A Love Letter to Online Worlds

We’re building Catalyst — a multiplayer RPG universe where every world is connected and your character travels with you between them. Some of those worlds are built by us, some by you. We’re building the tools to make that possible, so there’s always something new to discover, whether you’re someone who creates or someone who just wants to play.

This is the Catalyst dev blog, and this is the first post.

Why online worlds matter

We grew up in games like RuneScape, Club Penguin, Tibia, MapleStory, Habbo Hotel, and World of Warcraft. At their core, these games are elaborate chat rooms with a world attached. They’re social places. For a lot of people, they become a third place - a home away from home - and sometimes where you find your closest friends. People who actually understand who you are.

Catalyst is about that. Community and connection. A place to spend time with people you care about, find like-minded people who share a niche interest, and build something together. Once you’ve got your crew, Catalyst is your playground. It grows and evolves with your interests. And if you can’t find an experience that matches what you’re looking for: make one.

We want Catalyst to be the place that keeps your friend group together. Shared experiences, shared worlds. Your comfortable place.

Standing on the shoulders of mods

There’s a long history of incredible games coming out of modding communities. DOTA, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Chivalry, DayZ, Killing Floor, Red Alert, PUBG, and Auto Chess - all started as mods.

Beyond that, there’s GTA Roleplay, Project M, SAMP (San Andreas Multiplayer), JC2-MP (Just Cause Multiplayer), fan-made Pokemon games, and countless total conversion mods that people have poured their hearts into over the years. People build these things because they love the worlds and want to put their own spin on them.

We want to create the conditions for this to happen for MMOs and online RPGs. Right now, making an MMO is expensive, risky, and slow. That’s why so few people try, and why the ones that ship tend to play it safe. We think lowering the cost of experimentation is the way to fix that.

What we’re building

We’re building a game platform, game servers, and a game client from the ground up. Custom networking, custom map format, custom entity system - all designed around one idea: modding comes first.

Every world on the platform, including our own first-party games, serves as inspiration and a base for remixes. The assets are available for reuse. If you like a game on Catalyst and want to make a small change, or a big one, you can. That’s the whole point.

Catalyst is one big connected gaming universe, with a curated set of tools for creating multiplayer RPGs: MMOs, ARPGs, turn-based games, MOBAs, and anything in between. Everything is multiplayer-first - how game logic works, how entities behave, how networking runs, how maps and terrain are structured - all built to support seamlessly connected online worlds.

The tools

Beyond the game universe itself, we’re building a modding platform: a map editor, dialogue and quest editors, a game economy manager, and a prefab studio for things like world objects, spell effects, entity behaviours, monsters and NPCs. Everything you create can be published to a shared registry for others to reuse.

If you’ve always dreamed of making an MMO, Catalyst gives you a real path to doing it and a community to share your creations with.

What to expect from this blog

We’ll write about the technical problems we’re solving, the design decisions we’re making, and the progress along the way. Stick around to learn more, lets do this together.

- Jake