Coloniser is a large-scale online real-time strategy game set on the hostile alien world of Hastaris. Players crash-land and must fight to survive, expand, and dominate across persistent matches that can last up to ninety days. Blending colony building, resource management, technological progression, and tactical warfare with diplomacy, the experience challenges players to balance short-term survival with long-term ambition as they develop settlements, expand territory, and command hundreds of units across a shared world.
Designed as a deeply competitive MMORTS, Coloniser places equal emphasis on large-scale strategic decision-making and individual mastery. Its evolving world, flexible playstyles, and persistent server structure create an experience shaped as much by player-driven politics and alliances as by raw military strength.
Challenge
Developing Coloniser presented a unique set of challenges driven by the project’s ambitious scope as a large-scale MMORTS. One of the primary technical hurdles was supporting a significantly higher concurrent player count than traditional RTS titles. With matches designed to accommodate up to 32 players, every layer of network traffic required careful optimization to maintain stability, responsiveness, and performance under constant load. Reducing the volume of data transmitted between clients and servers was critical to ensuring smooth real-time gameplay at scale.
Following extensive evaluation, Photon Fusion was selected as the networking solution best suited to these demands, offering the reliability and performance necessary for fast-paced, data-heavy real-time strategy gameplay.
Equally complex was the challenge of designing long-duration servers. Coloniser’s matches were envisioned to persist for 30 to 90 days, introducing an uncommon level of persistence within the RTS genre. Maintaining competitive integrity across such extended timelines required careful systemic balancing, ensuring that players joining later could still compete meaningfully with those present from the outset. Preserving fairness, progression, and strategic depth over weeks of play became one of the most intricate aspects of the project and a central focus for the design and systems teams.
Solution
Magic Media supported Coloniser across all stages of production, delivering a comprehensive co-development effort spanning art, design, and engineering.
Our teams produced the majority of the project’s concept art, covering characters, buildings, props, and environments. In 3D production, we delivered over 22 unique characters, more than 30 buildings, and a broad range of environmental and set-dressing assets, all developed with custom textures and materials. Animation work covered nearly all character and building animations, with future plans in place to replace remaining placeholder assets. Visual effects were developed primarily in-house, supported selectively by asset packs, while our tech art specialists implemented advanced shader solutions to enhance both visual fidelity and performance.
On the frontend, we implemented core RTS gameplay systems including camera controls, AI behavior, grid and building mechanics, resource management, in-game chat, and diplomacy features. On the backend, we engineered a scalable infrastructure hosted on AWS, incorporating a custom server scheduler designed to reduce hosting costs by dynamically switching servers between Always On and On Demand states. We also developed the backend systems that act as the game’s central logic layer, ensuring consistency, scalability, and stability across long-running matches.
Our level design team created multiple playable maps, sculpting terrain, painting textures, defining biomes, and refining layouts through iteration and player feedback. In parallel, our UX/UI designers crafted the complete player-facing experience, including menus, settings, in-game HUDs, minimaps, and world maps, ensuring clarity and usability despite the game’s systemic depth and complexity.
Result
Cantos Games praised Magic Media’s end-to-end execution across art, design, and development, highlighting the seamless integration of complex systems into a cohesive and scalable experience. Coloniser continues to evolve through ongoing community feedback, balance refinements, and new content updates, supporting a growing and engaged player base while reinforcing its position as a distinctive entry in the MMORTS space.
