About

This is my hobby experiment in creating an MMO game. Many years ago, before I became a backend developer, I tried to implement a project under the name Avolt Online. Now I have started a new project with the same name.

This will be a small and cheap project purely for fun.

Background

I am a backend developer with 8 years of experience. Several years have passed since my last attempt to make an online game (avolt-online, res-universe). I learned quite a lot about the network, infrastructure and how to write large projects.

WIP

Recently, I've had the chance to work on my infrastructure, and now I have my own git/runners/build pipelines/etc, fully automated and running on my own server. I even tried automating the deployment of builds to itch.io, and it worked, which is quite convenient. In addition, I strengthened the control over my infrastructure a bit by adding uptime monitoring tools and set up build distribution across my network.

With the release of the stable version of Godot 4.3 (and since it was more convenient to experiment on my own infrastructure), I was able to create my basic Docker images both for building Godot with GDScript and for building Godot images with C# (which I couldn't do before). As a result, the builds for the game server and related services are automatically deployed to the production server, where I can launch the new version with just a click:

And migrated the current server list service to a different tech stack that's more familiar to me from work. Also, refreshed the design a bit and optimized it for mobile devices:

While running tests on the global server (with a 60 ms ping), I noticed a time synchronization issue that caused other players' characters not to move, which has been fixed. However, in the future, I will need to test with higher latency and overall server load.

I am still working on the engine and have started on a vertical slice of the game to test at least the basic functionality. The public server is not yet ready for testing, and the development servers are not accessible from the external network.