Creating Monster Tycoon
This blog post goes over my personal experience of creating Monster Tycoon and what lead up to actually designing and developing it. If you’d like to find out more about Monster Tycoon, please go here.
Monster Tycoon has been in development for about 6 months now, a lot of this time has been spent experimenting and concepting exactly what this server could become, as well learning new tools.
I'm a game designer that's graduated a 1.5 year course in Game Design and Production. I've always had a knack for building out games and over the past year I've thrown concept after concept at myself, trying to figure out which one could stick and seeing if I can build out a small team with the very limited money I have. The problem is that my skills are predominantly in the creative side of game development, so the game design, level design, etc. and also the production/management side of things. I am not a technical person, but have tried countless ways over the last 10 years of making Minecraft servers in becoming more of one.
I've worked with game/software developers, tech engineers, cloud developers, system admins and I've tried learning Java and other programming languages countless times but could never get it to stick with me which created a massive roadblock when it came to not only designing a game on my own, but also developing it. This is where an extremely powerful tool/software that has recently took the internet by storm comes into play; ChatGPT.
8 months ago I used GPT-3.5 to create a Minecraft plugin that would spawn a chicken 10 blocks above my head and it did so with such ease. It's an incredibly simple plugin, something an experienced developer could do in an extremely short amount of time, but for me, someone who has a very basic understanding of Java development but has always wanted to learn and build something more, it was almost a dream come true and it only got better when GPT-4 came out. I began deep diving into learning more about Java and the Bukkit/Spigot API, being able to use GPT-4 to provide me with code snippets, allowing me to slowly build up my knowledge surrounding both Java and the Bukkit/Spigot API was an amazing feat personally.
I began testing the limits, I was creating a variety of different plugins such as a QuakeCraft minigame plugin, a plugin that’d display a dynamic navigational (compass) bar in the boss bar, a plugin that’d allow for creating placeable models in game using display entities, plugins to create the core One Block and Gens gamemodes. Creating these allowed me to utilise my game design skills and experience and channel it into development as well, I was designing the game and developing it live, all while learning whole new skills.
Over time I started getting into more technical approaches and practices surrounding these Minecraft plugins. I began using MySQL databases to store data, utilise HikariCP for connection pooling and further database optimisations, Redis to create Pub/Sub channels and communicate between different servers and then learning new API's such as the Velocity API.
During this process I decided I wanted to try create a fully fledged custom gamemode in Minecraft and so I created Monster Tycoon, a gamemode that was inspired off of other games and the tycoon genre and it’s been a journey. I’ve learnt how to use Docker Swarm and the Docker Java API to dynamically create Minecraft Velocity and PaperMC servers, using services to scale replicas up and down, allowing them to communicate with each other via Docker Swarm networking and then containerising MySQL and Redis using services and volumes to allow for data persistence.
My journey to learning the game programming side of things is still ongoing and I have so much more to learn and do and will continue using GPT-4 to do so.
I am really excited to see where Monster Tycoon goes, the ultimate goal will to have a successfully running game built in Minecraft and receiving enough revenue to hire more game developers to continue the work and expand the Minecraft server, inevitably creating more jobs.
Thank you so much for reading,
- Leo Lopez