Has anybody here used atavism?

I am looking to buy atavism next year once I can purchase my new PC and do more with unity. atavism has a lot of plug in features that take away a tremendous amount of work, problem is that it's ran with javascript and python. The reason I ask this is because I am wanting it to be action combat but that requires physics. not sure if my idea would be feasible by not being ran with C#

I am no developer I am just a guy playing around with unity at the moment and making small games, was hoping to get atavism and get a small team that can work off of the license with me and make something to present for a crowd funding project.

Is there a thread or forum or even website for people to group up for a collaboration or is it just unrealistic?

 

My take: Your never going to make something decent that also makes any money using an MMO "kit". Sorry but it just is the truth, if you look there are no decent commercial games made with avatism other than the 1 game made by the creators of avatism, and that does not have many players at all considering.

If you dont care about making money or how you spend it then go for it, but £400+ is a lot for an asset.

If your serious about crowdfunding and getting a team, they are going to not want to use a prebuilt kit to make the features of the game, and when it comes to networking etc its going to cause you headaches. Something like a multiplayer game needs a lot of engineering and a kit wont let you cut past that.

Honestly if your no developer as you say and havent made a game before, why are you trying to make an MMO/online game first? The idea of making an MMO as your first game is literally meme worthy in the game dev community


I hope none of that sounds harsh I am just trying to be realistic, you are not the first developer to ask about making an MMO or online game with no experience, your not even the 100th, you are one of 1000s of people who have come here, on reddit or elsewhere to ask the same stuff. If there were instances of people like you who are new and inexperienced but still managed to actually get a online game off the ground and it do okay I would be more likely to say "go for it, spend that £400" but there really are not that many, and those that have definately have not used a prebuilt kit like avatism.

 

I have to agree with @GameDevCouple_I. Getting funding for an MMO developed with a team of randoms and a prebuilt kit is simply not going to happen. Ashes of Creation was one of the more recent MMOs to receive funding and they were only funded because their team consisted of well-known developers in the MMO industry.

We're not talking about a little experience here. We're talking former EverQuest developers. People who literally invented the concepts behind modern MMOs. If you want to attract any attention you either need people like that or you need to have a solid demo that you can use to show that you have potential.

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...on-new-mmorpg-by-intrepid-studios/description

 

Do it! The best way to become a professional game developer is to just jump in feet first and make your dream game. If you're passionate about it, you can make it happen. If you're not, it won't. Got what it takes? Do it.

I've got decades under my bel... uh, skirt(?) as a successful professional game developer, and I'm coming up on the end (Edited: but am I? Am I really??). The one thing I've learned over all this time is that you can do it. If you buy my e-book. I'll have a link soon. It will have all the answers.

But yeah, joking aside, just do what you gotta do. If you don't want to start small (and I mean, who does, really??), then start big. Start with the one thing that everyone says you shouldn't do. Make a damned MMO. If it's what you want to do, make it happen.

Or, you know... don't. That's what most people do. Big dreams, big goals, yadda yadda, it all ends in tears. That's the business. Ready to put up a fight? Do it. I believe in you. I really do.

Good luck.

 

The only thing worse than seeing your dreams get crushed to pieces as you do everything you can to make them come true, is to watch your dreams evaporate without ever trying to achieve them. If you want something then go get it.

 

Can only speak from personal experience. When I started out I knew nothing about nothing. Assets seemed a decent way to jump-start all these great ideas floating round in my head.

I bought lots of assets and a lot of them stayed useless. Some got obsolete before I really had the time to dig in. Others were simply too complicated. I can look back on a lot of assets and say "that was a waste of money" - but I don't consider any of them a waste of time. I'm a bit fatalist and I simply say I paid for an education I didn't realise I needed to take: It would have been a far better use of money to do some courses or hire someone to tutor me in basic game dev. But I still learned some stuff and really there's no such thing as wasting time to learn.

Owning assets gives you an opportunity to see how other people do it - or try to do it - and every minute that you spend examining how something is done - or how is it made - or even just staring curiously at it and not having a clue but still be impressed by it is time well spent in game dev. It's another way to learn. Maybe not the *quickest* way but if it keeps you interested it's a good way.

Anything that ignites your native curiosity is worth doing - and eventually, if you do it long enough your focus becomes better and better. You learn to prioritise what is important. You pick up a few basic tricks which become a few more. You start to understand a little better the discussions that previously were a foreign language. And perhaps most importantly you learn your own limits and what you need other people to help you achieve, whilst growing love for what you are doing.

 

What you propose is unlikely or else everyone would buy it, make an "MMO" and get it crowdfunded. My recommendation is to study and reverse engineer existing successful MMOs and Online Games to understand how they achieved their success.

My suggestions are World of Warcraft which is heavily Quake inspired. So, Quake might be a simpler place to start and is quite the foundation to many online games. World of Warcraft has emulation projects like TrinityCore and Mangos which will allow you to see an actual MMORPG backend that is running in production to many thousands of players daily on various private servers.

That is the path I took. Writing client and server emulators from scratch for a couple MMORPGs. It taught me a lot. But still I cannot make an MMORPG. It would take a team of talented people.

 

I don't take offense by the criticism, I honestly figured that's what would be said. I didn't ask the full scope of my question and I knew it was pretty vague. I know starting out asking to make an MMO is very vague. My main question I really want to ask is if there is a way to pull experienced (Freelance) developers into a team for an MMO if they are recruited for specific roles to complete a demo for a kick start showcase? Would people even consider doing a kick start project if they were included in the funding to proceed further?

I would rather have custom built assets, designed levels and artwork by professionals but that costs money, the reason I asked about atavism was that I was hoping to use everything in there as a template to build a demo for a quick start and then after funding(if it worked out) I would use the funding to custom build everything by hiring and keeping current developers on the project.

Not trying to act like this is an easy task in any way because I know you guys have put in lots of work and I bet it is tiring hearing the same questions from new inexperienced people. Just trying to see if it's possible to put a team together in any way or if there is a site or thread for that kind of thing.

I also know that atavism can't handle physics so I would have probably not gone through them anyways.


Much appreciated.

 

I also appreciate the advise from everyone and encouragement. I have been working on my own small projects and reverse engineering games like @Glader had mentioned to do in which I have been remaking a few games from my past which are small in scale and aren't too ambitious.

 

I guess you already know this, but this is the only info I know about Atavism. @TheMessyCoder made two 3-part series about it. Never tried it personally.

 

No I have not seen these, I looked all over for other peoples input via YouTube and couldn't find anything useful. Thanks!

 

whooop! thanks for the links. Hope the vids can help in some way.
I am actually planning a new series of videos as I try to make a game with Atavism. Starting off with the vanilla features and expanding to actually doing some server side code to expand Atavism further.

Atavism is a massive kit, but you are getting a lot and A LOT!
For a lot less money you could get UMMORPG,

but with all the 3rd party addons the price starts to go up and you could save for Atavism.

My advise, set your budget before you spend any money at all. Then buy whatever you need that is within your budget for your project. That is why you set out your budget!

If you have a good idea, dont let anything stand in your way, a lot of great games started in someone's bedroom.