I plan to make a very large MMORPG. Right now, I do not have the skills to make my own backend and networking, but I’m majoring in Computer Programming for that.
In the meantime, would it be a bad idea to make the entire MMORPG but 100% Local and no server, but set up for server integration so at the end it can be converted to multiplayer before release?
It is going to be a 3rd person Standalone + Web game.
I just would love to hear the advantages/disadvantages of doing it this way, and if this is really a good or bad idea.
Thanks in advance
Solo, and not very much. This is going to be a long project, but I plan to pick up a team very soon (Probably 2 more people) once I finish moving to Seattle in a few months.
Im a college student with no job, and paid housing and food, and no tuition due to scholarships, so I have a lot of free time to work on this when I’m not doing schoolwork.
You should probably start offline and build the multiplayer stuff later on. It will take a lot of refactoring, but compared to the horror of building an MMO from scratch, it will be a breeze.
Not gonna lie: There is almost no chance that this project will ever come close to finishing. Building a single player RPG, however, is more manageable although still pretty hard. You should put yourself in a position where you can work incrementally, starting with fundamental gameplay and fleshing your game out until you’re happy with it. Starting with a somewhat simple single player RPG allows you to do this.
I was thinking of starting with the MMORPG, but in a way where if it gets too hard i can just make it into a single player rpg without changing much things. I mean the camera, character, armor and stuff can all be used single + multi, so it wouldnt be too hard to just make it into an rpg.
Thanks for your response.
I will echo the others: it’s a really bad idea. Really bad. Doomed to failure. But I’m guessing that won’t stop you from trying it anyway, so best of luck! As long as you’re learning while you work on it, it’s not time wasted.
Doing this is not going to enable you to be able to create one of the hardest genres to make.
I dont believe there is a huge advantage to creating a game as MP to start with, although I may be wrong about this. Ask me again in 6 months when ive finished putting MP into my game.
I wouldnt waste my time with this genre though. This is one of the genres in which the programming is the smaller part. Content will take you years to create. Sure you could buy everything through various model sites, but this will leave you with a fruit salad of models that dont fit with each other, and will look amateur and out of place.
When you say MMORPG, I think big though. Maybe you are thinking much smaller scale.
Indie MMORPG is very bad idea, even if you do manage to make it, it won’t sell. Unless you offer something completely new than the dozen of other mmorpgs. Plus lack of singletons in Unity makes this hard task even harder.
Just make a small RPG with great story, it’s much more manageable and profitable.
Sorry, Singleton is manager code independent of scene, this would be code loaded on engine load. Unity only loads code from scene. There’s ways around it but it requires more code to transfer the manager between scenes and check for duplicates. ex: Quest manager that span across many scenes.
This is also not true. Multiplayer (let alone, Massive Multiplayer) and single player are two entirely different beasts. Yes, the camera controller is the same, but all that means is that you can make a camera controller that can be reused in other projects.
You really can’t change something that fundamental half way through creating your game. Decide first, what you want to create, then do it. If its a single player RPG (which I recommend) then focus on designing and creating that. If its multiplayer, then focus on designing and creating that.
