Spellsworn - Wizard duels with sumo-wrestling rules

[Omberone]

@.osolin;344397

Hi! Really nice game! I like the art style and the definition of the effects.

Since this is a UE forum, I also have some technical question. We are also building an arena fighting game of some sorts (but not top down view), and we could use some of you experience:
a) can you elaborate more on the difficulties you have encountered when going free to play; was the difficulty in creating the persistent database server where you keep per-players data and communicate with clients, or the amount of work required to build all the additional buyable items. I think the latter could also be done iteratively (you don’t need 10 skins at the start).
b) how do you host games; do you create a dedicated server somewhere and link it to all players when the “matchmaking” server finds a match? Also, do you have any more exact figures how much do servers cost, and how many cores/ram do you need to host the game? By the way, does Steam offer any way to host servers there?
c) how long are you in active development, and how big of a team are you? How many programers/designers/artists?
d) how big of a portion of the project is done in blueprints (in our case, we do most of the logic (90%) in blueprints, just heavy stuff in C++?

Best of luck!

Hey! Thanks!

Sure, I’ll answer best I can.
a) The four major points of frustration for the FTP model are the techwise infrastructure which needs a solid database handling (however you may chose to handle accounts), the transaction infrastructure, the content production and the “initial cost without initial income” hurdle. Even though you may do an iterative process for the purchasable content it will still need a lot of the production time, much more than level designing or props. Making a new character with a new skeleton and a new mesh painting takes us about three to five weeks from start to finish (polish), and we’re aiming for up to ten characters on release - which equals roughly thirty weeks, and then 10 characters are still a bit few from a players viewpoint. The tech side of things is always something that can be understood and learned, but it’s still time being dedicated towards something other than in-game features and bugfixing - which for a five-man team can be crushing. Using steams API’s has been a bit of a blessing, but there’s quite a few features missing in the Unreal department when it comes to Steam API wrapping. So we’ve often needed to work around Unreal’s wrappers.
b) We have two ways of creating games at the moment. There’s custom games which is your standard hosted game ( menu -> lobby -> game ) which shows up in a server list, and then there’s the matchmaking games which are hosted on dedicated machines around the world. In this case we’re using Steams matchmaking lobbies to find opponents and then from those lobbies find a suitable dedicated server, which we then let the lobby join (and reserve). When joined the dedicated server sends an API call to our dedicated server manager which fires up two new dedicated servers, just to keep up with demand. When they’ve idled for an extended amount of time they automatically shut down. Steam has no dedicated server handling, that would be way too expensive on their end, but they do have a master server which you can use for server listing. A quick google search for different hosters will most likely tell you the cost of a single VM over a monthly period, and the one we’re going with costs us roughly $40-$60 per month per VM.
c) We’ve been working full time for about a year now, and we’re two programmers, two artists and one designer.
d) Almost everything is done in C++, only the UI elements are done in UMG/Blueprints

Thanks, and same to you!