In case you’re not signed up on the e-mail list, I’m going to start posting these to the blog, too.  Read on for details.

And if you want to sign up for future newsletters, sign up here.

8BitMMO / Archive Entertainment Dev Newsletter!

8BitMMO is a free sandbox building game, an 8bit-style 2D massively multiplayer universe! It’s a giant construction sandbox — you can build a home or a castle in a persistent streaming world. Found and manage your own city. Fight evil Lawyercats and engage in player vs player battle.

To watch the trailer – click here.

To play the game – click here (or type http://8bit.vg in your browser)

If you prefer to read this newsletter in a browser, you can do so here.

New In-Game Enemy: Hipsters

There’s a new enemy – the Hipster.  He has 2 HP, and if you get too close, he’ll hit you in the face with a can of PBR.

If you’re making a dungeon, you can buy a spawner for him in the shop (he’ll spawn on a little coffee icon).

Build Your Own Dungeon

You can now purchase monster spawn points from the shop — effectively allowing you to build your own dungeons.  A couple players have already built some cool areas — be sure to check them out!

New Respawn Point

A new city has been created, ‘Root,’ which provides a simple starting area with links to commonly desired areas such as dungeons and the largest player hub cities.

From Root, you can access a few large player ‘Hub’ cities (cities with multiple links to other player towns).  It’s my hope that this new layout will allow you to get wherever you want to go faster, and will result in less vying for the handful of telepad spots in Origin.

Megamap Updated

The megamap has been updated with the latest & greatest in-game content.  Lots of cool things people have made — check it out.

Toggle PvP for your city

You can now type /townpvp in your towns to enable or disable PvP combat.

3x Free hats for Amazon customers

8BitMMO is now playable on Amazon.com’s new Game Connect service!  To celebrate, anyone who links up their Amazon account to their 8BitMMO account will get three free hats:

For details & step by step walkthrough, check out this blog post.

New Engine is Coming — Sign up to Beta

The client java engine we’re using currently has two key issues:  1) it’s a software rendering only engine, which can make it slow in situations with lots of on screen objects or running in a large resolution browser window.  And 2) it was officially abandoned by its creators as they move on to new things (best wishes to them in their future projects).

So, it’s time to switch to a new client engine.  I initially toyed with the idea of dropping Java entirely, but decided a full rewrite would take entirely too long.  So I’ve compromised, and am investigating a popular hardware accelerated Java engine libgdx, backed with the also popular lwjgl rendering system.

Progress has been good — most of the core systems are up and running in the new engine, and now the UI needs to be ported over.

For lots more details, check out this blog post.  If you want to beta test, please post in the comments section for that blog post.

Play it Now

Well, that’s it for now.  Even more exciting news to come soon.  As always, please follow along using one of the icons below for the latest updates, and click here play the game!