Von Neumann Defense Force source code is now available
hannobraun.de
hannobraun.de
The homepage on the project's website mentions some other things that were goals: http://hannobraun.de/vndf/home/
For anyone wanting more detailed information, the design docs may be a good start (as baking already said in the sibling comment): https://github.com/hannobraun/vndf/blob/master/docs/game-des...
The newsletter archive also has a lot of information, especially the early newsletters: http://hannobraun.de/vndf/news/
Working on something I was passionate about and sticking with it for a long time was definitely good. Even though it wasn't successful in the end, it was way better than all those projects that I thought would be a "good idea", but never finished because I didn't really care.
Rust is awesome. It was already awesome when I started using it for the project in late 2013/early 2014 and it's way better now. It has become my go-to language for everything.
Setting up a simple website with a newsletter signup form was a very good decision. I wrote a short blurb on the home page (still there), put the signup form right under it (no longer there), and de-emphasized all other content. Even though I did near zero marketing, that approach got me to almost 40 subscribers. Not a lot, but apparently enough to get to the front page of Hacker News. (To be clear, I did nothing to get this on Hacker News. One of the subscribers must have posted this, and it went from there.)
The newsletter also attracted my only co-developer, even though I wasn't looking for one at all. He was a huge help, and the main reason the project wasn't abandoned half a year before that ended up happening anyway.
During the course of the project I changed direction a few times. Some of those changes couldn't be avoided, but others could have. In the beginning I thought that the technology not working out would be the biggest problem, so I started out by putting the fundamentals (rendering, user input, networking etc.) in place first, then build the game on top. The technology never was the problem, however, the game design was (and all that networking code made it harder to iterate on the game design).
If I were to do it again, I would start out much simpler. I probably would build a simple single-player game to work out the basic building blocks first, then extend that step by step towards the MMO that I always envisioned. Ideally, this approach would have led to a series of small releases early on, which could have had a lot of benefits.
It was pretty harmful to put most of my professional life on hold for this project, as I ended up doing. I did enough consulting work on the side to survive, but didn't put much effort or thought into the long-term viability of my business. As a result, my business today isn't very viable :)
I think it would have been possible to choose a more synergistic approach, for example by polishing and releasing parts of the backend technology along the way, and trying to leverage that into well-paying consulting engagements. I'm actually trying out a similar approach right now, although in the field of embedded software.
That's basically all I can think of at the moment. I hope it's helpful.
A question for the developer; What status is the unfinished game presently in relative to what you initially envisioned?
What's there right now are basic 2D graphics, a user interface based on an in-game console (designed as a prototyping tool; we planned to replace it with a proper UI), some buggy beginnings of a mouse-based interface, networking code (client/server; the clients can see each other in the game), and some basic physics.
When you connect to the game, you start in orbit above a planet and can use the in-game console to execute commands that change your orbit. You can't really do much else other than fly around. So there's not really any game play or anything interesting to do, really.
If we had continued development from there, we could have started adding some real game play pretty much right away, but to get the basics right would have required a lot of iteration, and we would have been weighed down by all the technical infrastructure that was already there. Plus, none of that technical infrastructure was very polished, so it would have required a lot of updating and rework along the way.
So yeah, still years of work ahead, I suppose.
This really caught me off guard. I didn't expect an unfinished game I abandoned almost a year ago to generate this much attention.
>Von Neumann Defense Force was a huge effort, and even though I had high hopes for a while, there never was a great chance of any return, financial or otherwise. I still wanted to do it though. I wanted to work on it, because I knew a game like this needed to exist.
>But at some point, I lost that sense of purpose. That question, why this game needs to exist, I can no longer answer it. Without that answer, there's no point in continuing.
That's the big drafty room with the blue ceiling, amirite???
That said, I fail to see why expending so much effort to make NPCs indistinguishable from other players makes any sense in service of such incredibly boring storylines, or why there is so much finicky grinding that has to be done just to maintain a PC's rank, much less actually try to advance before dying of old age. To add insult to injury, apparently you only get one life, and once it's done, that's it (and they back this restriction with some truly diabolical system fingerprinting that as far as I know no-one has been able to spoof).
It's a really strange mix of technical tour-de-force (how the heck did they do that?) and utter banality (why the heck would they do that?).