Gardens of Gonzo - 2D Indie Sandbox MMORPG pre-alpha

Press release:

...a free-to-play 2D-indie-sandbox-MMORPG



at this point I want to thank the operators and sponsors of this site for the possibility to exchange help and show own projects. I'm always open to and thankful for constructive criticism and suggestions, from a player's point of view as well as from the keen eyes of experienced developers.

A few words about me and my motivation
My name is Georg, I'm 28 years old an I began programming when I was about 13 years old. I liked computer games very early on and I liked them a lot; so the focus of my programming doings have always been games. When I first played Ultima Online, I became completely fascinated by MMOGs in general and MMORPGs in particular. Since then I always thought: "I want to make something like that, too. Eventually." During my time in school and university I always worked on some smaller ideas and parts for a game engine, I worked for the German UO RP-freeshard Siebenwind for a year (developing the server software); until I had my own idea. My skills were matching up to what I wanted to do, so I began working on Gardens of Gonzo. This is the (preliminary) result.






The project concept, features and what's unique
It should be an online rpg with a persistent world and character development. On the graphic side I wanted to stay two-dimensional, since good 2D is ageless. The massive success of Minecraft did clearly show: players are creative and want to show that, but only if the process of creating is somewhat painless and rewarding. I wanted to use this creative momentum that inspires and brings something completely new and unexpected into being (the Gonzo-effect).

Movement and Interaction

• Movement with WSAD
• Object interaction and combat with mouse

The Character

• Experience
• Character Level
• Skills

Crafting and Farming

• Classic crafting system with resources from NPC loot and destructible world objects.
• Plant growing and feeding. Special loot on harvest. Plants wither when not cared about for too long.

The Combat Mechanism

• No target-lock-on, but pixel-exact real-time collision.
• Fast, direct, responsive.
• Imitation of swift and easy combat mechanism of old Zelda games.
• Melee, ranged, possibly magic at some point.

A dynamic, growing World

• Completely dynamic game world, i.e. every object, buildings and structures, whole landscapes can easily be changed without the need of arduous updates.
• Players can buy estates and worlds, they can build on them and bring them to life.

The Gonzo-Aspect (Gonzo - eccentric, crazy)

• System resources like sound files or graphics can be uploaded into the live session and distributed on-demand among logged-in clients.
• Pixel or sound artists can show their work in an already existing game! This makes completely new settings possible. While the main world has a more medieval-fantasy style, players can create laboratories, strange planetsides or a rocket base - or something completely different; everything they've got the assets to.
• Weapons and other items can be crafted with almost any and own graphics, animations and sounds.
• The own apperance (the char body) can be chosen arbitrarily as well - with own graphics and animations there are endless new, crazy and individual possibilities to customize.

The following screenshots are a few examples of purely player-built constructions.

Goals and important features that will make it into the game

• Access to the resource upload feature (coming very soon).
• Crafting with any graphics and sounds.
• More complex trigger system.
• PvP
• Player-owned minion-NPCs (merchants, warriors,..).
• Eventually, players will be able to create their very own quests that can be played by other players. This way, everyone can write his or her own story inside the game.
• Rating functionality for constructions and quests.
• Regular contests with (depending on revenues, also real)prices for best rated and most accurately rating players.
• More game modes (Hunting Grounds, Castle Attack...)

Get more information through the following links:

Homepage: http://gardensofgonzo.com
IndieDB: http://indiedb.com/games/gardens-of-gonzo
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@gardensofgonzo

If needed, you can also contact me directly through webmaster@gardensofgonzo.com.

The client isn't 100% bug-free yet (on Radeon adapters and with some drivers there are still some graphic errors), but all that will be fixed over time. The more players participate and give (technical) feedback, the better can sources of bugs and errors be found and fixed. The server runs pretty smoothly by now, which wasn't an easy task in the beginning, since it is highly multithreaded. The game was made completely with C++, I used OpenGL for graphics. You can find a full list of used resources and libraries in the readme.txt. If you've got any questions anyway, feel free to ask.