Welp.
First... yeah. It's July 4th. I took a little longer than I expected. 😅
Anyway, news....
I'm moving Daemon Protocol back to Discord.
This also means it'll no longer be part of Ardron Universe as a standalone always-online game. The AU infrastructure I built isn't being ripped out (I can simply disable it) but DP itself is returning to its roots.
After spending... months (before starting work on Nullsuite) prototyping both approaches, I realized something:
I spent almost all of my time building infrastructure instead of building the game.
The networking worked.
The backend worked.
The concepts worked.
...but I wasn't actually making Daemon Protocol.
I'm one person. I'd rather spend my time ... making Games rather than... AAA studio server software infrastructure.
Discord already solves a lot of those problems for me.
It isn't perfect, but it gives me authentication, communities, messaging, notifications, threads, and a place where everyone already hangs out. That means I can focus on making the game itself.
The nice part is that almost everything I've designed still carries over. The travel system, towns, battles, scavenging, progression, and everything else all work just as well on Discord,some of it actually works better now that i've had some time away from it.
So... that's the plan.
Time to build the game instead of the platform.
If you're sitting there thinking, "Ugh... Discord."
That's fair.
DP is free to play, and the lore consequences of not playing it are... 🤔 pretty minimal.
If you're in one of the handful of countries where Discord isn't available, I'm genuinely sorry.
If you're banned from Discord...
...well, maybe stop sharing [REDACTED]. 😐
Sucks to suck.
in OTHER other news.
I somehow learned enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to port the in-game Realm Quiz to the browser.
It's hosted on GitHub now under NullforgeStudiosOfficial, alongside NullSuite and the rest of my questionable decisions.
UH.
I've also got some real-life stuff coming up, so Ardron Universe development will slow down a bit for a while.
Daemon Protocol, though?
I think I'm going full speed ahead.
Most of the hard design work is finally done.
Hopefully I'll see you on the Discord when it's ready... or when the main game launches.
Ya *****