With last sprint we split off the game into two forks. The new fork is a copy of myMO as it existed at the end of last sprint (02/10/23). This fork is now known as OMNICore as it will be the basis of future commercial projects that Music Oasis Omni might get involved with. The plan is currently for it to be updated from Unreal Engine 4.27 to Unreal Engine 5.1.1 and then customized to add features that are important to commercial clients needing a virtual world type platform. This effort will be independent of the myMO effort that this blog has been covering. So, whatever progress that branch is making will not be documented by this author and probably won’t be in this blog unless that development team decides they would like to blog about it.
So, this split of the code base coincides with some rethinking of the original myMO goals and plans for it. We began thinking about this shift a few weeks ago and began more formal planning this sprint. We established a Confluence area that is being made available to the people that plan on contributing to it’s design and development. It has some in depth planning, story boarding and will be used for the evolving team design. Basically, is a game that is part tycoon game, part building game and part co-op music events.
It is no longer intended to be come a virtual world application, but rather a more traditional game that people would play much like any tycoon game (Railroad Tycoon, Casino Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc). There will be at least three ways that people will be able to play/use myMO. We are calling these modes. The following are the planned modes for the myMO game:
Event Simulator – myMO will mostly be played as a stand alone game where the player interacts with the game and solves puzzles/challenges to succeed as a Promoter .
The basic objective of myMO is for the Event Promoter to prepare a venue, recruit an act and attract people to attend the event. The basic economic unit is money which the Promoter can spend in various ways to enhance the appeal of the upcoming event and then run the event. The Event Promoter makes choices as to the Region and then tries to maximize resources to appeal to people in that region to want to come and visit and spend money at the Event. As people visit the event, they spend money which the Event Promoter reinvests to make their next event even better in a straightforward positive feedback loop.
The Event Promoter gains reputation with potential acts/performers, club/venue owners and music/event fans. As they gain reputation from successful events the unlock better acts, better venues and wider audiences. The performers, venue owners and audiences will have personas in the game and be represented by Non-Player Characters. We are now designing the game flow/story and the mechanics in terms of goals, challenges/puzzles and scoring. Expect to see much more of this in future sprints as they will be mostly planning sprints instead of software toy development like myMO has been over the last couple of years.
Sandbox Mode – In addition to this simulation mode of the game, we still plan on having a sandbox mode where players can play with their custom event builds they unlocked in the sim mode as a toy. Basically a version of the what the myMO edit mode is today. If you have unlocked a map, you can go play in it after you have accomplished the goals of building it in the sim game.
Party Mode – Also we plan on having a “Party mode”. This is the co-op party we were developing as the software toy. This will be more social version of the game where you aren’t scoring points and advancing your career, but rather you hosting online virtual parties with groups of friends at your favorite venue builds from the Sim or Sandbox modes of the game. You can stream your own audio and instead of interacting in the game with NPCs you are interacting with your friends. It is basically the game as it existed today when we made the clone. This is where we hope to expand myMO from a game to a real world, virtual music event platform where we can attract real life acts, real life venue owners/labels to have larger virtual events much like many existing metaverse platforms envision. What will make myMO different is that it is coming from a focused target Event Promotion simulation background instead of just a generic online virtual world. Hopefully all the knowledge gained in simulating Event Promotion can translate into Real World Event Promotion.
A couple of features were added this sprint. The first is when it records that a session was started by a given avatar it notes the version build of the game that session was started with. This is a database table that logs all accesses to myMO. Secondly a couple of chair types had sit animations added to them including the conference room in the Oasis Plaza and the wing chairs in Oasis Plaza buildings. The biggest coding changes were fairly extensive and they revolved around the ability to scale avatar size, rename avatars and delete avatars from the avatar menu. Here is a video showing this feature in action.
