Hello guys,
i’m Adre from LevenLab, a small creative agency in Rome.
I decided to start my biggest adventure: i started working on a concept i have since 6 years.
Being an hardcore gamer, i quitted playing online for the lack of decent mmorpgs to play, as i am totally unsatisfied with what the market offers, so i decided to write a “diary” with what i would actually wish a mmo has to be perfect, for me at least.
Now i am starting the developement of that mmorpg, having now more than 7 years of experience in developing, and i will be using Unity because i am working a lot with it for other projects, and because it perfectly fits what i want to achieve.
That MMORPG is named NEXT, and the next thing of the title is Age. Can’t tell you more
I am starting a devblog, and i invite you gamers to read it and partecipate because i really think the project behind Next is really innovative and totally experimental. Something we could not do 5 years ago.
No, because we’re working on mechanics first.
The scene is just made by placeholders and means nothing.
With mechanics i mean not “walking” or “shooting”. I mean much complex mechanics such terraforming, creating and destroying structures such buildings in realtime, etc. By that i am not saying i am unaware of the networking part. I already worked with photon server, but to do what we want to do we need a bigger team: is not a matter of syncing 100 players and make a chat server work.
A little update to the blog
In these hot summer days i added new control and camera system designed for the purpose and few other things such time cycles, camera system for props between it and player, spells database…
i’ll show in the next days
It is kind of problematic to start coding the mechanics on the client, because in the final game most of it will probably run on the server (otherwise cheaters will destroy your game in no time).
And for a MMO the server will not run Unity.
Hello thxfoo,
Yep, you’re right about it. Is problematic in a side, easier for the other. Coding such massive amount of mechanics server side requires also a massive investment in time and money, that’s why the playable alpha will be a demonstration of the mechanics, coded in unity and synced via server.
Cheaters in a semi-closed alpha demo for funding i guess will be rare, but even if there will be, will be also clear that is a mostly clientside demo, while the final product will be cloud based.
It will be a playable alpha to show for funding, because without funding would be impossible to achieve a goal for such project.
I am valuating between Indiegogo and Kickstarter. If the project will be on his feet and will be ready for a decent funding, the choice will be Kickstarter.
Indiegogo at the moment requires an intensive daily press release to get visibility, and the chance to get funded is a bit smaller than KS, but they offer the flexible funding which can help anyway to get on run.
A publisher / venture capital funding could be a next step, to enlarge much more the project and get more solid bases, but we’re talking about something that could happen in 1 year or more if everything runs smoothly, a thing that hardly happen.
I hope to gather at least a bit of fanbase and to enlarge the team for mid September, to start the hardcore dev stage, but of course is hard to draw attention in these days without any help from communities.
Best of luck! From what I can see from this thread, the probability of you actually finishing the game is extremely small, but don’t give up. I would advice you to make one or more other small networked projects so you get the hang of networking. No need to rush into it. My op is that mechanics made client-side will have to be redone sooner or later, might as well do them right the first time.
Not true: a seriously good project and a well done Kickstarter/Indiegogo page can bring successful funding even for devs that have no previous experience, and I saw it happening many times. That said, surely a portfolio is a helpful bonus.
For a game of this scope I disagree. For smaller games perhaps, but for a full blown MMO, I’d like to know which projects have been backed where the dev team had no previous experience and the project was funded sufficiently to complete it from scratch.
Valid argument there.
I’ve done some research around the boundary of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.
Most the games successfully funded there is not an MMO.
Scope is indeed a good point. Also considering that both Kickstarter and Indiegogo have become increasingly harder places to gain funds (thanks to sneaky/incompetent devs popping the dream bubble).
I released games for public administration ( edutainment, bot desktop and mobile) and for some companies in my country, but of course no AAA games and were all orders from costumers, as there are no chances here since country funding for the gaming industry is par to nothing ( and i am not a billionare, unluckly ).
Despite that, i guess you are right, and the reason is not because of the massive size of the projects presented, but due the poor innovation of the latest mmos in the market: latest products are offering pretty much the same mechanics offered by EverQuest, a product of 10+ years ago. Add to this that “wow clone” became in the last 7 years a common joke, pointing that any mmorpg shipped since wow, is pretty much like wow.
And this is in part true ( ok, i am a warr/priest/mage, i have to cap my levels and get new gear, then i will kill big enemies waiting for an expansion to start it over. Add [Random Lore 90% fantasy])
Would you be interested in backing a portable CD reader with a cool design and bluetooth connection? I guess no. That’s the case of the poor backing success: old product with fancy eye-candy, and this fancy eye-candy is where the industries are investing more, instead of researching.
Cutting out of the list all the Wow clones that are around, the list of the innovating products is really poor: we can count Darkfall which has a really poor development but had a huge attention for the innovative approach to the genere, maybe the last released ArcheAge which also has some innovative themepark/sandbox style, but is a korean farming clone in the end. Other products are or poorly coded so barely unplayable and mainly based on Pay2Win mechanics ( freemiums, east products ) or are a 95% clone with a mixture of what the market already offer ( GW2, ESO, etc ).
The reason why i think a product made by an “unknow” team could success, is because backing is based on two things:
Faith in the team: that is easy to get when you show your dev progress in the past 6 months, instead of spawning up from nowhere asking for 600k and showing a beautiful CG video on a detailed presentation of what you COULD achieve.
Desire to have the product: i believe what i want to achieve is what the market requires, what mmorpg players want to play. That comes from an extended experience of 14years from the player point of view.
This said, backing success is 1% without an attention drawn on the project.
“Blah, blah, blah … NEXTGEN MMO … Blah, blah, blah” … Two years from now, my son will tell you the same thing he tells me, ‘Kid wasn’t ready. Kid got wrecked. Kid should’ve prepared.’
Actions speak louder than words, whether spoken or typed. Go ahead, prove me wrong!
I completely disagree with that statement. I think investors might look away because of the sheer size of the project, rather than focus on the new mechanics. Investors don’t give a damn about features, and neither should they. Their only concern is whether a project will bring money back to the table, and innovation and new “MMO-revolutionizing never-seen-before kickass uber-cool” features will surely go straight over their heads.
Don’t want to sound negative, but everyone who starts making a “nextgen mmorpg” thinks they’re making the next big innovative nextgen game with cool never-before-seen features…
Also, the fact that you’re going to develop the game without proper networking in mind, just for the kickstarter campaign, tells me you’re never gonna have it finished. You’ll get the kickstarter money and that’s when the development will cease.
