Paradise Gaming's Future
You've all been patiently waiting for updates on our Rage MP server, and over the past few months unfortunately I haven't had an update to give. We had great momentum over my Christmas break when I wasn't working, but then real life got in the way, I had to focus on real work and couldn't make any progress on our Roleplay server. Anyone who has worked on a long term project will know that it is quite difficult to pick back up momentum after you've spent time away from a project, and doubly so I've had a lot of time to think about whether I can really build a competitive role play project in Grand Theft Auto V mostly by myself.
All of our competition has many more developers and are way ahead of where we are. I do think that we have some good ideas to separate ourselves and do something different, but frankly those ideas are complex to build and there's good reason some of our competitors focus on many small features instead of these very large systems.
And so as of now I am officially pausing development on our Rage MP server. But fear not! Our little community still has a bright future. As you may have seen on our discord, I'm changing gears to focus on learning Unreal Engine development. I hope to release a few minigames in the near future as I get used to working in a real game engine and get my bearings.
Looking Forward
The next thing I hope to do is build a role playing game completely from scratch (with the help of some premade assets). For now I'm learning Unreal, but we'll be considering the alternatives and making a decision on specifically what engine later, knowledge transfers pretty well between the popular game engines. This will of course still be a very long process, but I hope to bring our community along by sharing prototypes along the way. Moving from Grand Theft Auto V to Unreal Engine has a lot of advantages:- We're out of the rat race of going up against other communities. No more of the drama.
- Our game doesn't become obsolete because a new Grand Theft Auto releases.
- Unreal Engine has a very large team working on it, with support, tutorials, and a thoughtful release schedule.
- We will have a lot more control over our game. Those core RPG features that we wanted to integrate into our server will be much easier to implement when we are using our own assets, building the core of the game itself, and can easily modify the map to support what we need.
- More of Paradise Gaming can be involved in the development! Unreal Engine has a fantastic editor where our non-coding staff can work on level design, UIs, animations, etc.
~ Daniel & The Paradise Gaming Staff
PS. To clarify, whatever game we build will continue to be free-to-play, funded by a similar GameCoin model you've been used to, and we will not be having a Kickstarter
