Development

In late 2009 a game development competition called Assemblee began on the TIGSource forums. The competition was broken into two parts:

• Part 1: Artists and musicians created graphics, sound effects, and music.
• Part 2: Developers used the winning art from Part 1 to create a game. RotMG came in third place.

Many games were made for this competition using these free non-commercial resources. You’ll find some of these still out there today. WildShadow purchased commercial licenses for the works they used and continued working on the game long after the competition was over. Read more about it from Alex himself, here.

Original credits:

• Design and programming: Rob & Alex, Wild Shadow Studios
• Additional design and programming: Amit Patel
• Art: Oryx, Geeze, Oddball
• Sound Effects: John Nesky, feeblethemighty, Big Lon, boomlinde
• Music: Craig Stern

Programming information (from Amitp):

• Simple map generation is for the original maps, builds 38-99.
• Polygonal map generation is for the current maps, starting at build 100.
• Here are some other RotMG-related test projects:
  
  • Monster distribution was a proposed alternative to the original “monsters reproduce” model. It uses a hierarchy of monsters (scouts surround minions surround henchmen surround bosses). Alex did rewrite the monster distribution at some point, but not exactly to this proposal.
  • Temple generation was the original way “set pieces” were generated in RotMG (reload to get a new one). Alex started with these and then added lots of his own.
  • Voxelman was for using voxels for the RotMG characters. We decided it wasn’t worth it. -
  • Dungeon was an experiment in adding “triggers” to dungeons, so that walking over a pressure plate would open doors, spill acid, etc. In the end we decided these might not be that interesting in a multiplayer setting.

On June 20, 2011 Realm of the Mad God was released on the Chrome Web Store. This was the first time RotMG was made available outside of the official, original website.

On October 31, 2011 the game was released on Kongregate.

A new developer, Willem Rosenthal, was hired sometime in November or December 2011 and was tasked with creating artwork and design.

On February 20, 2012 the game was released on Steam.

WildShadow announced on June 18, 2012 that they had been acquired by Kabam. Alex and Rob both departed to explore new challenges while Willem remained with Kabam and continued developing new content until his departure on June 21, 2013.

Kabam announced on June 23, 2016 that Realm of the Mad God was being “transferred” to Deca Games. At the same time Deca Games posted a more detailed announcement on their blog. The game officially re-launched under Deca’s complete control on July 21, 2016.

Because Adobe will no longer support Adobe Flash, the existing engine of RotMG, the game was ported to the Unity engine on April 15, 2020. The “remastered” version is called Realm of the Mad God Exalt.