Fantastic Pixel Castle has had a few successful small playtests for their MMO, ‘Ghost’, according to their latest Word on the Street podcast episode. Not only are they testing the very early builds, development is even a bit faster than expected, in part thanks to how things are structured at the studio.
On development, things are progressing faster, in part, Greg Street and Scott Johnson discuss, to a lack of oversight. Though that doesn't mean they are being sloppy. They simply have more independence to work as a team without the layers and long chains of command. Street talks his time at Blizzard and notes that they'd finish something and not necessarily have the next thing set in place in part due to how many people had to weigh in.
As for the playtests, they’ve now run three in a row with external testers, with some of them having seen several hours of the game up in the early test build. Even with this, they're still variation since they generate the blue zones each time. Street says they’ve had concurrency up from about 80 to 100 players. The testers were being creative, interacting with the mechanics and doing things like building a bridge over a goo hazard, and fighting from the bridge, showing what the potential might be for the sandbox elements.
The team wants to make it feel rewarding to explore and for solving puzzles and coming up with creative ways to do things. Yet, they also want to make things feel less separated and more interconnected. Avoiding just teleporting between individual pieces and instead, to have a sense of a unified world. This also works with their initial plans to launch with about 3 to 5 different biomes instead of more than a dozen that they initially considered. They compare it to 'island hopping in the Caribbean', in a sense. You can see different shards and figure out how to reach them, with less fast travel and teleportation and more things like skyboats to get you where you're going.
With these tests, they also started to consider hardware compatibility and how the game might run on lower-end systems, including those with integrated graphics cards. While some had trouble, particularly with integrated cards, they give credit to Unreal Engine for being able to scale. They’re using a cloud-based server system, instead of a traditional setup, and there’s still work to be done on the infrastructure.
The full podcast episode goes deep into some of what they've been working on, as well as the Inspirations of trying to make a fantasy MMORPG that still feels grounded in some familiar ways. There's a whole lot more info on everything from the design process, storytelling, and the challenges of development. This is the 13th episode, and it is likely their most in-depth.
