Hello everyone!
A few months ago, in one of our previous Producer’s Letters, we announced that one of our top priorities on the roadmap was to make Realm of the Mad God future-proof. With the sunset of Flash, this essentially translated into investigating alternatives for the game past 2020.
We then went on to unveil that our choice had been set and that the new client would be rewritten, from scratch, in Unity: a powerful game engine that has proven its amazing capabilities over the years. In our very last Producer’s Letter, we expanded on the topic and shared with you some details about the progress that was made since the Unity project started.
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Today, we are happy to announce that we have staffed two additional developers and they are fully set up and working hard on the Unity project. In addition to being able to talk about what we have been up to, we will actually also be able to show you some footage of where we are at with the Client right now in the Realm Remastered Unity Port - Phase I trailer.
As announced, we have also released an in-game Realm Remaster Support Campaign through which you support the Unity project and get your name engraved on the wall of fame in game forever. Once you unlock the campaign, you can collect exclusive Supporter Rewards by spending gold or by farming Nexus Fragments and Crystals in the Realm!
Before going into the details of the Realm Remaster Support Campaign and how you can help shape the future of the game, we wanted to give you a full recap of the project and what it means for Realm, for you and for us as a company.
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A Realm Remastered - The Unity Project
The choice of Unity
We have said it many times over the past: we are in it for the long run and Realm of the Mad God is the cornerstone that kickstarted our company as well as the team. We have and always will view it as our core.
We knew that taking over a Flash game would bear the risk that the technology, on top of becoming more and more obsolete in the gaming industry, would eventually lose support from its creators and other key third party companies. For us back then, the question was never if that was going to happen but rather when it will happen.
Other than the necessity to change client technology to one that is heavily supported in the industry, performance is a key incentive to the port to Unity. The new client will significantly improve performance and longevity of the game.
Porting the Game - Definitely a remaster
We are essentially rewriting the entire client from scratch in Unity and C# - thus calling it a remaster. Nothing from the Flash implementation will remain and the only things that are carried over will be sprite sheets and XML.
As you can imagine, this is a big project - even if we do enjoy the jokes about the fact that we should be able to do it in our basement, with two people and a microwave. We want the game to feel and play identically which means that we are already working within the boundaries of what the current game is. Of course, we also want to add a lot of improvements made possible by Unity such as visual effects, camera management, performance, UIs and of course playing on full screen.
See it a bit as if you would renovate your house and move back in after it has been refurbished: everything feels familiar and you know your way around but it feels fresh and beautiful… and the leaking roof has finally been fixed. This is pretty much the result we are aiming for with the port.
Getting rid of legacy issues and starting off this new adventure with a clean code is our top priority with this project. We are regularly re-evaluating solutions and refactoring our work, building on solid foundations and as little tech debt as possible.
Team and Resources
We are not planning to stop development on the current game while porting the game to Unity and we actually expect to even have a time of running them in parallel. This was outlined in our past communications and still holds true.
This means that we went ahead and hired additional developers in the past months to form an extra team for the port project. We now have 2 full time Unity developers working on the client and also hired an additional backend developer in order to increase our capacity and prepare the game for what we hope will be a massive relaunch success for the game we love. And since a kid can dream, maybe we will go on to conquer the console space once we are live with Unity.
Remaster Support Campaign
This one was a long time in the making and we went back and forth on it quite a bit. There were just so many options. Should it be a donation only system? Should it incorporate game play? Should it reward the everyday gold spend?
At first we wanted to keep it donation based as that would allow us to allocate the proceeds directly to the remaster project. At the same time we felt that at its core, the campaign is about supporting the game - yes that means finances to a certain degree but it also means engagement, possibly the most important component to us.
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People were asking us, why do this at all? We honestly asked ourselves that question and came up with the following answers that we wanted to share with you:
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It’s a historic moment from the point of view of where the game came from and what it can become
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Looking for validation that players agree that this is the right step for the product
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Support the expanse of the team. These things always have to make business sense
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Give people the chance to etch themselves into the game so that they can share in the credit of making it all possible
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In the Shop, you are now able to access a new tab called “Campaign”.
The Campaign works as follows:
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Donate Gold to join the Campaign and unlock the feature (points only start counting after unlocking the campaign)
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Any Gold spent after unlocking the campaign in the mystery/package shop or purchases in the nexus will count towards collecting points throughout the Campaign in order to unlock “Supporter Ranks”.
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As an alternative route, you can collect and use Support Items that you will be able to find in specific locations around the Realm
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If you wish to go through the campaign faster or feel the desire to do something akin to donating gold to the cause, then you can use the boost option to unlock tiers directly for gold - any gold used for boosts will give you 2x the amount of points
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Receive rewards associated with each of the Rank upon completion
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Note that for technical reasons, NOT counted are: vault unlocks, charslot unlocks, class unlocks, skin unlocks, potions from inventories, pet yard features
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Now we know that donating gold to unlock the campaign in the first place will get some people’s spider senses tingling, so we would like to explain it right away, since we also went back and forth on that one.
In essence we wanted to make sure that not every newly opened and botting account can get onto the wall of fame. That would discredit our loyal supporters in our eyes. Thus we decided for a very low amount of gold to be paid after which you can go through the tiers by game play or spending depending on your preference. Of course the gameplay part will be quite the challenge, we want to be fully transparent there. Otherwise the rewards would be worth nothing.
The other thing we want to further explain is the limited character glows. We want this one to be very exclusive and reserved for people who are as convinced about the project as we are, so it will be next to impossible to achieve this rank with only collecting shards and crystals. In order to gain access to the exclusive purple character glow, you will have to reach a total of 100.000 pts within the duration of the Campaign.
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We want to sincerely thank all of you that have stuck with us and given us such great support over the past 2+ years. We consider ourselves lucky to have such a supportive Community and are looking forward to shaping the future with you.
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R4 & The Deca Team
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Rewards detail (cumulative):
Rank 1 - 500 pts (Unlocking Campaign)
- Your name on the Wall of Fame at the end of the campaign and in the Unity client’s credits section
- Automatically unlocked when joining the campaign
Rank 2 - 6.000 pts
- Beta access to the Unity Client
- Unity Supporter Vanity Item (Energy Signet)
- Mystery ST Chest(s) x 1
Rank 3 - 13.500 pts
- Unity Supporter Pet Skin
- Mystery ST Chest(s) x 2
Rank 4 - 24.000 pts
- Exclusive Supporter Skins
- Mystery ST Chest(s) x 5
Rank 5 - 39.000 pts
- Exclusive Purple Chat color
- Exclusive Deca Djinja Ninja skin
- Mystery ST Chest(s) x 10
Rank 6 60.000 pts
- Exclusive Supporter Gravestones
- Mystery ST Chest(s) x 20
EXTRA: Players achieving 100.000 pts
- Limited exclusive purple character glow
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Additional details:
- Supporter Gravestones and Chat color are applied immediately after unlocking the corresponding Ranks (refresh the client if not).
- The Exclusive Supporter Glow will not activate when reaching 100.000pts and will be activated in the coming days.
- There is no toggle option for chat color and gravestones, activating them is permanently affecting the account (for now).
