Making a Web-Based MMO in Your Attic with Shockwave

Gene Endrody (Founder, Maid Marian Entertainment)

Is This for Real?

Yes, the title of this talk does sound absurd. You get people all the time on forums (especially here on GDNet) about people wanting to build their own MMOs and most commonly the response is something akin to “oh yea? You and what army?” Nevertheless, Gene has indeed succeeded where countless others have failed (no doubt miserably). Sherwood Dungeon is a 3D browser-based fantasy MMO created entirely in Shockwave, with no outside funding. Launched in 2003, it now attracts over a million unique users each month and generates its revenue solely through banner ads.

Inspired by the book Dungeons & Dreamers, which tells the story of Richard Garriot and other solo game developers of the time, Gene started Sherwood Dungeon as a hobby in 2000. He had a vague idea of what he wanted to do with the game and didn’t really plan anything out, just adding one feature at a time. People who checked out the game recognized that it was just a hobby project, but came back from time to time to see what had been added. The player base grew organically as development continued and Gene added more and more features into the game for people to check out. In 2003 the first guild (Black Death) appeared of its own volition; Gene had not yet implemented any sort of clan or guild functionality in the game yet. Now there are many guilds, clans, and orders in the game, along with various guild sites, fans sites, and tips and tricks sites.

The game itself is a very casual and social environment with classic hack-n-clash player vs. enemy combat against creatures like giant spiders and dragons. Player vs. player combat is allowed as well, but it is not emphasized and player XP does not factor into the battles. There are no classes or level caps, again appealing to the casual nature of the game. Plenty of items and infinitely deep dungeons create the majority of the user experience, as well as six themed islands to explore featuring quests and merchants.

Why Shockwave?

That’s a good question, and Gene went into great detail to answer it. Flash’s forgotten older bastard step-brother, as Gene likes to call it, has quite the market penetration with 59.2% in mature markets (U.S., Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan) and 34.2% in emerging markets (China, S. Korea, Russia, Taiwan and India) as of June 2008. This penetration rate is much higher than most other 3D browser technologies such as Unity, although in all fairness Unity is relatively new and wasn’t an option when Gene began development. He does, however, give props to Java’s 3D tech, which he says has gotten much better over the years. Flash, according to Gene, also still doesn’t do 3D as well as Shockwave does.

Gene went through several slides listing the various qualities of Shockwave 3D and why it’s such a robust solution for something like a web-based 3D MMO. You could get the majority of the facts off the Shockwave site, but some highlights are:

• Very small file sizes for things like meshes, skinned meshes with bones, textures with embedded alpha and animations thanks to an excellent lossy compression scheme.
• Support for a variety of platforms and graphics technologies including Mac, Windows (Vista/XP) and DirectX7, DirectX9 and OpenGL
• Shader support, which Gene put to good use on item customization (colors)
• Automatic Level of Detail modifier, which is great for performance and easy to use
• There are a lot of undocumented useful features that you can dig up online

The Content Problem

So how does one person make enough content for an MMO, and how do you keep it small enough to run in the browser? These were two main issues that Gene had to solve, because without content there was no reason for people to stick around that long, and if it took too long to download, people wouldn’t play at all. So he decided to use procedural content, creating objects made up of models that could be re-used in various things. He also used shaders to allow people to customize the colors of their objects. He also used a random seed to create random height maps for his islands, and generated quests, dungeons and items. All this is done client-side and is faster than loading or streaming in content from a server. As a result, the Sherwood Dungeon Shockwave client is a mere 2.7MB of data.

Becoming Profitable

Running completely independent of any major publisher or portal has allowed Gene to retain full IP over his work, but obviously he’s not making money by doing that and refusing to work for hire or license out. However he doesn’t need to thanks to banner ads that run at the bottom of the window outside the game frame, from which he gets a 4% click through. Anyone familiar with banner advertisement will realize that’s a pretty impressive rate. He supports various ad networks and allows anyone to embed Sherwood with an IFRAME so long as they show the ads as well, though they can also monetize other space on the page if they wish. So very shortly he had hundreds of small game sites hosting Sherwood and effectively creating a viral distribution network.

While the game is free-to-play, as of September 19th Gene introduced the first purchasable item – a pet that the user can own for $5 a year. These pets can be helpers (like a wolf that attacks enemies with the player) or mounts (like the horse that players can ride around). He demoed both in the game and chuckled when he told us that it was an as-yet unannounced featured and he was probably causing quite a stir amongst the players who were now seeing him running/riding about. This is the first small step he and his wife (who handles the business side of things) are making towards micro transactions.

Sherwood Dungeon continues to grow and evolve, and offers quite the perspective on casual MMOs and their creation. People may once have scoffed at the idea of one man making a successful MMO, but apparently Gene never heard them.

Coverage by Drew Sikora

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