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Original post by Madvillain Ellis: A MMORPG on 25 grand, eh? I hope those 5 people working for free are gonna stick with you all the way through!

They have stuck by me this long, they will stick with me longer for the low-budget MMO on $25,000. My situation is unique in that the 5 people in my team are all people I've known for several years and are doing this for the "just to do it", which Temporal Flux doesn't have the luxury of doing. The various tools for MMO creation range from excellent/expensive to decent/free, so there's definitely ways to make an MMO for less than the millions of dollars it used to take. Note, I have not posted anywhere that "I am making an MMO that will push the envelope and be the next Doom!" I doubt ours is even going to be the next "Tale in the Desert", but it's something we want to do, is fun to learn to do, and if we can get 1,000 subscribers, it'll be enough to run the game and the company.

So, that's also something any new game designer wants to get a handle on: what s/he wants to accomplish, how big it's expected to get. Since Temporal said he wants to compete with the Big Boys, I'm assuming he means like EQ and WoW if an MMO, or like Doom/Quake/Half-Life/Deus Ex in the FPS range and I don't know much about RTS games, so can't put anything there. Doing that will take way more in time, team and money than what I'm doing, but notice that I still have a lawyer to handle any legal issues that will come up. To the law, it's not going to matter whether Temporal's game company makes RTS, FPS or MMOs. He'll need to protect his intellectual property, to make sure anyone he hires signs the agreements that the work they do belongs to his company (or some variation thereof) in exchange for pay, and that all legal requirements about taxes and employment are covered in the state his business is registered in. Even if you hire only all subcontractors working in their homes, if you pay them more than $600 a year, it needs to be declared.

Oh and a little extra note to Temporal: I, too, am not a programmer, and I don't have a good aptitude for it, but I did learn enough of the languages we worked in to be able to understand what's going on. So, if I can do it, anyone can. Also, it turned out that a plus to me not being a programmer was that I'm not set in my ways, so sometimes I've come up with a way to solve a difficult problem, by saying "Oh can't you do X, and then C?" and the coders didn't think of it because it's unorthodox, but will work.

You really can't know too much. Only too little. :)