Hey All, long time lurker first time poster.
I've been working on this project since about 2024 that was the first time I started sketching on the idea and had a general idea of what kind of game it would be. The initial idea was a boss rush, hand drawn isometric 2.5D game with MMO combat. I didn't end up making anything with that exact definition. It was very boring to me.
So instead I pivoted to making it more of a "simulated P2P MMO", (fully 3D this time, hand drawing animations took forever for a single character, I have some basic animation skills but I'm not crazy) where you can scale an "infinite***" dungeon and fight bosses along the way, pick up temporary power ups, level up, etc etc. But as for actual development, somewhere around November last year I had a small group who decided to start working on it with me. Unfortunately about 4 months ago they decided to drop out of the project. So I started over from scratch in unity (we were using godot before, I was only focusing on blender skills up to that point)
I don't want to turn this into a huge wall of text post. So for the gameplay loop, it's basically my favorite game mode in FFXIV. (palace of the dead) With more of a continuous meta progression. (rogue-lite) And there will be a boss rush mode (rogue-like) once the rest of the game is in a better, more complete state.
Tech/Tool Stack
Unity (URP, Burst, DOTS (etc), Dx12)
Purrnet (P2P)
SpacetimeDB (Online mode - C# )
Blender (3d modelling, basic textures)
3dCoat (hand painted textures)
Unity Assets (tools, some textures, environment models, most of the character animations, SFX, VFX bases)
Booth .pm (tracks)
Performance
On steam deck currently (performance target platform) I'm getting around 150 - 215 FPS
my main ddr4 dev PC - 265-300 ish on DX11 (5080, i9)
and my buddies almost identical ddr5 pc - 500-600+
I put a lot of work and time into making sure that ECS was configured properly and that I'm not getting any major performance losses due to random issues with the ui trying to re-draw every single frame or THE FONT BEING WRONG (steam OS)
This obviously will change as post-processing, more detailed models/effects etc are introduced. But I'd prefer to keep things as performant as possible.
Rant on Optimization in SpacetimeDB
For now, online mode has all of the functions of the P2P and singleplayer modes, has light auth/verification of items, and (almost) has parity with playing P2P. There are still some outstanding issues with the online mode, mostly optimization of SpacetimeDB reducer calls, and some issues with errors happening on the mob and boss calls that just don't really need to be logged anymore IMO, we don't need to be sending the end user that there is an error with something they didn't even try to initiate, it just takes up unnecessary calls.
Game Design Inspirations ETC...
As for the game itself, the steam page is not up yet, so you wont be able to find it unfortunately, I do have the steam pipeline setup, and have issued test keys to about 25 people, but its still very early in development.
I could probably explain the design and systems in depth for about 10 hours, but in the interest of getting back to work. Here are the main design inspirations for the current features of the game
POE (armor, affixes, crafting gear)
Monster Hunter (style, gathering, crafting)
Atelier (crafting tiers (individual items), alchemist class)
FFXIV (combat, UI, controller usage)
FFXI (modelling style)
.hack// Fragment (Server structure)
If you are interested in talking about it I'll be around off and on the next few days to respond to comments. I have been a Software Engineer for about 10 years now, and this has been the most fun I've had with a project in my life. Though I have not slept much for the last 4 months while working on the "backend" of this project mostly solo.
Edit : I say 6 months in the title because for the 2 months preceding the last 4 months I was working on blender every day, before that since november I was mainly more casual with my time only spending about 1-3 hours on blender or in CSP designing per day.
Edit 2: Some grammar issues.
Edit 3: Text formatting, more grammar.