I've started working on a 2D fantasy MMORPG. It's not the first time I've tried to make something like that, but in the past I've never gotten very far. The working title is “Arq”, which is based on several previous attempts at making multiplayer RPGs or roguelikes where I used the name ARQ (A Rogue's Quest). The final name may change or perhaps use “Arq” as a place name in some variation of “Lands of Arq”, “Legend of Arq”, etc.

What led me down this path again was my inability to make any further progress on my previous multiplayer RPG project MUG. My initial enthusiasm for MUG came from the lack of graphics (a task I find daunting) with a bigger focus on mechanics and story (something I thought was going to be easy). Because MUG was going to center around space travel, there would initially have to be a decent number of planets and systems for the player to travel to, and each of those planets and systems would have to have a name and history. This may seem easy to some, but to me the thought of having to come up with several distinct but logically consistent alien races, civilizations, systems, planets, moons, etc. without straight up copying them from existing work didn't seem like an easy task. The thought then struck me that maybe it was in fact easier to make a more traditional 2D RPG like I'd previously attempted. At least there should be a lot more existing games to source ideas from.

Like Underground Tomorrow I'm building Arq using Rust and Actix on the backend and TypeScript and my own reactive programming framework CSTK on the frontend. I've spent a month on it so far and have a lot of things to show, so I've got several devlog posts planned already .