The path has been long, adventurer. Do you see it on the horizon? Mirandus awaits!
The world of Mirandus isn’t simply discovered… it’s crafted specifically for the mighty Exemplars who eagerly await their adventures in this new world. Bringing this complex world to life requires incremental victories and building on the successes of yesterday to create more robust mechanics and an engaging Mirandus tomorrow.
We’re not at the end of this journey yet, adventurer… but your destination grows closer each day.
Watch the full Town Hall to get more info on the latest updates!
Small Steps Heading Towards Big Leaps
In the third quarter of 2024, we hope to hit some major goals that may seem incremental from the outside looking in, but are absolutely essential to the next steps in opening Mirandus for exploration.
Our first milestone target will be July. During this period we hope to fully test the infrastructure and processes of our release pipeline. By this point, we’re planning to have refined the core set of gameplay mechanics and for engineering analytics to have identified main weaknesses and priorities as we move towards live servers.
As we approach the end of the quarter, we hope to reach our second milestone in September. For this benchmark, we’re planning to have a workable system in place for all basic crafting recipes, including related and art and gameplay integrations. These recipes and items will expand over time. This initial system will serve as the foundation for testing and optimization before being filled out with additional items.
A Strong End to 2024
As the year comes to a close, we’re going to get more ambitious in the milestones we’re hoping to reach. We’ll build on the fundamentals we’ve established in Q3, and Mirandus will start to look more like a real world.
For our third milestone in October, we’re hoping to have a solid first pass on combat and analytics. Again, these systems will start off very basic. Getting a solid foundation on these, however, is absolutely necessary to building a fun game.
By the end of December, we hope to hit our fourth major milestone. At this time, we hope to have a very basic version of deed and building placement within the game. This will likely be limited to buildings dealing with food, armor and weapons to start. We also hope to have a functional UI for store management and the full ability to get people into the game… for longer than just a few hour playtest!
Into the Future
Game development is never quite a straightforward A to B path, and we acknowledge that unexpected issues may come up that could require us to deviate from this roadmap. We do believe, however, that these goals are realistic and achievable over the next six months.
Beyond 2024, the focus can move beyond fundamental systems as we begin giving the world of Mirandus more depth. This is when the full realization of Exemplars and Materium in game will begin, as well as refining enemies, bosses and dungeons.
2024 will be the year of establishing the foundation. 2025 will use that foundation to create everything that makes Mirandus Mirandus.
The Journey and the End of the Path
Boiling the development of such a large project as Mirandus down to some itemized milestones belies the actual progress that ironing out seemingly inconsequential systems can create in MMORPG development.
In a world as vast as Mirandus, every system relies on those underneath and around it to function and create a fun and engaging experience. While 2024 may seem less exciting than what’s coming on the horizon, the work we do in the next six months hopefully results in Exemplars discovering all that the wild land of Mirandus has to offer in 2025.
We’ll keep you updated regularly as we move through the year. Hopefully knowing where we’re headed makes you as excited as we are as we craft the world of Mirandus for the arrival of Exemplars!
The magnificent fantasy world of Gala Games’ legendary fantasy MMO is coming to life before our eyes, moving faster than ever. Games of this magnitude are often years in the making, and some of our most dedicated community members have been patiently waiting for Mirandus since the dawn of Gala Games.
Mirandus is one of our most community hyped gaming projects, set to redefine an entire genre of gaming with a fantasy simulation as aesthetically beautiful as it is strategically challenging– A land where magic reigns, Materium flows and “dying hurts.” Players are itching to get into Mirandus more than ever… and we can’t wait for them to experience it!
Dig into the latest blog for an up-to-date roadmap with what you can expect in the coming weeks and months.
If you’re not able to catch this Town Hall live, then don’t forget to watch the replay. You don’t want to miss this one.
Join us at 12pm PT today, June 26th. Set a notification at the link below!
The journey takes you far… ever closer to Mirandus.
The wild and untamed land continues to grow more vast by the day as the team works diligently to craft Mirandus. A lot of progress has happened since the last time the community got Exemplar boots on the ground, and there’s going to be even more coming next week in our Town Hall!
Internal Playtest
Many of us at Gala Games hopped into an internal playtest recently! It was an absolute blast. I wish we could say that we’d prepped a bunch of material from it, but we were mostly laser focused on critical feedback.
That having been said, some little clips and snips of a few players’ experiences:
Just minding their my business – the beauty of the hills around the citadel! Then,
…Then, of course…
Running around getting eaten by wolves is fun… but are reasons that we test behind the scenes!
Bugs need killing, and one of the best things at Gala is that we can get such great feedback from other teams when we need it.
Just Chillin‘
“They call me the Long Thumbed Stabber of the Beating Heart Clan” –Deathlicious
Other Mirandus Updates
We’ve been working on compiling and standardizing our entire catalog of assets for buildings, settlements and enemies. An MMO world needs to be diverse and engaging, and this leans heavily into the assets used to fill out the world. In a player-driven world like Mirandus, many assets need to be fine-tuned so that they work as intended and look like they belong in a wide variety of environments.
We’ve been doing a lot of work under the hood on systems. A full replacement of the asset loading system has solved multiple issues, and we’ve started crafting a new analytics system to really track behaviors better in game.
You certainly won't want to run into these little piggies🐷
The berserk and forest pigs may not look like much at first, but they certainly can pack a punch pic.twitter.com/m0sg1MH5C3
A lot of long work continues, as detailed systems require detailed efforts. Big strides have been made on designing the progression system and mechanics for armor and weapons. We’re exploring new concept art for animals, weapons and Purgatory.
Taking a great concept…and bringing it to life!
The style and feel of armor is crucial to the gameplay experience of an MMORPG.
Not only does the armor need to enhance the player’s identity and fit in with the world, but it has to be designed to accommodate all the actions and animations that any Exemplar may need!
On the Horizon…
So, what’s coming up in Mirandus? Enough that we’d like the team to be able to tell you themselves!
Join us for a Town Hall meeting on June 26th where we have some exciting updates for you.
We look forward to talking more about what we’ve been working on, but also really dive into what’s happening right now and into the future.
We’ve internally solidified our roadmap throughout the rest of the year and it’s time to share with you where the journey will take us. Don’t miss this Town Hall!
Watching the evolution of Gala’s massively ambitious MMORPG has been almost as exciting as the adventure itself. There’s something magical about watching such a passionate project come to life. The seemingly endless obstacles overcome, the often tedious but fascinating details and all the little victories along the way have been laid out in our wake like a masterfully built brick road that leads to the fantasy wonderland of Mirandus.
If you are among the privileged minority that has been part of this journey since the beginning, you’ll remember the earliest visions of Mirandus. We’re extraordinarily pleased that these visions are constantly coming to life as the game gets closer and closer to launch.
Today, you’re all invited to a live Mirandus Town Hall on the Gala Games Youtube channel, where members of the team will share the latest news and address some questions from the community.
The Town Hall begins at 11am PT– We hope to see you in the comments!
Please set a notification at the link below:
If you cannot attend live, please watch the live replay so you do not miss out on the latest Mirandus excitement! We can hardly wait to bring you the legendary next generation fantasy simulator MMO that is Mirandus.
Building a massive open world of exploration and adventure is no walk in the park. The team has been hard at work squashing bugs, shipping updates and polishing the game’s unique look and feel, making Mirandus a truly magical place.
You’ll find a more in-depth list of recent tech stat updates at the bottom of this article!
Mirandus Offsite
The team just finished an awesome offsite meetup with the Mirandus Directors and key community members in Austin, TX February 8-10. The offsite was vital for discussing decisions in the game design that affect all vectors of Mirandus. We now have consensus about major game features like looting, combat contribution, MTRM connections with GalaChain, Exemplar data and more.
Greetings from the Mirandus team and community at the Austin offsite meeting!
We can’t emphasize how important it is to collect and embrace community feedback and input through this process. We have brilliant minds in the community that love Mirandus as much as the team and it’s amazing to see how we all want to make the greatest game ever.
In a Fireside Chat with the team sometime next week, we’ll offload all the decisions and share our latest updates on the tech stack. We’ll let you know in Discord what the date and time will be for that Fireside Chat soon.
Hinting at things coming in the future
A new era of Mirandus is coming. The next tech test will prove vital for monitoring the tech stack and running diagnostics on issues in real time, as well as flushing out the most elusive problems.
During the upcoming tech test servers may be taken down whenever major problems arise, and remain down until the problem is solved. We thank you in advance for your patience while those problems are dealt with.. Additionally, certain features and parts of the game may be selectively disabled during the test so we can troubleshoot those areas.
Check out the tech test screenshots below!
Specific Tech Stack Updates
Reworked the few remaining ModRequests into the new fully server-authoritative format, mainly surrounding Equip/Unequip/Draw/Sheathe.
Delivered the cemetery/purgatory system and we now have a full death loop stood up. By putting players somewhere, we can more easily try out different options for how we handle death, and it dramatically simplifies the code in the event someone logs out dead and comes back later.
Built an automated unit test for all the item manipulations, so we know if/when we break something instantly.
Fixed some bugs with spawning and also made dead creatures spawn a dynamic tag for “Carnivore Food” so creatures that want meat can find it. We kind of had that working before, but it was a bit hacky, so we got to remove that code we don’t want to support moving forward.
Improved the concept of our NPC AI “making progress” so they can figure out they are outmatched during combat, one way or another, which allows them to be smarter about target selection or choosing when to flee.
Dug into the asset bundle rebuild issues and uncovered two important details that we solved to make our workflow faster.
Improved our environment art team tools to quickly switch prefabs to atlased-material versions so we can A/B check that things look right with final high performance materials.
Built the initial version of the Mint Manager, which also handles the movement of MTRM into and out of player records from GalaChain. The first version is just a mock DB system that lets us test without needing access to the chain, but the real version will be built soon.
Worked on phased vocoder for the voice modulator, focusing on this early as it’s one of the hardest, riskiest parts of the voice system left.
Made big strides toward solving some dependency issues with the asset bundle system. This will improve our build download size drastically.
Tech Art is putting some extra effort into helping the character team get the new human and female Exemplar models in as we discovered some issues with the skeletons. This will get us really close to final character assets for Q1.
Fixed a bug issue with environment atlasing and the sampler states not working properly, which had to do with poorly documented lightmapping behavior when building static geo.
Created an admin control page design that will allow QA/CS to help players even without logging into the game (sometimes critical when things are truly broken).
Wrapping up the navmesh exploit detection and look-at data for NPCs so they can pay attention to things while doing something else.
Migrated code over to the new ModRequest system, pulling the PlayerMove out of that system since it’s the one thing the server doesn’t need to respond about. If you cheat, it’ll do something worse than roll you back…
Upgraded the spawning system data to properly use material tags for determining where things can spawn in the environment, and if something is required but missing, avoid spawning at all. Also, popping small things in is ok, but trees grow into place slowly now.
As the most ambitious and extensive gaming project in the Gala ecosystem, Mirandus is gearing up to really show the world what GalaChain can do. Get ready to experience a fantasy world that’s more immersive and imaginative than you ever thought possible. Learn more about what makes Mirandus so special at Mirandus.game.
