I’ve been writing 1 of 5 books, and book 1 is nearly completed. My family and I have started designing a video game based off of the book that I had written. We have come here to help get input on our development progress and get feedback from people to help better understand what we should be focusing on and setting aside… Also, we feel like the roadmap is missing things but were unsure as to what it might be. Maybe you can help with that?
We have not yet posted links on the roadmap so feel free to comment on trello in the tags. Or on here, whatever you prefer. We should have things like social media sites up soon, such as “facebook”.
We know what we are trying to achieve is a lot of work. But we already planned on this taking about 5 years of development…
(Ps, to unity if I have stepped out of line by posting this on your forms then feel free to remove it. I have not yet had the chance to fully read through all of your policies…)
Our family is making a video game as well, with help from some non-family team members. It is a lot of fun to work with your family on a project. I did not take your poll because one can’t predict whether a game will be finished or not, but if you are determined, I think you can do it.
I browsed your cards briefly, but really couldn’t tell anything about what sort of game it is. I don’t even know if it’s a first-person-shooter or a simulation game or what.
So, I would recommend you start by preparing the 30-second “elevator pitch” for your game, and get some feedback on that.
Also, on platforms: if you support Windows only, you’re missing out. Windows (like iOS and Android) is saturated with games. Mac and Linux, not so much — and supporting these is fairly trivial with Unity, so don’t leave them out. I suggest you target all desktops, and just leave off mobile/tablets/consoles for starters.
I agree with @Teila , if you can do this as a family project, then it should be great fun (for you, at least!). The trick will be maintaining motivation for years. So, be sure you have lots of small milestones, and celebrate each one.
I’m developing a game with my two boys, but since the school year started, it’s been hard to find any time for us all to work together — the boys are incredibly busy with all their various activities. So, at the moment, I’m pretty much doing it all myself. But I’ll bring them back into it as their schedules allow… maybe after marching band season is over…
My high school girls are the same way. They work for a while and then get busy for other things. They are currently preparing for an art show so not giving me as much time.
So far it seams I’m the only one who voted. I don’t think you’ll ever finish this game because of for example this:
I don’t even know what half of this is supposed to mean. “Active X”? Wasn’t that a crappy browser plugin format or something along that line? What is a “Active Dimension Battle” or a “Style-Change Active Time Battle”?
And “better than Destiny’s” - on your first game? In what way do you think you could do better than Destiny? I don’t say you can’t; I found the Destiny Demo rather boring myself. But everything on this list is vague and meaningless in my opinion. Combine that with the ~100 hours of main story playtime and ~100 hours of side quests you are aiming for:
I feel like I have to tell you that this isn’t possible to create with a small team of non-professionals, not even in 5 years.
In my humble opinion you should make it into a board game. You get all the fun of collaborating and playtesting together, it can be tied in with the storyline of your books and you have a chance of actually finishing a game. And if you do you can do another one, focus on another important part of the story or different game mechanics etc… You could even pitch the prototypes to publishers and might end up with a release if the game is good and marketable enough.
Actually, making it as a board game/card game/rpg is a good suggestion even if the desire is to make it as an electronic one. They allow you to tighten rules, interactions between elements (e.g. Do some actions need to be done first in the order of actions to make it fair?) & will also highlight gaps in logic &/or rules before you have spent time coding them in & then potentially having to redo everything to fix it. Also, depending on ages, younger kids can help by drawing, cutting things out etc. I’ve done this with my kids except they do all the rule & design work, make everything & then I become the play tester to see if I can understand (& read, handwriting is important) the rules & if they forgot to write a rule down (surprising how many there can be that were forgotten if you start winning).
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_System <this link explains some different battle systems etc… If you don’t know what types of battle systems exist then perhaps you should try researching a bit on google…
That site only lists a small number of battle system types. There’s many more; however we only listed the ones that we already have implemented into unity. Trying to shove it into unity is becoming quite a task; mainly to do with unity lacking a truly integrated real time clock feature… Sense where making a game that is entirely based on real time the systemdatetime feature seems to either be flawed/bugged or were simply trying to do more than what it was intended to be used for in unity…
Considering we have 9 people working on this, all family members. I don’t think we’ll have much problems accomplishing our goals in this endeavor. I personally may be below expert level somewhere around intermediate, I’d say. But the rest of my family has years of experience with either many programming languages or a very high networking background working with cisco. My family is very tech savvy so I’m sure we can bite of more than we can chew and rebuild any bridges that we may burn down in the future.
Our problem isn’t that we lack the backgrounds to program a game; but more like how to designing a game. Right now we threw together some things like a simple RPG for testing the battle systems/debugging/modify. And it seems to be going quite smoothly; however what’s mainly holding us back is none of us really know how to do video animations… And trying to sculpt characters is quite a challenge for us. However object like items such as books, potions, weapons, uniforms, buildings, terrain stuff, environment things, UI’s, vehicles, or any other in game object is simple as hell with unity…
Have you considered getting in visual designers, artists & animators to help if that is one of the areas you are having difficulty with? Depending where you are you may be able to find someone locally & just contract them in & include some time each week for training some or all of you up. A lot of (non gaming) companies I’ve worked for have that as part of the standard contract when they hire specialists in I.e. They must also train permanent staff so that our staff will have a basic understanding for when they commence formal training & can therefore relate it back to their job. A professional can also help with the overall design including UI to make sure it all goes together.
Well, none of us are a fan of apple. Infact most of us hate them so we won’t ever develop on that platform no matter how easy it may be… Linux however may be something we’d be more inclined to support. But for now with thier being windows 7-8-8.1-10 I think we kinda have our hands tied at the moment mainly because of the online side of things… We’re still trying to get the different windows to play nice together on the prototype server we’ve developed… But! I think we can do a single player/local co-op type thing on Linux for the time being until we can make time to even start thinking about adding linux support to the prototype server.
No actually we have not thought about hiring people. We had planned on talking with some college kids in the pullman WA area to see if they would be inclined to do some charity work for us. So they can get some extra credit and something to put down on thier job application as real world experience. We like to support our community and what better way than by supporting our local students. Were mainly focused on trying to get all of the core game engine features implemented and the subsystems. Also, working on the online side of things is a bit challenging but doable. It mainly is a lot of work as in coding, but windows is definitely throwing a wrench or two in things…
(If you’re wondering what I mean when I say core game features and subsystems then please leave a comment and I will reply with in depth detail about it…)
My sincere apologies! Had I known you walk into JRPG territory I had not replied, because I know nothing about them. “Destiny” as a reference mislead me to believe you are going for a type of game like Skyrim/Mass Effect/Borderlands/Dragon Age or something along those lines - genres I felt comfortable enough with to not do any additional research on when a wealth of buzzwords sounds entirely made-up to me.
Seems like you’ve got this figured out, and I changed my vote in the poll to “yes”. Carry on and good luck with your MMORTSRPG!
Uhh; the game will not be like like of league of legends. More like Destiny but with Star Ocean 4 elements. So where doing open worlds like destiny with many planets to explore etc. But with a wide variety of view modes and combat styles to chose from. Here is a few of our characters in the works to help you better grasp what we’re trying to explain;
Elizabeth Wheeler:
Occupation; Communications Expert, Exploration task force member.
Combat background; Samurai, Herbal remedies.
View Mode: Third Person
Johnson Harris:
Occupation; Pilot, Exploration task force member.
Combat background; Guns, Explosives, Hand to hand combat.
View Mode: First person and third person. (depends if shooting or riding a creature…)(but will usually always be first person)
Faize Hawkins:
Occupation; Co Pilot, Scientist, Exploration task force member.
Combat background; Fencing, martial arts.
View Mode: Not yet decided
That’s just a few of many more to come!
League of Legends or MMORTSRPG isn’t really a comparable game term… Destiny is a shared worldfirst-person shooter where as Star Ocean 4 is a JRPG. So I guess it’d be simpler to classify Stellar Galaxy Thee Beginning as a shared world first/third-person shooter/combat style game? O.o Someone please chime in if you can help better classify this for me…
If you add another choice for “Make it a board game / card game” as others have suggested, I’ll vote for that. That would be a wiser way to build and test the design first, and you and your family will probably have more fun than if you also try to tackle graphics, programming, and software production at the same time.
If the trello represents your teams design / project management capabilities, then there’s no chance.
Dude, do the board game. Your family will have fun, maybe learn something, and if there’s any chance at all of you making the ‘dream game’ you have planned, you will find out while trying to build the board game.
I would place your notes at around 1,000x-10,000 more work than a board game. So if it takes a month to build the board game, then it will take between a thousand to ten thousand months to build your dream game.
If your team is capable of building out that board game in a few days (to the point of it being fun) then you have a real shot at making the dream game a reality in 260 weeks.
Guys, modern board games are just as challenging to put together, and require more clever design work then a modern video game. Board games are a sub set of games where:
Processing power is extremely limited (You can count on basic addition, subtraction, and some clever random number generators).
Graphics power is extremely limited
AI is severely limited
Players must be in the same physical location
Play lengths are severely restricted (saving state is difficult)
Patches and upgrades are difficult
Your tutorial must be text and pictures only. And it must effectively explain every single game mechanic, including the code behind each mechanic.
Under these conditions designing a effective board game is more difficult then building an effective video game. You can’t just throw in a bunch of assets and get them to work together. Plus you have a ton of competition with modern designer board games.
Lol. This is where I normally chime in with advice about scoping small. But nobody listens, so I won’t bother. I will point out that what you are proposing is a project so big that Blizzard wouldn’t have the budget to pull it off. Good luck.
Everything you say is true and I’m no stranger to the complexity in boardgames myself. But I would still wager, that if you take two random groups of people who never developed a game of any kind and tell one group to make a board game and the other group to make a computer game and see what they have done after a year, I’d suspect the board game people to have an actual playable boardgame prototype (which might be crappy, but it is a game for all intents and porposes) and the other team probably feature creeped themselves into oblivion or got lost in some technical challenges.
For really breaking into the market… yeah, that might actually be easier with a computer game at this point.
We understand your concerns. We know we have “too many features” but thanks to the asset store many of these “Features” are already coded for us to use. Which not only is saving time but also quickly leaping us forward in development and crossing boundaries much easier. Of course those assets need to be modified but just having them still saves a lot of wasted time… + We’ve managed to gather code for unity from other sources other than the Unity store.
And we accept your challenge “Martin_H” In one year of development we are going to try for Pre-Alpha just to show you how far we can get. The reason Blizzard wouldn’t attempt something like this is because they are too much of a coward, Bungie is probably the closest thing that has accomplished what where trying to achieve. And look at them, they’re nothing compared to some of the other game companies.
Where shooting for holiday 2016 Pre-Alpha release date. I’m currently working on the website for the game and many other aspects such as social media sites, RoadMap, Scripting (as in story, filler characters, etc…), and searching for more great assets to use in the store.
The game will have realistic characters not fantasy ones but the aliens will clearly be somewhat sci-fi but realistic like star trek… The planets will be sci-fi. The ships will be realistic, the space stations will also be realistic.
Sorry I’m just trying to clarify that this isn’t going to be like an anime style game…
Where shooting for a game that will be truly unique and nothing that you’ve played before. We understand what a good game is like because we’ve played all the bad ones. We know keeping our motivation over the next 5 years is going to be a challenge. But because we’re working on it and we can see the progress we’re making, that is enough for us to keep going. Now once we’re done doesn’t mean we’re not going to keep adding or fixing things. Infact it will only encourage us to do more. People can think what they want or say whatever, it won’t change our minds. Once you set your mind to something anything can be accomplished even great ambitions.
It is a lot of fun to work with your family on a project. I did not take your poll because one can’t predict whether a game will be finished or not, but if you are determined, I think you can do it.
In one year of development we are going to try for Pre-Alpha just to show you how far we can get. The reason Blizzard wouldn’t attempt something like this is because they are too much of a coward, Bungie is probably the closest thing that has accomplished what where trying to achieve. And look at them, they’re nothing compared to some of the other game companies.
We know keeping our motivation over the next 5 years is going to be a challenge.
But because we’re working on it and we can see the progress we’re making, that is enough for us to keep going.
People can think what they want or say whatever, it won’t change our minds. Once you set your mind to something anything can be accomplished even great ambitions.