Devlog #1 — Why I shelved the open world

Hi, I'm Marc, the developer (the only one, more on that below) of Kanarion Online. First devlog, so let's start with the hardest decision I made this year: I put the open world on hold.

A solo MMO forces choices

Kanarion is a real-time tactical MMORPG that I'm building alone, between a full-time job and a toddler. An MMO is already not the easiest thing to build as a team; alone and with no experience of the genre, I got the chance to make just about every possible mistake. The most expensive one was trying to do everything at once.

I'm not an artist. Building an open-world map is a money and time pit, and every hour spent fighting tilesets was an hour stolen from what actually makes the game live: the combat system. So I made the call. The game now centers on a hub: a village, PvE contracts, PvP arenas. Fewer square kilometers, more depth where it matters.

Where this combat comes from

The heart of Kanarion comes from three games that marked me. Canaan Online, which I loved and whose companion spirit I'm carrying over. Ragnarok Online, for its class system that I'm particularly fond of. And Dofus, for its positioning strategy. My bet is to blend the three with one major difference: here, nobody waits for their turn. Everyone acts at the same time. Picture grid-based tactical combat where positioning and timing decide everything, but in real time. That's Kanarion, and it's the reason I'm making this game.

The wall: becoming a truly authoritative server

The biggest project of the past months is invisible to you, and it nearly drove me crazy: moving the whole game from a logic where the client decided to one where the server controls everything. It's essential for an MMO (otherwise, hello cheating), but it means rebuilding everything properly.

The emblematic victim is the tutorial. I rebuilt it more than six times, and every version brought its own new bug. I know it's what made quite a few of you quit, your feedback made that very clear, and I want you to know I read it. There's still work to do, but it's my top priority: the first half hour of the game has to be flawless, and it isn't yet.

What's next, honestly

My current focus: stability, and making every feature that doesn't need a beautiful map work fully: social, PvE, PvP. The shiny content comes after, notably because I'll need an artist for that, and I don't have one yet. I'd rather tell you straight: this is an early access game made by a solo dev dad, it moves forward every week, and everything listed in the changelog is actually in the game.

Kanarion runs in your browser, no install. Come try it, break everything, and tell me what's wrong on Discord: that's literally how the game gets better.

See you next time,

Marc