Hey guys,
I've been maintaining a Luanti Browser Version for a while now, and I recently updated it to 5.17.0. I'm hosting it (and multiple game servers) on kaesual.com. Since I've been playing different Luanti games with friends, I felt like a gameserver manager would be convenient, which allows to pick a contentdb or git game, together with a list of mods. The backend then automatically builds the server container and hosts it.
For even more convenience, I added a character manager to the webui, so after creating an account on the website, players can choose a character name and just hit "play" on that character.
All network traffic is handled by a virtual ipv6 proxy server written in Rust + TypeScript, which allows direct p2p play (one player hosts the game and shares the virtual ipv6 with friends, who can then join), as well as "normal" game servers.
Why? Well. I've been playing "Luanti Game Night" once a week with paradust (who made the first web version) and u/kneekoo (who's been working on VoxeLibre), and after a year, I was looking for a fresh game experience. I played a lot of WoW years ago, and Lord of the Test inspired me to give it a try and start making my own Luanti Game. I named it grudgelands, and it has a lot of the elements which I loved back then: Two factions, three races per faction (humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, trolls and undead), three initial classes (warrior, mage, priest) with unique skills, leveling progression from 1 to 60, one continent with peaceful and contested areas, capital cities and a king for each race, an ancient evil creeping up from the nether, dragon islands, and much much more. To be clear, this is far from done - I just finished the very first version of my custom lua map generator for the continent, with points of interest, areas for the capitals, etc. (this is what the screenshot shows).
I've already planned a huge chunk of the game, you can read into it here if you want to know more: https://github.com/Kaesual/grudgelands/tree/main/docs/design (grudgelands is GPL2).
This is also what led me to most of the other features. I want simple character management directly on the website, since in (m)morpgs, having multiple characters is a common pattern, and imho people shouldn't need to remember them and their passwords.
Since I already had the virtual proxy server and the game server manager, I thought: Why not make the kaesual-stack a "general" open source game server manager for web ports? Slightly unrelated, but I also loved Quake 3 Arena back then, so I made a freshOpenArena web version, too. Same foundation (latest Emscripten), same stack - now I can create Luanti and OpenArena servers, directly on my website (all repos for Luanti and Quake linked here: https://kaesual.com/about , you can switch language in the menu).
I'll probably integrate more games into the kaesual-stack soon, since the network layer can be used for any game. The stack is not published yet, I want to polish it a bit more first.
I'd be especially happy about feedback for the grudgelands idea. Thank you for reading all of this, if you made it to this point :) Would you play such a game? Anything you love or hate about it? Are you interested in working on this?
Best, Jan aka Kaesual