Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

grabbed a screenshot of concept art of current class lineup

naranja said:

I think people who played Vanguard and EQ have a chance to make a great game in the future. Most of todays big developers never played these games so will never understand some important things.

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What? Current devs were 5 when those games were great. You think there is gonna be a sudden surge in 49 year old devs that actually played Classic EQ? All that’s coming down the pipe is Minecraft fags

Nice to see they found the oft whispered of Macho Mountain Man. Mythical member of the Village People.

Update 17: New Year, New Milestones​

Jan 31
Written By Nick

Introduction​

It was a busy start to the year for the Monsters & Memories team. We're pleased to announce that we now have six of our nine team members streaming regularly! Nick has started his Design, QA, and Gameplay streams. Ali has been streaming an educational series on “How to Create a Unity Game in 6 Hours,” coinciding with the Global Game Jam.
Alexander, Harrison, and Connor have also been streaming concept, environment, and character art (respectively).
You can find all of the VODs on the Monsters & Memories YouTube channel.
To help keep you up to date with the latest VODs of our development streams, we've created a #videos channel in our Discord server, (which you should totally join here!). Every time a new video is posted to our YouTube channel, it will automatically be posted there. You can also opt in to receive notifications by reacting with the YouTube emoji in our #notifications-setup Discord channel. We have also organized the videos on our channel into playlists, so you can easily find the type of content you are looking for.

New Milestones​

As January winded down, we reached a few fun milestones. First, Shawn hosted Nick and Alexander on his stream to reveal the classes of Monsters & Memories, along with Alexander's excellent class lineup concept art, and Nick's early descriptions and design ideas for the classes. You can find that video below:
Another big moment for us was Ali beginning to implement animations for some of our NPCs. For a sneak preview, check out this video:

We also have a first pass for the Bat’s Attack and Death animations, and a special surprise. We’ll share more in some of our next streams!
Next up, Ali plans to get the human character models in-game and playable, along with animations for them and some of our critters (first up likely to be the Rat).
Connor has also has finished up our beetle critters, and got them in the game:

The Results Are In!​

We want to thank everybody who signed up for our Mailing List! We hit our goal of 1,000 newsletter subscribers in the New Year. We took this occasion to send out a poll to our readers. We asked, without much information to go off of (deliberately), which Class and Player Race interests you the most? Here are the results:


Now that we’ve revealed some information about our Classes, expect to see a similar reveal about our Player Races. Hamad has been busily working through these with Shawn.
We’re also looking into getting Class and Player Race information on the website, and talking through what that will look like. Stay tuned!
And after we get a ton more information out on Classes and Races, we will poll you again!

Conclusion​

As you can see, we have kicked off a fun start for what we hope is a great year! Thank you again for all of your support. We are certainly feeling the love in our streams and elsewhere on the internet. Thanks again!

xmod2 said:

Is this going to be first or third person?

For some reason that bat animation is giving me flashbacks to hitting a bat overhand with a two handed hammer and it not flinching in Rift. Magic flying bats.

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During their streams they play 3rd person but have confirmed there is a 1st person camera.

This game can't come out soon enough.

The bones of this game are solid, they've got the right idea since they're going for a niche MMO. It really makes me excited, the idea of having something old school like EQ but not quite as brutal as something like P99 is.

The dungeon crawl stream was great. It was really nice to see something new that the team has been working on being put to use.

This will definitely give us something to do while waiting for Pantheon

Update 18: Short Month, Big Progress​

Feb 28
Written By Shawn Lord

Hello!​

Before we get started, we’d like to thank all of you that might be reading this from our mailing list. We’ve passed the 1,100 subscriber mark, and the community is growing daily thanks to you sharing the word and staying engaged with us.
February is the shortest month of the year, but the team decided to make this month’s newsletter bigger than ever!
There’s a ton to get through in this one, so we’ll keep the intro short and dive right in.
Enjoy!

Player Characters​

This month we’ve worked on getting Player Characters into the game, initial animations work, and the system that drives our visible items & item customization online.
This will be an ongoing, iterative process (as with most things we do), but we got the following into the game and working:

• A first pass of the Human, Ogre, and Gnome models
• Placeholder “base” or skin layers for each race
• Visible item slots working, along with held items
• Armor and items scale appropriate to each race
• Initial Robed Human Model implemented
• A basic data driven item tinting/customization system (which we have plans to refine further)
• Initial optimizations to the systems and a lot of testing & learnings

The image above shows the Ogre with varied visible armor pieces, including the ability to show bracers independent of one another (or not at all), and our current armor tinting.
We’ll provide more detailed images of the various player character models, armor, etc… in future updates.

Monsters & Critters​

This month we created and animated our first Skeleton. Our new system provides designers the ability to tint things like its glowing eyes on the fly via data. It also displays and uses any weapons it possesses in its loot table.
Our next steps will be to customize them with various armor pieces to help with variety, and eventually include the skeletons of each of our player races.

We’ve also created a Crocodile, started modeling the Desert Jackals you’ll encounter around Night Harbor, and begun concepting the Ashira (a race of Jackalweres that you’ll be learning more about soon).

Environment Work​

We’ve spent the month focusing on defining & laying out the remaining zones required to demonstrate our full Proof of Concept. This includes several zones you’ve yet to see on stream, as well as redesigns of the Shaded Dunes & Night Harbor zones to accommodate more gameplay.
Keep in mind that we believe our cities need to be more than just Starting Cities for each player race, but rather living spaces that maintain their utility, social, and gameplay value for the life of the game. Expect to return there often, and even adventure in them.

continued:

As we block out Night Harbor, Alex (our concept artist) is able to then create quick paint-overs of this work, to help us better visualize and discuss specific details.
View fullsize


We’re using a similar process for our first “Deep Realm” zone, which is found below Shaded Dunes and connects several of our placeholder zones. We’ve given this zone the placeholder name of Deep Dunes.
It’s currently in a playable form (including a population of beautiful glowing Deep Beetles), and allows us to get a feel for how we want to handle the space, underground lighting, and similar challenges. If you want to see more of the zone, please check out the video linked in the Playtest section below.


And last, but not least - When Harrison isn’t modeling the environments you’ve seen above, he’s been cranking away on new props. You can watch him do all of this on his streams — which you should check out here:

Music​

We’re happy to announce that Robert Engstrand has joined the team, and is covering all things audio. You can learn more about him, and the rest of the team, on our Team Page.
Robert has started cranking out some amazing sounds and music, which we’ve already been adding to the game with Nick & Ali’s support.
And he’s started a playlist for our soundtrack, which you can find here.

Continued Class Design Work & Playtesting​

Nick is steadily iterating on class and combat design, and plans to starting streaming more regularly now that we have hit these new milestones. We encourage you to follow along during our livestreams and on our YouTube channel.
Here are a few screenshots, and a link to a recent playtest which includes us taking the new Ogre models for a test drive.



If you want to watch the full reveal stream, click here.

Installer/Launcher Work​

We’ve also started working on integrating a service we’re evaluating for registration, installation, launching, and patching the game.
We’ve still got a ways before we’ll be bringing folks in to play with us, but we want to get a head start on this (along with other player facing services), so that we’re more than ready once the time comes.
And as we’ve been saying, we’re aiming very seriously for sooner, rather than later.

Conclusion​

We hope it’s apparent that the team is working hard and taking that work very seriously. We’re a small team, but we’re moving fast. And with your support, we’re having a fantastic time doing it.
Thanks again for all of the support in sharing the word and hanging out with us on the streams and our Discord!
We look forward to seeing you there, as we push into what should be an equally productive and exciting March.
Talk to you soon!

Way too early for this, but I wonder how many starting zones and total zone they are planning to have at launch