Discussion: My Mmog Game Development Outline

I'm currently in the process of programming the basic engine for an Isometric Massively Multiplayer Online Game.

Here's the basic idea behind the game:

• You build your own country including it industry and army.
• There is a massive amount of land available to build your original nation on (meaning you can expand your nation by colonizing, buying, or taking land)
• You can setup roads, cities, build rivers, canals, lakes, castles, forts, forests, farms, etc...
• Everything you build or buy will cost money
• Players can trade for money or give money to other players.
• Money is reffered to as gold
• You can make money from industries, laws, and taxes you setup, or you can attack someone else and steal money from them.
• Your original land cannot be taken unless you accept an offer for a Territorial War and only have your original land left (the game will warn you that doing so can result in a 'National Destruction' or in otherwords you loose the majority of all of your assets and are brought almost to the beggining of the game)
• In order to survive you must maintain a powerful army, industry, government, and city/state system.
• Everything is roughly midevil based...
• You download the game and install it
• You click the launch icon and the updater opens up, it displays news related to the game and if there is a patch to the game available it will download and apply.
• When the game finishes loading you will be able to login or create an account.
• You will then choose from one of the servers that are available (at launch there will only be two)
• After choosing your server you choose your nation (you may have up to 15 Nations per server)
• You then choose your nation's name and average skin color (this is what the majority of your population's skin color will be)
• You then are brought to an overview of the world, you get to see all of the land, and can click to get a list of all of the available starter plots, this will tell you the price, number of rivers, number of mountains, climate, continent, size (for the most part almost all starter plots are the same size), number of neighboring nations, Landlocked/# of Bordering Nations/Island, number of lakes, cost, etc...
• Everyone will start with 50 Million gold, and will spend almost all of this buying their original plot (I'd say they'll be left at best with 300K gold)
• They will then get to place their first city (it will be a bunch of tents with a wooden fence around it and a slightly larger tent with a guard in front of it as the main governmental building where the politicians live/work.

 

 

 

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I see that you have most of the things figured out and have listed here. What I would suggest for you to do is come up with design documents. You should be having a series of design documents form high level to low level.

You should understand that when I say design documents, it is not with the programming aspects. It is with the gameplay aspects as you have stated in points above. You would have a high level document stating the game design very briefly and giving a birds-eye view. Then you need to focus on parts of it, getting the work done on the lower level designs. You may do this more than two levels depending on the details.

One may ask as to why we need to have designs of gameplay rather than the engines and the rest. The answer lies in the fact that once we have the gameplay clear, the approach needed to go forward for the engine design becomes much easier. Yes, the logical next step would be to get the engine design. The same approach of high level to low level needs to be employed.

Once these two tasks are done, the coding should be piece of cake for most parts with out considering the technical hurdles that would be encountered.

On a side note, if you are serious about the MMORPG, you would need to think of the buisness model you need to follow and such things.

 

 

 

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Definetely. Sure, you could have a fairly large free open beta running around like some fairly recent MMOs like Gunz Online and Fly for Fun have, but to support a basis of hundreds or thousands of players with recent updates, bug fixes, powerful enough servers and other stuff has it's (high) costs.

I didn't quite get from your post whether you are trying to do all this by yourself, join up with a team of coders or even present your idea to a big company. In the latter case, they'd probably take care of the business model for themselves, but it's always a bonus to present thought up ideas on those aspects.

Some of the ideas you presented seem a bit too thought up for now though, like the starting money and all that, since it's all going to depend on how well balanced the overall economy of the game will be when the number of players becomes reasonably large and stable. You'll find out more often than not that all those details will be radically changed either during the initial release development or during the maintenance phase.

And you should definitely organize your development like Vyoma pointed out in his post.

Make loads of concept art and design thinking. Sometimes (more often that you'd like) your idea looks great on your mind but on practice it doesn't fit well with the rest of the stuff.

Now for some suggestions about the game itself:

From the way I see it, unless you organize the game world in seperate servers for different regions in the real world (because of time zone differences for example) each with it's own instance running, the game will definitely collapse onto itself because, let's say you have Europeans and Koreans both on the same server... When all of Europe is asleep the Koreans will simply overrun the European-controlled territories because I doubt any AI will stop their murderous rampage (don't get me wrong Korean mates ).

Add different resources for different regions of the game world. It'll be an incentive for players to conquer or make treaties with the neighbouring countries for those materials they lack and need to increase their power. Money only is a bit too simple. Think of iron, wood, food, stuff like that.

Since it's not an RTS or any offline strategy game, you'll need to think about a LOT of different types of units, buildings, and other various items, to allow players to have greater strategy flexibility, and also as to add uniqueness to every player. It wouldn't be much fun if every character in a MMORPG wore the same clothes and had the same hair style, now would it? Think of this as the same.

All in all, keep those ideas you have and when you finally work it out, you'll have a chuckle on those points you're happy you didn't implement and you'll also remember some stuff that you'd really like to do but didn't manage to get there (maybe on an update?).

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