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Start things off with a MMO creation question!
Ridetsu
Member Posts: 41
Hello everyone... this is my first time posting on the forums; although i have been watchign the news and the site for about a month or so now. Sorry i haven't built my account much; but i'm frazzled from a car-wreck i just got into, and just want to try and get back on track..
Anyways... For the past year i have been actively working on an MMORPG with the hope that i can present it to a developing company, be hired on as staff, and work as a developer on it through the MMO and its expansions as a developer and level designer. My art skills aren't great, but i work on it a lot... anyways.. that is my aspiration and goal.
As i am comming to the end of my work (Something i have feared), i am beginning to wonder about things i have missed, and things i might have never even thought to do. Allow me to explain my process...
When i think up something that might be cool, i write it down.. from there, i add it to a specified dictionary of sorts (Such as a combat dictionary that will contain things like Melee, Ranged, and magic). From there, i write down the thought, and then think about it as a whole in the entire game. After thinking about inherent flaws and possible bugs - as well as people taking advtanges of it, i detail rules about it which will define it to the reader (hopefully a publishing company).
After that i detail everything i can about it, possibly give an example, and then go off of that in a ripple effect to define and describe other things... so if you can imagine, its kinda scattered, but centralized in the sense that you can find a subject easilly.
So... i am winding down... i have to describe and define items and equipment, and what their properties are, as well as a few other things.. and that is all i can think of...
Holy crap this is long..
ANyways.. here are thigns i have defined thus far...
- Battle system & a special concept (not telling
) - Area - the tutorial area and the ideas i have for other areas and the geeral explorable content.
- History – you know, RPG stuff.. the thing that makes it different than MMO... history, knowledge, ideas, concepts, and things along that line which makes it a story.
- Main Characters – those who move the plot along.
- What we are – What makes us different from
others, and generally about why this game is/will/can be better than others. - Plot – skeleton plot outline, with beginning details
- The main enemy.
So i guess, my question is this... what more should i do before presenting this to a company? I know about copywriting and such, and all that jizz-jazz... and please, if you're just going to say "It won't ever happen", feel free to. Although i respect your opinion, and know the odds, nothing makes me more determined than people telling me it can't ever happen.
So please.. tell me other things i might be missing and what i should develope to submit the idea to a videogame company... any help is greatly appreciated. I have been dissed and flamed in other forums - which is one reason i have been hesitant to join this one... i hope you all will be understanding, and i hope you all still have eyes after reading all that crap!
EDIT
Well, this hasn;t gotten much attention.. prolly because of when i posted it.. but also; i meant to add on:
If anyone can direct me to a place where there is a sort of 'outline' so to speak, of things that need to be created for an MMO to be looked at by a publishing company, it would be greatly appreciated if someone could throw a link my way...
Thanks!
*~~ One winged Angel
Comments
come on.. somebody here must be able to help me!
*~~ One winged Angel
"The one who begins with nothing, gains everything slowly."
If I had a pound for any time one of these posts came up I'd retire today!
So basically you've been working on something for a year, is this the first time you have asked for any feedback? Do you even have a website? Not trying to flame you or anything, but if companies that invest years into a game and spend millions can't get it right.. Anyway, just build a portfolio, show a company what you got and if you are lucky you might just convince them that what you got to offer is better than the other 99 Joe "Hey I've got a great idea for a mmorpg and want to get rich quick now" Public's. Good luck, you'll need it.
No annoying animated GIF here!
Well, I think you have missed the main point. Companies don't care about your MMORPG ideas. They care about money. Your presentation has to show them how your MMORPG is going to make them LOTS of money. It must go into it in detail. How you will attract initial subscribers. How you will keep your subscribers. How you will make even more money off your current subscribers. Nothing else is more important to Investors than how they are going to make loads of money. The faster, the better.
There is an old saying, "Ideas are a Dime a Dozen". Nothing could be more true than in the MMORPG industry. So, by all means, work on your ideas. But, realize that no one is interested. The '400 lb' gorrilla is already out there and everyone can see it. How is *your* MMORPG going to take a major bite out of it? If you cannot lay it out in detail, then I am afraid you are wasting your time.
Good Luck
Pretty much everyone who works at a gaming company has dozens of good ideas, only a few of which will ever see the light of day. They really don't need to pay someome outside of the company to come up with ideas, just using ideas from people within the company would provide more game concepts than they'd ever have time to actually implement. The fact that you're hoping to be a developer and level designer says to me that you have no game design experience at all, so what you have almost certainly doesn't come close to being a design document.
What you'll want to develop is an explanation of why they'd want whatever it is that you're going to submit. How is it going to make them more money than one of their own ideas, or be easier for them to implement that something an existing designer has been kicking around for a while, or in some way useful to them. Since game companies do not sit around going 'OK, we've got a big staff of designers, artists, and programmers, now we just need a couple of basic ideas for gameplay and a plot outline and we're good to go', you're going to need to come up with something pretty compelling to get their attention.
Sounds like you have one hell of a design document. I don't think I've ever heard of ANYONE taking a year to put together one though.
Unfortunately, you're going to need more than that. You're going to need a working prototype and a whole lot of concept art. You don't have to impliment all of the features into your prototype, just the main ones. The concept art will help with generating hype, an important factor when pitching to publishers and VCs. Your biggest hurdle is providing the netcode that runs the server. You can get cheap / open source 3D engines easily enough, but scalable, parallel-server netcode has to be handmade. If you can't show them that you can provide a stable server cluster, even over an office LAN, investors won't have much faith in the project.
I suggest that you try turning you're game into a regular multiplayer RPG and market it as an indie game before stepping into this particular "Land of Giants". Having a few well known indie titles will go a long way in boosting your cred with investors.
aren't the first, just so you know; so its not liek this is the first
time since i have started that i asked about it).
Look, i know the odds in this sort of thing. I know my chances are
hovering around near 0%, and i'm fine with that. Even if it doesn't
ever get published, at least i can live with knowing i have a project
to commit myself to - instead of sitting around day to day doing
nothing, and expecting nothing to come from anything i do. Nothing is
more important than a goal, and a dream, and thats what i have - as
corny as that may seem.
I am an avid artist, working on drawing out some of my ideas for the
levels, so i guess once i get a little bit better at that, it will be a
good point of refferance. Thank you for that hint of advice.
Now, my real concern is a working prototype. Unfortunetly i have not taken the time to get very deep in C++, or even much of the coding language at all. And when you say prototype, could you possibly elaborate on that idea of what comprises a working model?
And yes, Jimmy-Scythe, it is one hell of a design document... i'm actually serious about this. Look everyone, i wasn't born a month ago. I'v been right in your position, telling people they don't have a chance with what they got... but i at least gave them a chance to prove themselves through what they have. Nothing is more sad than what i usually see with these MMORPG people - they work on it for about a week.. and spend an overall ammount of possibly 4 hours on what they are hoping will earn them millions of dollars. This is crap, and not worth anyone's time.. if you want something, you have to work at it... especially with this sort of thing. Yes, ideas are a dime a dozen, but i'm not pushing an idea. I'm pushing an entire game, one which i will have done all by myself for the most part. My goal is to have everything figured out, and open for adjustment by the company when the time comes. I'm not just going to outline some battle system i want because i think it would be cool, i'm going to outline and develope the ideas and conceptsfor an entire game.
At any rate, i appreciate all of your kind words of inspiration, because that's what they are to me... that's how i'v been my entire life. Tell me it won't ever happen, and i just grin, because i work that much harder to make it hapen.... ah, i blame my father for that one... but at any rate, thank you for some of the ideas as well.
*~~ One winged Angel
A working prototype is kind of like a tech demo. You just have the bare basics of what you're game has. a few pre-made characters, some mobs roaming the scenery, and a town complete with shops and NPCs.
Since you're an artist, you should use Blender for all your character / mob models and decorative objects (tables, chairs, trees, rocks, etc.). You'll need an MD2 or MD3 converter for Blender, but those can be found pretty easily. You'll probably need Quark (Quake Army Knife) for interior areas like houses, dungeons, caves. And, since you're a beginner in programming, you'll probably want to use Blitz 3D or Dark Basic. They both work with MD2/3 file formats as well as Quake 3 BSP data. They're also both variants of Basic, so they're pretty easy to use for novices. If you wan't to go a little deeper and flashier, using C++ or C#, you could use The Torque Shader Engine. The cool thing is that Microsoft has let some indie developers distribute their games over XBox Live Arcade that were using this engine. If you want to go totally indie, you'll have to make the client for both PCs and Macs. I can't tell you how many indie studios have died because they forgot to do this.
There are some terrain heightmap generator programs out there, but I don't have alot of experience with them. I'm much more comfortable with hand tweaking terrain grids and then taking an "arial" greyscale render for the final heightmap. But that's just me.
Like I said before though, you should just start with a regulare multiplayer RPG rather than an MMORPG. I'm not saying that you can't pull this off, but you should walk before you run. Especially since you said yourself that you aren't a programmer. The netcode will ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY HAVE TO BE COMPILED INTO NATIVE CODE!! There are some open source networking libraries floating around, but I haven't used any of them and just don't trust them.
BTW, can someone move this to the Developer's Corner? I try to keep the geek speak out of this forum as much as possible.
If you can't delete it, just lock it up - or don't post here. If this thread is deleted, don't worry - all your kind words are saved on my computer so i can refer to soem of the advice for later on.
*~~ One winged Angel