State of the Game (2021)

In 2017, I made the decision to spend some of my spare-spare time improving MonBre. It had some egregious bugs that needed fixing and some easy improvements that could be made to greatly improve the experience. Four major updates and a few minor ones later, I consider the game to be borderline playable. I'm not embarrassed by its state. I think it's paced well enough and I am still proud of it, and myself for making it, even if I have many regrets with how I coded it.

I had hoped this effort would lead to me truly finishing MonBre: adding the last city, some mobs in the surrounding area, and writing a big juicy thank-you to anyone who beat the last boss. Sadly I just cannot justify spending any more time working on MonBre for the next few years, and possibly forever. For game development, I'm entirely focused on my next game, an open-world multiplayer fantasy roleplaying game. In my personal life, well, I have a five-month old baby girl! And a ten-year-old son, and many other duties that require my attention. Working on MonBre's rebirth updates was often frustrating and (fully accepting this before I started) had only a very small audience that would actually enjoy it. It's time to once again freeze development.

The COVID bonus is now a Thank You bonus. You have a 1% chance to get 50 bux per trainer level. No other updates have been made since last Spring.

The Future

I've thought about open-sourcing MonBre but there isn't anything worth sharing and there are probably some terrible exploits lurking in its depths. I wouldn't mind sharing the source code with anyone who wants to improve the game, but I'm not going to start looking around for someone to do so, and managing all that comes with that. If anyone is serious about helping, they can mail Vael@tinydark.com about it.

I love the monster game genre and I want to make a spiritual successor to MonBre some day. Right now I'm sitting on a very impressive game engine that's only going to become more impressive as I develop more games. You can check out https://tinydark.com for the latest news on what I'm on working on, and you're always welcome to join our Discord: https://discord.gg/tjYTUGQ

Knowing me, I'll finish MonBre some day, probably just by way of finishing the remaining content off.

Finally, we do have an avenue for buying premium membership. https://ko-fi.com/monbre For $5, you'll get a red supporter star near your name. Your avatar will also get some cool glasses. It's a manual process, so allow me a day or two to process it.

See you in a few years, maybe.
Vael

I've just added the notorious "I am not a robot" checkbox to sign up because, well, bots were signing up. I also removed broken Twitter code from the index and fixed the player activity on the front page: turns out it was ignoring anyone who didn't have an email set.

My mother recently visited me and brought 20 years worth of saved memories with her. Here are some pics from my early years of wanting to make a monster game. I ended up doing that in 2007! My computer broke in 2006 and all I had to play was old unfinished Playstation games for six weeks. Came up with the design for MonBre during that time.

https://imgur.com/gallery/bonWjQx

sad. I can't actually code, sadly. I would help the game, but..

I've just tested the waters of PHP 8.1 across all my software, MonBre included. It wasn't too troublesome to resolve most of the issues I found, but I'll still need to sit down and go through everything when the time comes for 8.1.

I've removed some Flash (swf) objects from the game, such as on the gameover screen, and I improved the visuals of the explore and "explore skills" pages with new borders. I also removed both the World Map and Mini Map links from explore.

[edit March 2nd, 2024] CRITICAL BUG FIXES. I fixed splicing and hatch-related bugs, as well as the bug that prevented joining PvP. I'm sorry to say fixing people's accounts manually is confusing and time-consuming... and a few people's accounts seem to have broken when they spliced.

We recently moved to PHP 8.2 and while I tested where I could, there were some errors that were reported to me with the training center and two "visual aid support" views. So those were fixed. :} We've seen some activity lately, and I hope if you were a new player affected by these bugs, you'll decide to keep playing.

Regarding the future of MonBre, there are no plans to develop it but I do assume that before the end of my game design career (that is: my life) I will create a successor to MonBre. I already have a great name for the game. When I do, I imagine the following things will be true:

* It will be a pleasurable grind, and the same loop of leaving town to explore and return with stronger monsters/minor loot will be present

* The SRP system, possibly even named exactly that because I love the brutalist nature of Stat Raising Points

* Splicing for sure

* Engagement from the breeder in battle; ideally I'd like to not only be able to train your monsters, but yourself as well, acting in a variety of roles of your choosing: commander, fighter, bard

* Open world RPG with a start-to-finish story/campaign

* Multiplayer interaction

I had a brainstorming session with ChatGPT and the results were decent for a ghost or spirit theme of monster breeding. The game would likely be darker but more mature. Anyway, that's where MonBre 2 is at right now.

If you ever find your account "stuck," such as if you had a bad splicing from before I fixed it, our player Garr has a solution:

"I worked around the splicing by changing lineup, adding the monsters' numbers and going to the monsters page."