Universal 49 Reasons To Die (Soon available)

Hey Guys,

we are developing 49 Reasons To Die for 2 years now and made our first Features Gameplay Trailer yesterday. We're a small team of 1 and a half people . The Game will come out this autumn, right now it's in an closed alpha phase. How do you like the trailer?

It will be available for Android & iOS.



The game will set a new Milestone in this so popular genre. Broken down into pieces and reimagined in an own new way of Skill-Shooter for Mobiles.

Mechanics have never been so hard to learn. See only what's in your sight. Control the unique bullet spread of every weapon. Attach your Guns with scopes and grips. Find Armor. Block Sight with Smokes. Trick your enemies with special abilities.

The first mobile 2D shooter that "thinks" 3D. And the first, where skill really makes a difference.

 

Hi Vikas, thank you . It will come out autumn this year, but the beta testing will be sooner. I will post it on our Social Media Channels when it's ready .

 

Hi Jstorm, thank you for your reply and your honest opinion. Most of the people just say it looks cool, and that's it - feel free to give me any critics, that way I can improve much more and make it nicer in the future.

You are right, I didn't think of if people will ask the question if it's a multiplayer game, as for me Battle Royale itself means Multiplayer. I'm making the next trailer already, where I will mention this already at the beginning . For your information: You will play against 49 Real Enemies . As for the hands you are right, I think it's not the arms, I think the hands are just too small - I will redesign them and make it a bit bigger.

At first glance, the trailer was just made to show off, which specials the game will have compared to other 2D Shooters. As you can think of, developing this whole thing, drawing everything on my own, doing all the networking and social media stuff - besides a main job - is really hard, especially when u're alone. I just needed some music for the background, which I made also by myself. But the next one will be much more action-loaded ;-).

I've never been a programmer, but was always interested. So two years ago I started to read some literature about programming and game-design and teached it to myself. I was on my way to the supermarket one day, when I met an old friend from the school. He told me, that he's studying informatics now. I revealed my idea to him - some days later we met again, and decided to establish a 2D Battle Royale, which is hard to play and more complex then any other topdown shooter. He used to come over once to two times a week at the beginning, but as time went by he had more and more stress with his studying, so I continued on my own. He's still coming over once a month, which is quite nice, as it helps me a lot, we're still a team, as we've put so much passion in to this.

I made a new website with some more informations about the game, if you're interested.

https://www.49-game.com

Greetings,
Dario

 

Hi Jstorm,

it's nice that you are curious about the background of the game! You are right, making 50 players play at once was not an easy task. But everyone grows with his tasks, and I don't regret that stress I've put myself in the last two Years .

To your first question: How will a game be hosted? Supporting a network that can handle 49 people isn’t an easy task. Are you planning to host a server, or will it be a p2p?

The servers are hosted by Photon Engine, as shown at the start of the trailer. Photon is normally meant to be played by 4-10 players, if you use the solution just out of the box.

In short, what Messages per second mean: If a player runs around, he sends 10 msg/s, to update the others of his current position. If there are 5 other players, then 50 messages will be sent to them, what is a total of 60 msg/s (10 to the server, 50 the the other players), and this is only, if one player runs around, and not the others. If everyone would walk around, you can think of, what would happen: 500 msg/s (which should be the average-limit in a played round) would be exceeded fast, which is the average limit for a photon-game.

I started to research a bit, and read many things about network culling. I found some games, that feature already 32 Players via Photon, and that's achieved via this: You don't get all the messages from every zone (interest groups) - players being more far away will send less messages to those zones. But those games, that have integrated culling, got an average of around 1000 msg/s with Photon Networking at that playercount. So players that are more far away will be updated less times per second, and be more "laggy" if they are far away.

Then I rethinked a bit. Why do my players need to know ANYTHING about what is far away? Since my game is topdown, you can't see that far, and everything is limited to the screen boundaries. Do I need position updates from players that are far away at all?

And then I started on my own network-culling script. It was a horror at the beginning and took me almost 2 months to get it working, many nights and less sleep, +my non Experience at the beginning got it going slow. Now it is working - and my solution was: No messages from other Interest-Groups (Zones) at all, if I'm not in. The Player can cross a maximum of 4 Zones at a one time, and that's the maximum a player can get messages from.

But this didn't do the job good enough, since still every player will send 10 msg/s, even if no one gets an update back. And then the second step minimized it even more: Why should the player update the server 10 times per second where he is? Wouldn't it be enough to maximize msg/s only, if someone is near my player? So I reduced msg/s to only 1, and if an enemy comes near me, on both clients msg/s will be maximized to 10. This did the job fine.

But there is still one more thing to be considered: What, if too many people land at the same zone just at the beginning? Yes of course, this would exceed the limit fast. That's why I had to compromise at this point: Like in Surviv.io the player will start at a random Spawnpoint, you can't choose where you land. So the players will be distributed at the beginning and the zone will put them slowly together.

I know, the 500 msg/s limit cannot be held throughout the whole game, for sure if too many players meet at once it will temporarily go up, but what counts is an average per match, and this is pretty fine.

How are items spawned? Since there will be a lot of items on the map I had to figure out how we could do this. This is a point, that my friend, who programmed at the beginning with me, did: The Masterclient just sends a number between 1 and 10.000, and then a seed will be generated and everyone calculates "semi-randomly" the same items on his local client. Item-spawns are not totally random, but the players will not recognize that, since there is so many combinations. We can put the number up, we just started with 10.000.

How are items synchronized? The Master-Client (+ two other players, who are the "backup" of the master) are holding a list of picked up items for every zone. When a player enters the zone, he gets the actual list and updates everything from the master. Why backups for the master? If the master disconnects from the server, or just closes his client, everything would break. That's why two more players are holding the informations, one of them will become the next Master-Client, if the master dies, leaves or disconnects. A master-client is one of the 50 Players, normally the first who opens the room - but as a client you don't really see, if you've opened up a room or just joined one. Having this feature with sending lists also minimizes msg/s, since you don't need to know what happens in other zones you would maybe never enter.

- Will a match start with less than 49 people? No offense, but no one knows you yet, and unless you make the game visually appealing or something, there is a good chance the game gets a slow start.

To say it straight away: No, the game wasn't tested with 50 Players yet, because as you say, no one yet knows our game. That's why I'm doing all this: Showing the game to the world, and searching for beta testers, which will be available in September. Currently I'm putting in the server backend for statistics and so on, that's why my closed alpha is in "sleep" mode right now. I'm having around 15 people who tested the game, all in all around 50 people have registered already. The game was tested with 12 People in one round - and everything worked fine. In the last six months I have tested a bit more with my players, put in some more features (like adjusting Shooting-Sensitivity, inventing a 1vs1 - Mode and so on, and much of bug fixing.

But you are right: What will happen at the very beginning if we don't have enough players? Or if it's late at night and there are no other competitors online? It's a good question I have been thinking of already many times. First of all: The Game will feature three GameModes: 1vs1 Round-Based Royale, so only 2 Players needed. Then there will be mini-Royale for 8 Players (a small map, you can see it on our instagram profile), and the Big royale with 49 Enemies.

But what if I still want to play the big map? Then there will be bots, which I will put on straight after Serverbackend (PlayFab) and leveling is done. Since you know that I'm very limited with my time, they will not be super AI controlled, they will not pick up items, but they will be able to walk around and shoot and randomly drop items when they die - bots from other games like Pubg Mobile are also not any better then this. At least you will be able to play the "big round" always.

I know it's totally crazy to develop all these things alone - but believe me, I made a total solution for all this and thinked about everything over and over again.

How will the game monetize? Here's where Special Abilities come into play. A player can choose whether he wants an Ad-Free Version or not. An Ad-Free Version will cost per month. If he doesn't want to pay anything, that's fine. The Game can still be played for free - but before the rounds start, you need to watch a rewarded Video-Ad to use special abilities in this round. The players can watch Ads up to three times, and have 3 Games in which they can have special Abilities. Watching ads will also give you a Double-XP Boost. Opening loot-Chests will also be available via Rewarded Video ad, in lootboxes you will find Stones to level up Special Abilites. That's the only way how this can be monetized besides In-App purchases for Skins. Three skins for the player (which are by the way combinable with each other - see on the website) can be earned through playing and leveling up. Special Abilities can also be leveled up, to last longer or to have a better effect. Some of these features are still in pipeline. You could, as already said, play without Special Ability, and you could also win a match without it - but you have a big disadvantage to other players, so I had to find a way to force my players to watch ads. At least I need a way to pay my servers..

I hope this wan't too long, but I just wanted to make things clear and give you some deeper insights, how much work actually stands behind all this.

Greetings,
Dario