i know what it takes to have a persistent 24/7 world, belive me, that`s the lowest concern right now.
My big concern is to create the team . I have 3 years experience in MMORPG playing, i know how programming works, i know a little bit about arts, mainly i know a little bit from all the domains needed to create the mmorpg, just enough to make me a good project leader. I will design myself the dbase , i have ~90% story with numbers (skill points , damage points, etc).
So i have everything + money to help me fund main aspects, but i don`t have a team.

Allan, when it comes about this i don`t have "Maybe" word in my vocabulary, i started this thread to hear : "Yes. It's possible ..." (you guys are a little pessimist)
I know there are many enthusiast here ... "oooo, i`m going to start a game, i have the greatest game ideea", but i`m not one of them

Mike

I'm not sure how you'll be able to assemble a team, but I think there's Help wanted boards here. Some folks might be willing to work for free or cheap to have a resume padder. Also, check at a public library or bookstore and get some books on motivational management, to help you lead a team.

Quote: Original post by HopTim
i know what it takes to have a persistent 24/7 world, belive me, that`s the lowest concern right now.

Is it? I was tech lead on a commercial MMOG back when it started out, and if I was ever doing it again (I wouldn't), then that would be my #1 worry. The sheer volume of content is killing you. The other thing that's a real pain is the lack of closure; the damn thing never ends. The third is that you quickly stop being a Game Developer and start becomming a glorified telco operator as soon as you ship. If I wanted to work in a telco, I could have gotten better paid for it from scratch.

Quote: Original post by HopTim
I have 3 years experience in MMORPG playing,

PLAYING != Making.

I have no idea why this issue keeps comming up. Watching movies does not qualify you to direct them. It can INSPIRE you, but the whole point of a movie (or a game) is to raise a virtual scaffolding around the viewer, and make him believe that the painted canvas really is a real western city.

Quote: Original post by HopTim
Allan, when it comes about this i don`t have "Maybe" word in my vocabulary, i started this thread to hear : "Yes. It's possible ..." (you guys are a little pessimist)

For your sake, I hope you have the word "breach of contract" in your vocabulary, though.

Anyways; if you're dead set on trying this despite everything:

1. You should look at recruiting a local team. The cost of labour in Romania is in your favour, and command&control becomes a lot easier with local people. Since you have no experience managing game developers, any help you can get helps.

2. Get buy in from a minimum 2 other people (Lead Artist and Lead Programmer). These should be good enough that you, personally, never have to touch the tech/art aspects. Restrain yourself from meddeling, and find people you can trust to manage that aspect. Accept that these guys will have input on the design at the same level as you; you're the PM, not the Word Of God. These guys will help you with recruiting the rest of the team.

3. Use off the shelf technology. The programmer will resist this (programmers universally suffer from Not Invented Here (NIH!) syndrome), and will protest that he can whip up everything the solution offers in 2-3 weeks. Don't believe him. Depending on the scope, Realmforge or Torque are good candidates (Realmforge has a better backend. Torque's got a better front-end and tools, and a very active community). Torque's better if you're happy with a fairly small scale MMOG areas (<64 players / zone) and don't mind paying a premium on bandwidth and servers. You'd also need to build the login and world-database yourself. ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that your solution has a complete asset path (tools, exporters, 3D mesh/animation loaders, GUI tools, etc), as building these will cripple your art-team while waiting for them to come online.

4. Go through your design, and cut down on any content multipliers. Every MMOG design I've ever seen focuses on Nx races, Nx different cities, Nx different powers, etc. While you DO need variety, you can often start out with as small a data-set as possible. If you're a success (or even finish), you can fill out the races, cities, spells, levels, thingys, you took out for the initial version.

5. Your art-budget is too small. No, I don't care how much you've budgetted. Double it. At least. Sit down with a competent artist, and work out exactly how much time he thinks building each mesh, texture, animation, GUI screen, etc is going to take, then double that to account for everything you didn't think off, and for tweaking.

6. Beware the weight of assets; don't let the artists start producing content until you have a stable build and a stable content pipeline to put it into. Until the artists can import and see the object in the game, they're not allowed to build any in-game assets (doing concept art and pre-renders is fine). This is to stop you from building content that has to be thrown away later. Nothing is more demoralizing for artists than building content they have to throw away.

7. Schedule time for UI up front, both code and art. It's boring, tedious work. Everyone would rather to occlusion culling or character animation. Doesn't matter; getting a real GUI up is both critical for the game-design, and really makes the thing feel like a game (as opposed to a 'running around on a height-map demo'). Pick a GUI solution that's got a proper editor (I believe Torque's is pretty decent, without having used it).

8. Avoid designeritis (things like "and of course, you can do anything you want"), or anything else where the actual action-items and mechanics can not be plotted down. Everything needs to be reduceable to single atomic actions (Player can "pick up object", "drop object", "open doors", "activate levelers", etc). "Rule an empire with an iron fist" is hard to break down into atomic actions, though it does sound fun.

9. Remember that online games HAVE NO HEROES, just loads of grunts (some of them very high-level grunts). Avoid designs that have actions only a single person can do (Frodo going to Mount Doom). Every chunk of content (action/asset) should be selected for "bang for the buck", i.e. how many people get to enjoy it vs how much does it cost in manpower to produce it.

For reference, Stormriders Online eventually took 3.5 years to make, using a full-time team of 35-40 people. The last year was dedicated to testing, tweaking, and additional content development, and the complaints at launch was still "buggy, unbalanced and too little content".

And all this has to be done for 20K USD. Be aware that users often don't give you slack for being on a budget, they'll still judge you against WoW, and bitch when it's not what they expected.

I know that your design mirrors WoW and UO (because the "I've played MMOGs for X years" crowd always does), but before you start this, go play A Tale in The Desert and Puzzle Pirates. I know they don't have the 'sex-appeal' of WoW, but realize that these are the only 2 commercial successes in the 'boutique MMOG' market. Try to understand why; write the authors and ask questions if you have to, but work out why. Because you CANNOT compete with WoW, LOTR Online, EQ2, Lineage2 or the other Big Grind Machines. So you've gotta be smart.

Or just go build some fun casual games that you can actually finish.

Allan

Allan , thank you for your reply , it`s very helpfull

And thank you all for replies, they`ve been very helpfull