So I have an idea for a game, I have not thought that much into the storyline or anything all I have been thinking about is how the gameplay will be, so I want it to be in first person. In the beginning of the game you will choose your gender and your race(their will be more like Sci fi races not human like), and then theirs a cut scene.

Here's where the main idea comes in, their will be hundreds of ending to the game, throughout the game their are hundreds of different questions and options and paths, and each thing you pick/each way you take contributes to the end result, and it'll obviously be a open world game, and for each race there'll be different options for your power(for instance if you choose a elf you could pick one of these. Arrow crafting, gives you the ability to take a normal arrow and different items to make different types of arrows. One with nature, ability to make plants from nothing and can harvest from plants, and so on for every race), that's what I have thought out so far.

What you've described isn't a game. What you've described is a handful of generic (and/or pie-in-the-sky) features with no particular rhyme or reason behind them. The one that stands out the most as being silly is having "hundreds of endings" to the game, determined by a myriad of minor questions through the course of the gameplay.

Not only is does this imply an insane amount of work to develop, it's the kind of thing that offers extremely limited payoff.

Why do I, as a player, care that there are hundreds of endings? A handful of endings, maybe. But who is going to care enough to play through the game hundreds of times to see all the endings? Who is going to care about the difference between the two endings that result when you make one choice differently between playthroughs? Can you even make that choice a meaningful one?

Hey AquaPlayz,

Sounds nice, it's a start. It's a grand idea for a game. Unfortunately I have to tell you that you really really really really really really really really really really really need to scale down. I have a friend who has those grand, crazy ideas like you have. Like, he has this idea, “I'm gonna make the ultimate fighting game,” or, ”I'm gonna make the ultimate hardcore ninja action game,” or, ”I'm gonna make a genre-breaking hardcore action game that brings third-person Hack 'n Slash and FPS perfectly together, and the story mode is gonna be huge, and there's gonna be an even bigger massive online mode with territory control, character creation, gamers build their own bases, and it's gonna be a trilogy etc. etc.” And he does. He created the Dead or Alive franchise, he created Ninja Gaiden for Xbox, and so on. But he's Tomonobu Itagaki. He leads a multimillion dollar team of some of the best developers in the world. He's published by Nintendo etc. etc.

If you're going this alone, a realistic scope if you wanna make an RPG is ... say, game in 2D, one town or village or whatever, and one dungeon, and one playable character (i.e., no different races to choose from). And you say, okay the player can level up from level 1 to level 10, now let's see how far I can push it. That's a realistic scale if you're doing this alone, and you create everything from scratch: sprites, code, music, game design, writing, and so on. If you work really hard, and you can find many people willing to playtest your game, then maybe in 2+ years you will have a short quality RPG created from scratch like that. Maybe.

Happy devin'! Game development is fun. You don't need to make a huge, gigantic RPG to have fun. Make something small like a card game. All you need for that is paper and pen, and you can start. Or a tiny board game, abusing those star wars monopoly collector's edition figurines to stand in for your figurines, and drawing the board on a sheet of paper. Play it with your friends, then make it better with every time you play. There's nothing holding you back from making an awesome, high-quality, polished game. It's all in the scope. :)

Cheers,

Chris

Not only is does this imply an insane amount of work to develop, it's the kind of thing that offers extremely limited payoff.

Break the ending into five segments, write 4 versions for each segment. You do the work of writing 20 ending segments, but you've just created 1,024 unique endings. It's still a whoooole lot of work, but with the right budget and team potentially realistic, so I wouldn't dismiss the general idea too quickly. Every player getting their own unique ending in an epic RPG sounds marketable to me, and I can see gamers all sharing their unique stories.

Not only is does this imply an insane amount of work to develop, it's the kind of thing that offers extremely limited payoff.

Break the ending into five segments, write 4 versions for each segment. You do the work of writing 20 ending segments, but you've just created 1,024 unique endings. It's still a whoooole lot of work, but with the right budget and team potentially realistic, so I wouldn't dismiss the general idea too quickly. Every player getting their own unique ending in an epic RPG sounds marketable to me, and I can see gamers all sharing their unique stories.

Honestly, it's probably a little late for ending variety to actually be a selling point.

Star Ocean: The Second Story did exactly what you suggest 17 years ago, and even then they only advertised the number of individual segments (over 80) rather than endings (well over 10,000 possible combinations).

By the time of Fallout: New Vegas (nearly 200 scenes with literally SEXTILLIONS of combinations), the diversity of endings is barely even mentioned - although certainly appreciated by the more dedicated fans.

Anthony,

You've just proven my point actually naming two successful AAA titles that have this feature, which certainly adds to their charm. Star Ocean has the variety of endings printed on the backcover. It's likely not the selling point, but it's a selling point. It's out of scope for a small indie team unless they write very short segments, but that doesn't make the idea as horrendous or unrealistic as Josh makes it sound. Now actually writing 200+ endings, I agree, is far too much work; but with the right method you can get hundreds of endings with, in comparison, minimal work. Whether or not this work pays off depends on how important the endings are for the vision of the game. I don't think Star Ocean would have worked as well without the unique endings.

Most of what has already been said has been very good advice about your concept. It seems you are at the beginning stages of the game idea which needs a little fuel to help keep the fire within you burning. I would suggest you really start to focus on what the game is about and keep the features you want in mind but start working through your game world. Nyaanyaa is correct in suggesting that you start to make some kind of playable game with pen and paper.

Iteration is the key! With pen and paper you can make changes to the game rules and other parts of the game quicker to see how well it will change the game. The other part of iteration is follow the fun. If something makes the game a lot more fun to play then keep going in that direction.

During this process try and schedule regular play testing so that you can get as much feedback as possible. Have friends and family try your game and ask them for their honest feedback about how well it played. Use this feedback to improve your game and make it better.

Good luck and please keep posting about your idea it seems interesting but without any details its hard to give much more advice then general information.

Can I state something a bit controversial? I don't care for the neverending games from a development point of view, because you as a tester and developer will never be able to test every facet of the game. Perhaps with endings this doesn't matter so much, but still, I tend to avoid making such a game for this reason.

So I have an idea for a game, I have not thought that much into the storyline or anything all I have been thinking about is how the gameplay will be, so I want it to be in first person. In the beginning of the game you will choose your gender and your race(their will be more like Sci fi races not human like), and then theirs a cut scene.
Here's where the main idea comes in, their will be hundreds of ending to the game, throughout the game their are hundreds of different questions and options and paths, and each thing you pick/each way you take contributes to the end result, and it'll obviously be a open world game, and for each race there'll be different options for your power(for instance if you choose a elf you could pick one of these. Arrow crafting, gives you the ability to take a normal arrow and different items to make different types of arrows. One with nature, ability to make plants from nothing and can harvest from plants, and so on for every race), that's what I have thought out so far.

It seems there are no questions included with the OP.

@Aqua: What is the intent you pursue by writing this here?

Are you seeking for feedback? (in which case I would be inclined to agree with Josh Petrie's assessment)

Are you seeking for suggestions on how to go from there? (I would personally recommend to focus on one thing that lists this concept apart from other games and scrap everything else including conventions).

Are you seeking for help? (There are classified to hire a team if that is your intent).

ok, so I now get that I can't make that game, so I have been getting some assets for unity to make a fps game, I will probably just do a zombie runner type thing then if people like it I will program soldiers that shoot instead of zombies.

also a problem, whenever I try and open a project in unity it says that it is already open and I can't open it, anyone know why?