So if you don't plan on paying for the work. What are you offering for the person doing all that work for you? A handshake? A smile? Coding and animations are not cheap. Unless you're offering a % of your company to that individual. Why would anyone do it for free? I'm not trying to be a argumentative, but realistic. Having some ideas and expecting someone else to build that game for you for free is pretty ridiculous. That's like drawing up plans for a house and expecting someone to provide their time, materials and labor for free. Just because you drew a pretty house.
Feel free to share some artwork you've made. That will be a first (your) step into showing that you really mean it.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy? Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
It would be awfully hard to find people to work on your project for free or peanuts at this stage. If you are serious about this, I believe you need to take risks. Come up with seed money to develop an MVP, then go crowdfunding to fund the core, and look for investors for expanding the game into your whole vision.
Constantine, The Console Poster
"One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves." - Carl Jung
Making a single or 5 player group game first is probably a better option, that you can manage far cheaper with fewer people on and test the concept. If that goes well it will be a good stepping point for getting more devs, investors and some initial cash besides that you can try out the combat mechanics and group dynamics in a setting easier to control.
Also, it will give you and the people you collect to gain some experience before staring on the big one.
If that is unacceptable, at least make a CORPG like Guildwars, that niche is rather open at the moment and it is far easier and cheaper to make then a full blown MMO. GW was made by a small handful of people for a humble sum and it did pretty well for itself.
Making a full blown MMO is really hard, that is why the majority of MMOs done pretty badly and if Vanguard showed us anything it was that no matter how cool mechanics you have a MMO still need competent coding to be a success. I doubt you can get much better coders then Sigil had working for free.
Also, if you already have a single player game or CORPG even if it is a humble one you can certainly do a crowdfunding project to make a similar MMO from people who like your gameplay.
Don't start too big, that is my advice. MMO companies have started really small before and grew big, CCP, Turbine and Arenanet all had humble beginnings and there are more companies like that. Heck, even EA started out with a handful of people back in the 80s.
Get something small, fun and playable out first and things will keep rolling.
Don't get discouraged by the naysayers, but it might be wise to start with a smaller scope to test and showcase your ideas.
While you try to find someone who has experience with one of the major game engines (Unity, Unreal Engine etc), you work on making your art come alive. The more assets you create, the faster you will be able to make a demo once you find someone who is used to working with one of those engines.
Maybe forget MMO for now and try to make a rogue like rpg based on your ideas and art first. This way it is a lot cheaper (or free with enough free time and other enthusiasts) to get something running. Then it might become easier to attract more ppl to work with you.
This can all be done with a few ppl, just not a MMO. Many type of games can be done without any investment (if you have enough time ofc), because you just need a few pc's to test them on. But a MMO has a very expensive backend and requires specific knowledge (hardware and programming) apart from being able to make a game. This requires an initial investment, which is maybe not a good idea if you never made a game before.
Another option could be using one of the more accessible game engines, like Gamemaker. This is for 2D though, but could be easier to start with on your own. Still, don't underestimate the amount of work needed to make something substantial.
I love your enthusiasm, man. I like you wanted to turn my fandom into development, though not on a grand MMO scale (but who knows, maybe one day). I had a background in coding so I downloaded Unity, fooled around, got some free assets and I made some cheap fun Android games that a whopping 100 people have played and learned that I hate Apple more than I ever thought I could (who nother story). Then I realized, crap, I'm getting the hang of this. So I started a real ambitious project for an Android game that I honestly think could be a good success. But i'm no artist, so I stopped trying to do art. Currently on my other monitor I have a level with 2 gun models, 1 barrel pasted twice, a lot of mobs that are actually one model from Adobe Maximo with 5 animations, and a lot of white polygons. I have been working for a couple months (part-time as a hobby) on what I am good at: coding. And I have a really really fun level that sometimes I have to stop playing and focus on working. It seems you might be with me up until now.
What I can't simply do is take a half baked game (not even close to half) with no art assets and manage to find someone who will do all of my art for me for free considering I don't even have a playable white polygon game yet. But what I can do is continue doing what I do: coding. Eventually I will have all my working systems, some horribly plain menus, and a boat load of feature creep to boot. Then I can get some more free assets, make a few visually repulsive demos that show off my mechanics and features and perhaps spark the interest (as others have suggested) of a art student willing to hone his craft to help pay for school instead of working at McDonalds, since my project is a mobile game, I can get by with student art/animations.
This is all to say, consider the art/programming flip of my scenario. I feel I am genuinely 6 months out from getting prototype demos out to art students (for a co-op mobile game). You have 10 races and 2 NPCs that are not animated for a MMO. That is a great start just like me, but you have a LONG time to go before you can interest a programmer. And that's OK. Stick with it. Finish your animations, add dozens more NPC models, create some buildings, decorative objects, then make sure you can produce good looking models with half the polygons for when your future programmer looks at you and laughs (unless you want people to have to go buy a new machine for what I assume are beautiful high res art assets, you are an artist afterall). Design a few dozen weapons, design some levels (zones) and remember that yes, seamless worlds still have "zones", they just load async and/or are hidden behind animations. Begin to answer some of the other questions people have presented about infrastructure and business plans. You need servers. MMOs cost money to run. Period. Some guys were throwing some hefty crap at you as if you are making a AAA game but the fact is a few guys can make an MMO with merely thousands in initial capital.
But the only way to do that without programming friends, is to finish your assets and really 'sell' your game to a bored programmer or finish your assets and get them on a kickstarter page so you can hire a real team. But better yet, is to use 'Prefabs'. Just like I grab some free or paid art assets off of marketplaces, so too can you get some free and paid plugins off of marketplaces (Unity and Unreal are GREAT for this) to get some basic working prototypes that don't necessarily have to have your game mechanics and features, but can make your assets come to life. You can even use certain services (GameSparks, or even AWS's Free Tiers) to connect to certain plugins to make functioning MMO prototypes without typing a single line of code (maybe just copy/pasting lol). Then you can really begin to pitch your game around the internet.
P.S. don't talke engines. Virtually nothing you have developed/designed is engine dependent. Your engine will be decided by the preferences of your programmer who you can't much argue with on 2 peanuts a day salary.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
oh so they actually launched but failed coz they only had good art. I only have the art because it's what I'm naturally good at whilst coding is hard, while a coder might say art is hard. I'm not depending on the art so much as I am on the design
I have what I imagine is a design document and will post it on kickstarter with everything else once it's all said and done and ok I will save up to hire those people but I'll still ask if anyone wants to do it for free first.
forgot to mention the coder really only needs to make some basic stuff for a gameplay video and slightly more complicated stuff. It wouldn't be a full blown functioning mmo. there will be the HUD, models and unique yet simple systems fully implemented then once the kickstarter is funded we'll just have to duplicate everything so theres enough for everyone and pay for everything else
Based on the fact that you did everything yourself you have probably not made an MMO that would interest many people unless it's made for phones.
Now if it's made for phones... the market is desperate for a decent MMO for phones.
i did everything myself with everyone in mind. you will very much be interested and it will be your favorite mmo once you see it and it's not for phones
So if you don't plan on paying for the work. What are you offering for the person doing all that work for you? A handshake? A smile? Coding and animations are not cheap. Unless you're offering a % of your company to that individual. Why would anyone do it for free? I'm not trying to be a argumentative, but realistic. Having some ideas and expecting someone else to build that game for you for free is pretty ridiculous. That's like drawing up plans for a house and expecting someone to provide their time, materials and labor for free. Just because you drew a pretty house.
% of the company sounds appropriate. mmos and houses are really different though
So if you don't plan on paying for the work. What are you offering for the person doing all that work for you? A handshake? A smile? Coding and animations are not cheap. Unless you're offering a % of your company to that individual. Why would anyone do it for free? I'm not trying to be a argumentative, but realistic. Having some ideas and expecting someone else to build that game for you for free is pretty ridiculous. That's like drawing up plans for a house and expecting someone to provide their time, materials and labor for free. Just because you drew a pretty house.
% of the company sounds appropriate. mmos and houses are really different though
In this case, you have drawn a picture of a house, but your not an architect, and you want people to build your house for you. Hate to say it but just having some artwork which may or may not be useful is not much of a contribution towards making a game, probably not even 5%, so do you plan to give whoever makes this game for you 95% of the company ?
As others are saying, ideas are not really valuable.
Most people on these forums have brilliant ideas. I can guarantee you, I could find 20 people, on MMORPG.com alone, who will have a better idea for an MMO than you.
What you need to do, is take your idea, create something valuable and show it to others. If you're not good at coding, then create a portfolio of your artwork. If you are not confident in your art, then learn to code and create a small demo of your idea.
This is not to discourage you, quite the opposite. What you have currently is simply not valuable enough to draw others in - you'll need to do more.
I'll tell you how I started, just to give you an idea of a possible path:
When I started University, I had a lot of time on my hands. I enjoyed roleplay, so I created a Starbound RP server on launch. It had a community of around 250. This showed me that if you put your passion into something, there is a chance people will come. Towards the end, donations were funding the project. I wasn't trying to scam people out of their money, it was completely voluntary to donate - if I wanted, I could have gotten a lot more. Starbound had poor server software, so we decided to move to Minecraft.
I had a bit of money saved on the side, so I rented a small server and started to put together some buildings on a server. I downloaded freely available plugins, made a website and had a super basic server. It had a small village, two quests and a couple of explorable places. I recorded a video of this and posted it on the Minecraft forums. The idea I was pitching was bigger than what I already had, but people could see something tangible - they could log in and test the server on their own. This gathered a couple of people who liked the vision and decided to tag along. One of the people was really dedicated, so I made him a co-founder. We had a small team of about 4 people.
As the project grew, so did the idea. We had dungeons, guilds, dynamic groups. I was lucky to come across two developers, who started making custom plugins for the server. I knew little about game development, so as the project went on, it was becoming apparent there are some design issues. You see similar issues with mainstream MMORPGs - our inability to produce enough content, people running out of things to do, etc.
After a year, development took a break. I was determined to address some of the issues that came up. I, like you, loved innovative ideas. So I came up with an idea to create a community-driven Minecraft server - one where players are a part of a bigger ecosystem. Most of the team went separate ways and I decided to try and make my own Minecraft plugins - that would give my project an advantage.
Over the summer, I learned the basics of Java coding. I started watching Youtube videos and simply reproducing what I saw. Then I started to tweak what the tutorials showed. And at the end of summer, I made a plot plugin. Players could rent a piece of the world and build something out of a pre-set list. I thought this was interesting enough, so I took the idea and went back to my previous Minecraft server developers. They thought it's pretty cool, so we started working on Minecraft Frontiers.
Over the next year, we grew to a team of 30. We had 5 amazing developers. The player community was somewhere around 350. Towards the end, we were rewriting Minecraft code and doing groundbreaking work. Things that other developers told me are impossible were basics to us - I'd go as far as saying we were the very top server in terms of innovative work. NPCs that were using neural networks to drive conversations. Custom soundtracks that were streamed right to the players from our servers. Economical systems that responded to every transaction made by a player. All of that was pretty innovative - and especially considering we didn't require a custom client. This was something I insisted on: I wanted a person to be able to simply start Minecraft and connect to our server, no additional download necessary.
At the end, I could see just how much work was needed from our developers. Being so innovative meant we needed 1 developer deconstructing Minecraft code pretty much full-time. The others were constantly struggling to push the boundaries of the engine - which is quite limited. Then Mojang released guidelines about monetization, which I did not agree with at all. I did not want to force people into paying, but these guidelines actually encouraged me to do that. So we took a few weeks to think about things. We decided to stop with Minecraft and move to other projects. I released all of our project to our team under an open license - it was fair they had access to their hard work.
I thought the idea we had with Minecraft Frontiers was really interesting. So I went ahead and started working with Unity. I did some simple prototypes for about 6 months and then I started dabbling in multiplayer, finally making a basic MMO demo another 6 months in. Again people enjoyed the idea. I took the 3 best team members from Minecraft and now we have a small team of 4, trying to bring our vision to life as a stand alone game.
I frequently consult these forums for ideas - people here have amazing thoughts about games. I hope one day I'll be able to show them my game and let them play it. But whenever I ask people for a bigger commitment than simple feedback, I make sure show something first.
The take home message is that you can get far with an idea and dedication - I've come extremely far. Looking back 5 years, I knew nothing about coding and leadership. Now here I am, knowing a fair bit about game development, actually working on something tangible and innovative. But as you can see from my story, whenever I wanted to gather people around my idea, I first made sure I have something to show them.
So if you don't plan on paying for the work. What are you offering for the person doing all that work for you? A handshake? A smile? Coding and animations are not cheap. Unless you're offering a % of your company to that individual. Why would anyone do it for free? I'm not trying to be a argumentative, but realistic. Having some ideas and expecting someone else to build that game for you for free is pretty ridiculous. That's like drawing up plans for a house and expecting someone to provide their time, materials and labor for free. Just because you drew a pretty house.
% of the company sounds appropriate. mmos and houses are really different though
In this case, you have drawn a picture of a house, but your not an architect, and you want people to build your house for you. Hate to say it but just having some artwork which may or may not be useful is not much of a contribution towards making a game, probably not even 5%, so do you plan to give whoever makes this game for you 95% of the company ?
if someone builds a house and no one wants to buy it then he loses everything he put into it but if he then came to me and I designed him a house that everyone wanted, yeah he could go on to build that design a million times over so long as I got 5% of the earnings and the design did not change so it would stay popular and I too could enjoy it. oh he has to build it for me for free
i'm not an architect but that's an argument from authority i know more about game deisng than i do politics
Why do you insist on making an MMO straight off the bat? Go try making a single player game that has 20 minutes of gameplay, there are tools that require no coding skills, just google it. Prove it to yourself you can bring any project to the finish line first and get some much-needed experience and insight doing it.
Seems you have passed the storefront and saw a model of a ship and want to make an aircraft carrier without ever making one of those remote-controlled models.
While I admire your enthusiasm, your efforts might be better served by starting with something much smaller. Ideas are a dime a dozen, we all have them. It is the skill of turning that idea into a functioning game that is the trouble.
I would recommend you start by learning more about the unreal engine. It does not actually require programming. Check out some videos of how their blueprint system works.
Most people who try game design fail because they plan for a much bigger game than they have skills to produce. I can guarantee you that making an MMO as your first game is a sure path to epic failure.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
Consider the fact that Stardew Valley, a little retro-graphics single player game, took the lone developer/creator about 5 years to complete. Now think about making something with much more complexity, taking into account the online/multiplayer aspect of an mmo. Then add in the fact that no one is going to donate extensive time and resources to code a game without compensation. As others have said, "good" ideas are a dime a dozen, everyone has them. It's getting from the idea stage to completed product stage that's the real challenge. And when your goal is to make an mmo, you're setting that bar at unrealistic heights.
Start off simple, outline the project with artboards and feature summaries. Make it into a professional looking presentation and then realistically assess the project in an objective manner. Determine what your resources are and what challenges you'll likely face at each stage. Think about your budget; you'll either need money to invest in the project or a lot of time and expertise. If you don't have one or the other, then move on to something more worthy of your time. You may find that your art and ideas work better in another format, like a comic series or short story/novella.
oh so they actually launched but failed coz they only had good art. I only have the art because it's what I'm naturally good at whilst coding is hard, while a coder might say art is hard. I'm not depending on the art so much as I am on the design
I have what I imagine is a design document and will post it on kickstarter with everything else once it's all said and done and ok I will save up to hire those people but I'll still ask if anyone wants to do it for free first.
forgot to mention the coder really only needs to make some basic stuff for a gameplay video and slightly more complicated stuff. It wouldn't be a full blown functioning mmo. there will be the HUD, models and unique yet simple systems fully implemented then once the kickstarter is funded we'll just have to duplicate everything so theres enough for everyone and pay for everything else
Complete failure. Way farther in development than your idea and it's done. No more. Oh I think they are trying but I also think it's stalled.
or follow the issues/development with Shroud of the Avatar.
or Camelot Unchained which is is much better shape but is delayed because they were working on their engine and discovered a variety of challenges that held them back.
I'm telling you, if you animate your art and throw it on kickstarter you are not going to get funded. Not at this point.
Players have been burned and are more wary about giving money to projects that they don't think will make it.
start. small.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Why is nobody treating this like the garbage troll thread it is? I can't be the only one that figured it out from the first post.
I think OP is young and simply doesn't understand games don't get built overnight.
Yeah I dont think it's a troll thread either. If you check his post history, he made a bunch of threads asking about how much money is needed to make an mmo, some ideas for mmo systems, etc., under the pretense of "just out of curiosity..." Seems he just has a sizable underestimation of what's involved in game development/design.
Seems he just has a sizable underestimation of what's involved in game development/design.
Agreed.
He seems to be focused on the art/dev side, when there are dozens of other components to think about for an MMO.
It's going to be a lot harder to find a sys admin who understands how to implement a distributed system or a good game designer who knows how to put together all the pieces than it will be finding a dev, for example. Devs are a dime a dozen. The other two are not.
Comments
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
It's no small task.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-to-create-a-mmorpg.58991/
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/But why do it have a troll smell around ?
MMO is long run game and you need people who know how to run it , it not singleplayer game where you can just make the game and sell it .
Also, it will give you and the people you collect to gain some experience before staring on the big one.
If that is unacceptable, at least make a CORPG like Guildwars, that niche is rather open at the moment and it is far easier and cheaper to make then a full blown MMO. GW was made by a small handful of people for a humble sum and it did pretty well for itself.
Making a full blown MMO is really hard, that is why the majority of MMOs done pretty badly and if Vanguard showed us anything it was that no matter how cool mechanics you have a MMO still need competent coding to be a success. I doubt you can get much better coders then Sigil had working for free.
Also, if you already have a single player game or CORPG even if it is a humble one you can certainly do a crowdfunding project to make a similar MMO from people who like your gameplay.
Don't start too big, that is my advice. MMO companies have started really small before and grew big, CCP, Turbine and Arenanet all had humble beginnings and there are more companies like that. Heck, even EA started out with a handful of people back in the 80s.
Get something small, fun and playable out first and things will keep rolling.
While you try to find someone who has experience with one of the major game engines (Unity, Unreal Engine etc), you work on making your art come alive. The more assets you create, the faster you will be able to make a demo once you find someone who is used to working with one of those engines.
Maybe forget MMO for now and try to make a rogue like rpg based on your ideas and art first. This way it is a lot cheaper (or free with enough free time and other enthusiasts) to get something running. Then it might become easier to attract more ppl to work with you.
This can all be done with a few ppl, just not a MMO. Many type of games can be done without any investment (if you have enough time ofc), because you just need a few pc's to test them on.
But a MMO has a very expensive backend and requires specific knowledge (hardware and programming) apart from being able to make a game. This requires an initial investment, which is maybe not a good idea if you never made a game before.
Another option could be using one of the more accessible game engines, like Gamemaker. This is for 2D though, but could be easier to start with on your own. Still, don't underestimate the amount of work needed to make something substantial.
What I can't simply do is take a half baked game (not even close to half) with no art assets and manage to find someone who will do all of my art for me for free considering I don't even have a playable white polygon game yet. But what I can do is continue doing what I do: coding. Eventually I will have all my working systems, some horribly plain menus, and a boat load of feature creep to boot. Then I can get some more free assets, make a few visually repulsive demos that show off my mechanics and features and perhaps spark the interest (as others have suggested) of a art student willing to hone his craft to help pay for school instead of working at McDonalds, since my project is a mobile game, I can get by with student art/animations.
This is all to say, consider the art/programming flip of my scenario. I feel I am genuinely 6 months out from getting prototype demos out to art students (for a co-op mobile game). You have 10 races and 2 NPCs that are not animated for a MMO. That is a great start just like me, but you have a LONG time to go before you can interest a programmer. And that's OK. Stick with it. Finish your animations, add dozens more NPC models, create some buildings, decorative objects, then make sure you can produce good looking models with half the polygons for when your future programmer looks at you and laughs (unless you want people to have to go buy a new machine for what I assume are beautiful high res art assets, you are an artist afterall). Design a few dozen weapons, design some levels (zones) and remember that yes, seamless worlds still have "zones", they just load async and/or are hidden behind animations. Begin to answer some of the other questions people have presented about infrastructure and business plans. You need servers. MMOs cost money to run. Period. Some guys were throwing some hefty crap at you as if you are making a AAA game but the fact is a few guys can make an MMO with merely thousands in initial capital.
But the only way to do that without programming friends, is to finish your assets and really 'sell' your game to a bored programmer or finish your assets and get them on a kickstarter page so you can hire a real team. But better yet, is to use 'Prefabs'. Just like I grab some free or paid art assets off of marketplaces, so too can you get some free and paid plugins off of marketplaces (Unity and Unreal are GREAT for this) to get some basic working prototypes that don't necessarily have to have your game mechanics and features, but can make your assets come to life. You can even use certain services (GameSparks, or even AWS's Free Tiers) to connect to certain plugins to make functioning MMO prototypes without typing a single line of code (maybe just copy/pasting lol). Then you can really begin to pitch your game around the internet.
P.S. don't talke engines. Virtually nothing you have developed/designed is engine dependent. Your engine will be decided by the preferences of your programmer who you can't much argue with on 2 peanuts a day salary.
If I want a world in which people can purchase success and power with cash, I'll play Real Life. Keep Virtual Worlds Virtual!
I have what I imagine is a design document and will post it on kickstarter with everything else once it's all said and done and ok I will save up to hire those people but I'll still ask if anyone wants to do it for free first.
forgot to mention the coder really only needs to make some basic stuff for a gameplay video and slightly more complicated stuff. It wouldn't be a full blown functioning mmo. there will be the HUD, models and unique yet simple systems fully implemented then once the kickstarter is funded we'll just have to duplicate everything so theres enough for everyone and pay for everything else
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Hate to say it but just having some artwork which may or may not be useful is not much of a contribution towards making a game, probably not even 5%, so do you plan to give whoever makes this game for you 95% of the company ?
Most people on these forums have brilliant ideas. I can guarantee you, I could find 20 people, on MMORPG.com alone, who will have a better idea for an MMO than you.
What you need to do, is take your idea, create something valuable and show it to others. If you're not good at coding, then create a portfolio of your artwork. If you are not confident in your art, then learn to code and create a small demo of your idea.
This is not to discourage you, quite the opposite. What you have currently is simply not valuable enough to draw others in - you'll need to do more.
I'll tell you how I started, just to give you an idea of a possible path:
When I started University, I had a lot of time on my hands. I enjoyed roleplay, so I created a Starbound RP server on launch. It had a community of around 250. This showed me that if you put your passion into something, there is a chance people will come. Towards the end, donations were funding the project. I wasn't trying to scam people out of their money, it was completely voluntary to donate - if I wanted, I could have gotten a lot more. Starbound had poor server software, so we decided to move to Minecraft.
I had a bit of money saved on the side, so I rented a small server and started to put together some buildings on a server. I downloaded freely available plugins, made a website and had a super basic server. It had a small village, two quests and a couple of explorable places. I recorded a video of this and posted it on the Minecraft forums. The idea I was pitching was bigger than what I already had, but people could see something tangible - they could log in and test the server on their own. This gathered a couple of people who liked the vision and decided to tag along. One of the people was really dedicated, so I made him a co-founder. We had a small team of about 4 people.
As the project grew, so did the idea. We had dungeons, guilds, dynamic groups. I was lucky to come across two developers, who started making custom plugins for the server. I knew little about game development, so as the project went on, it was becoming apparent there are some design issues. You see similar issues with mainstream MMORPGs - our inability to produce enough content, people running out of things to do, etc.
After a year, development took a break. I was determined to address some of the issues that came up. I, like you, loved innovative ideas. So I came up with an idea to create a community-driven Minecraft server - one where players are a part of a bigger ecosystem. Most of the team went separate ways and I decided to try and make my own Minecraft plugins - that would give my project an advantage.
Over the summer, I learned the basics of Java coding. I started watching Youtube videos and simply reproducing what I saw. Then I started to tweak what the tutorials showed. And at the end of summer, I made a plot plugin. Players could rent a piece of the world and build something out of a pre-set list. I thought this was interesting enough, so I took the idea and went back to my previous Minecraft server developers. They thought it's pretty cool, so we started working on Minecraft Frontiers.
Over the next year, we grew to a team of 30. We had 5 amazing developers. The player community was somewhere around 350. Towards the end, we were rewriting Minecraft code and doing groundbreaking work. Things that other developers told me are impossible were basics to us - I'd go as far as saying we were the very top server in terms of innovative work. NPCs that were using neural networks to drive conversations. Custom soundtracks that were streamed right to the players from our servers. Economical systems that responded to every transaction made by a player. All of that was pretty innovative - and especially considering we didn't require a custom client. This was something I insisted on: I wanted a person to be able to simply start Minecraft and connect to our server, no additional download necessary.
At the end, I could see just how much work was needed from our developers. Being so innovative meant we needed 1 developer deconstructing Minecraft code pretty much full-time. The others were constantly struggling to push the boundaries of the engine - which is quite limited. Then Mojang released guidelines about monetization, which I did not agree with at all. I did not want to force people into paying, but these guidelines actually encouraged me to do that. So we took a few weeks to think about things. We decided to stop with Minecraft and move to other projects. I released all of our project to our team under an open license - it was fair they had access to their hard work.
I thought the idea we had with Minecraft Frontiers was really interesting. So I went ahead and started working with Unity. I did some simple prototypes for about 6 months and then I started dabbling in multiplayer, finally making a basic MMO demo another 6 months in. Again people enjoyed the idea. I took the 3 best team members from Minecraft and now we have a small team of 4, trying to bring our vision to life as a stand alone game.
I frequently consult these forums for ideas - people here have amazing thoughts about games. I hope one day I'll be able to show them my game and let them play it. But whenever I ask people for a bigger commitment than simple feedback, I make sure show something first.
The take home message is that you can get far with an idea and dedication - I've come extremely far. Looking back 5 years, I knew nothing about coding and leadership. Now here I am, knowing a fair bit about game development, actually working on something tangible and innovative. But as you can see from my story, whenever I wanted to gather people around my idea, I first made sure I have something to show them.
i'm not an architect but that's an argument from authority i know more about game deisng than i do politics
Seems you have passed the storefront and saw a model of a ship and want to make an aircraft carrier without ever making one of those remote-controlled models.
While I admire your enthusiasm, your efforts might be better served by starting with something much smaller. Ideas are a dime a dozen, we all have them. It is the skill of turning that idea into a functioning game that is the trouble.
I would recommend you start by learning more about the unreal engine. It does not actually require programming. Check out some videos of how their blueprint system works.
Most people who try game design fail because they plan for a much bigger game than they have skills to produce. I can guarantee you that making an MMO as your first game is a sure path to epic failure.
Start off simple, outline the project with artboards and feature summaries. Make it into a professional looking presentation and then realistically assess the project in an objective manner. Determine what your resources are and what challenges you'll likely face at each stage. Think about your budget; you'll either need money to invest in the project or a lot of time and expertise. If you don't have one or the other, then move on to something more worthy of your time. You may find that your art and ideas work better in another format, like a comic series or short story/novella.
https://goblinworks.com/pathfinder-online/
Complete failure. Way farther in development than your idea and it's done. No more. Oh I think they are trying but I also think it's stalled.
or follow the issues/development with Shroud of the Avatar.
or Camelot Unchained which is is much better shape but is delayed because they were working on their engine and discovered a variety of challenges that held them back.
I'm telling you, if you animate your art and throw it on kickstarter you are not going to get funded. Not at this point.
Players have been burned and are more wary about giving money to projects that they don't think will make it.
start. small.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
He seems to be focused on the art/dev side, when there are dozens of other components to think about for an MMO.
It's going to be a lot harder to find a sys admin who understands how to implement a distributed system or a good game designer who knows how to put together all the pieces than it will be finding a dev, for example. Devs are a dime a dozen. The other two are not.
~~ postlarval ~~