The History of MilMo: 2008

Hello MilMonauts,

Not so long ago we celebrated the happy fact that MilMo BR had been online for one year! Now it's time for a blog series about the history of MilMo, both BR and EN. We're going to look back and see what's happened since the early start in 2008 when MilMo took it's first baby steps towards the beautiful, fun, social MMO it has become today. We have come a long way since the very first beta versions of the game!

Pre-Beta: 2008

First things first. Junebud was formed back in the summer of 2008 when some of the veterans from the traditional PC game industry decided they had grown tired of making war games. The web 3D games were an emerging market and the Unity game engine had just arrived to the scene. The free to play busies model seemed to be working nicely on the Asian market. Junebud wanted to create something truly unique and fresh, so we combined the power of streaming with our very own art direction and the free to play model. This mix was named Million Morning, and eventually got the name "MilMo".

Basic movement tests of the avatars. Do you recognize Lightmill Island?

A lot ideas for current islands were born back then. Some of you might recognize Lightmill Island from these old pictures. The MilMo art direction is a bit rough, but it's there. The hardest part was to make all the basic things work, like the laws of physics, movement and collision. When making a video game you need to construct all these things that naturally exists in the real world.

A early boy avatar. These are some of the first pictures ever taken inside MilMo.

As you can see the sky is still pretty realistic and the landscape is just basic blocks and shapes, but the feeling is there. We knew pretty early this game was going to be about exploring. We wanted to create a mix between Zelda, Super Mario and Maple Story.There should be puzzles, questing, a social aspect, enemies to fight and secrets to unveil.

A screen shot from an early promotional video.

A lot of concept art was created during this time to determine the right look and feel of the game. Concept art is great, it unites the team's perception of how the game should look and feel. It serves as a guide line for the level artists.

Character concepts for avatars.

We experimented with more realistic looking avatars, but soon settled for the cartoony ones. We aimed for a style of old western comics, nor manga or anime. Many members of the Junebud Crew enjoy drawing and reading comics such as X-Men, Spider Man and the old Super Man, which is shown in the crisp art direction. 

During 2008 the Junebud Crew slowly grew and recruited new members, a mix of old game developer veterans and handpicked new talent from the game development program at the University of Skövde in Sweden. We made all the necessary preparations for moving in to our very first office. In the early beginning all meetings were held on phone and by web cam, since the crew members were spread across the country. That required a lot of discipline and good communication. Today we have an open work space at Junebud, which promotes the communication and reduces the necessary paper work.

Next part of the "History of MilMo" will be focusing on 2009, which was the year things really started to fall in to place and we released the closed beta after 1,5 years of hard work.

See you next time,

Sara and Ivan