    17.5 Obfuscation
    17.6 Protecting Unity Builds against Reverse Engineering
18. Server Protection
    18.1 Keeping all the Logic on the Server
    18.2 Validating all Client Input
    18.3 Securing the Server Machine
19. Protection through Law

Note: this is still an early version of the ebook, expect some rough edges and future improvements.

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