Devlog

Every few weeks another indie studio announces their "revolutionary MMO." There's a Kickstarter with a $500K goal and 47 stretch goals, concept art of a vast open world, a roadmap that goes to 2029, and a Discord with 50,000 people waiting for a game that doesn't exist yet. It's one of the weirdest patterns in the industry and it never stops being funny.

So we made an actual MMO. In one day. It's called Null Online.

You're a single pixel in an infinite 3D void. You can move, see nearby players on a proximity radar, and chat. That's the whole game. You cannot fight, trade, quest, or do anything else. The feature list is four items long and one of them is "exist."

Here's the thing though - it actually works. Persistent accounts. Real-time sync. Your position saves between sessions. It's a real, functioning MMO that you can play right now, for free, in your browser. It's 2.7 MB. Technically it delivers on more launch-day promises than most crowdfunded MMOs ever do.

There's no battle pass, no premium currency, no season pass. The game is free. But - and this is important - there is a $3 Supporter Pack. It turns your pixel gold. And your name. That's the entire microtransaction. One cosmetic, three dollars, gold pixel. We figured if every MMO needs a cash shop, ours should have exactly one item in it. It's our love letter to the premium cosmetics industry.

The joke aside, we actually did want to see what the minimum viable shared world feels like. Turns out a dot, a direction, and the knowledge that the other dots are real people is enough to make a space feel alive.

People have already found each other out there in the void, talked for a while, and drifted off. Some just float alone. Both feel right.

Null Online is a finished game. No roadmap, no early access, no season passes. It does exactly what it's supposed to do and nothing more. You can play it at nullonline.com.

Submitted both the main Starboys project and the Starboys Playtest to Steam this week. The store page, build, everything - it's all in their review queue now.

Not a ton to say about it honestly. Filled out the forms, uploaded the builds, hit submit. Now it's just waiting. Steam's review process takes however long it takes.

The playtest build is the same alpha we've been running locally, just packaged up properly for Steam's infrastructure. Once it's approved we can start inviting people in through Steam directly instead of sending builds around manually.

Small step but it feels like a real one. More soon.

We're going to GameOn Expo this year, which means we need an actual booth. Spent the last few weeks buying TVs, figuring out how to transport everything, and making sure we have enough controllers.

Building a booth from scratch is its own kind of project. Cable management, signage, making sure the systems don't overheat in a convention hall. We're learning as we go.

The goal is simple: show up, let people play Starboys, and see what happens. If you're at GameOn, come find us.

Figured the new year was a good time to look back at where Starboys started and where it's at now.

The core of the game is the gravity system - walk on walls, ceilings, flip mid-fight. Getting that to feel right took a while. We went with FishNetworking for multiplayer, rebuilt the player controller more times than we'd like to admit, and eventually landed on something that feels good.

From there: new character model, basic level design, a few game types, and interactables like jump pads, bounce walls, gravity zones. The kind of stuff that makes arena shooters fun to mess around in.

Lots of playtesting - in person, online, yelling at each other, finding bugs. It's been a good way to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Still a lot to do, but it's playable and it's fun. That's the part that matters.

Started digging into the narrative side of Bloodrust this week. The visual direction is feeling solid enough that it's time to figure out what actually happens in this world.

The setting has a tone - dark, corroded, heavy - but tone isn't story. Spent a lot of time just writing. Lore documents, character backgrounds, faction motivations. Most of it won't end up in the game directly, but it shapes everything. When you know why a place exists, you design it differently.

The goal isn't a wall of text the player has to read. It's the opposite - a world that feels like it was here before you showed up and will keep going after you leave. The story should be in the environment, the item descriptions, the things NPCs say offhand. Not a cutscene.

Still early. But the world is starting to feel like a real place and not just a collection of cool-looking assets. That's the part that matters.

Been kicking around an idea for a while and finally started putting real work into it. Bloodrust - dark fantasy action RPG, heavy atmosphere, no hand-holding.

Right now it's all foundation work. Setting up the project structure, experimenting with art direction, figuring out what the game actually looks like. Tried a bunch of different visual approaches before landing on something that felt right - dark, gritty, almost gothic. Lots of texture, lots of shadow. The kind of thing where the environment itself feels hostile.

Got some early concept work and design mockups together. Nothing playable yet, just establishing the aesthetic so everything built on top of it is consistent from the start. It's tempting to jump straight into gameplay systems but getting the vibe locked in early saves a ton of rework later.

More to come on this one. It's going to be a big project.

Started prototyping the multiplayer for what's becoming Starboys. The core idea - arena shooter with full gravity manipulation - only works if it's multiplayer, so netcode had to come first, not last.

Went with Fish-Networking (FishNet) for the networking layer. Spent the last couple weeks just getting two players connected, synced, and moving around in the same space without everything falling apart. Sounds simple. It's not.

The gravity stuff makes it extra fun because players can be on any surface at any orientation. Syncing position is one thing. Syncing "which way is down for this specific player" is a whole other problem. Got the basics working though - two clients, real-time movement, no desync. It's ugly and there's no game yet, but the hard part is proving the concept and the concept works.

Next up is building an actual player controller on top of this that feels good. Networking first, fun second. Or ideally both at the same time.

This is the first entry so might as well explain what's going on. I'm starting a game studio. It's called Signal Spike Games.

Spent the last few weeks getting all the boring-but-necessary stuff in order. Business registration, setting up accounts, getting the infrastructure ready so that when actual development starts, I'm not scrambling to figure out where things live. Domain, hosting, source control, project management tools - all the unglamorous foundation work that nobody talks about but everything depends on.

The plan is pretty straightforward: make games I'd want to play. No investors, no publishers telling me what to build. Just me, some contractors when I need them, and a lot of late nights. I've been making stuff my whole life and this felt like the right time to go all in on it.

I've got a few ideas already in various stages of "scribbled in a notebook." More on those soon. For now, the studio exists, the lights are on, and it's time to get to work.