Advertisement

So Ive designed an MMORPG now what

Started by December 02, 2001 03:52 AM
13 comments, last by Nomax5 23 years ago
It seems likely that no large company is going to invest millions of dollars producing a game from a designer without a track record. So my design is in effect a resume. How do I get it to a big producer ? NB. Although the design document is large the template was taken from a dev forum and is hyper linked allowing the reader to jump and skip around quickly.
You don''t...
Advertisement
Thank you ronin_54_
you don''t ?

I must be way off the mark with my question

A little background :
I''ve been in the computer industry man and boy for more years than I care to mention.
I began designing new games to include things I like about the genre, redesigning the things I didn''t and of course introducing my new ideas. I''m now in the position where I enjoy designing my games more than playing other peoples, in fact I like designing more than most things now. I will continue to design because I enjoy it so much, but I would swap churning out reams of boring designs and code for the retail industry for a break in the games industry like a shot.

So my question may have been a little inaccurate perhaps I should have said publisher or developer, I was just asking for a little advice is all ..
Actually you can hire a development company to make your game if you truely have a good design document. Most people think that a game "developer" only designs titles of their own. In fact, their are some are specifically design Hollywood Intellectual Property, or are sub-contracted from a publisher.

For instance, LucasArts just contracted Bioware to make a new RPG based in the Star Wars world.

Bioware would be a good company to take your design to. Though, it does cost money. You can design all you want, but if your outlook on everything is "ok, i designed it... how do I get a producer to make it?" then your in for a bumpy ride, becuase noone will design it. If you had funding, then you could get it made easily.
Another problem is, that most teams got more then enough creative ideas themselfs... My personal approach would be to join a team as a programmer, work my way up, and then propose my ideas
Yeah, the sad answer is that for every development house working on a game, there are 10 people with ideas for new ones. And of those 10, at least 5 think their idea is amazing. So they''re not gonna just take ideas from some relative unknown and make a game from it, especially since people without experience tend to not have what it takes to carry a game from fanciful idea to workable implementation.
Advertisement
It usually takes a lot of vitamin C to get something big like a MMORPG design going... connections. Even then I think I´d have to go with the poster above - "You don´t".
If you´re serious about gamedesign work on other stuff first, to build a track record in gamedesign. And you´ll probably want to do your own template first.. none of those I have seen so far are a hundred percent statisfactory, besides, every design doc has different needs.

If you´re really serious about this I´d suggest you get in touch with as many development studios as you can, give them your design doc and let them do an effort estimation (this probably won´t cost too much, if anything at all). If the developers like it, AND say its doable (which I would say is not a given, as you´re talking about MMORPG) AND give you an effort estimation which is realistic, then you can start trying to find publishers.

A question: How big is your design (words/pages)?
Though, something I have a problem with is when I see some small game group with a qoute like "you should help us, we already have a 200 page design doc, and 80 pages to go..." Just becuase your design document is 200+ pages long, does not make it a good design. A good design is someone who can "design" a game within a nicely confined understandable syntax that can be read as if it were a "treatment" for a hollywood studio, but still contains all of the right details in place. A friend of mine made a game called "Alice", and of course it was published, the design document was very well thought out and that is why it was made. They saw the potential in the pages of the document.

more is not better.

No, but the bigger the design doc, the less chance it''s crap. If they got to 200 pages without realising that there were serious flaws or holes in the plan, then that must count for something. And, at least those are 200 pages you can check to see if they are onto something or not. 0 pages gives you no indication whatsoever. I would err on the side of more rather than less.

[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite ]
Well yes and no. They''re is definetly more for them to chew on. But in all, they recieve a lot of design documents (I don''t think this guy is the first to think of that idea), just as hollywood recieves a lot of scripts. So it is best to first send a "Treatment", or in game terms, a "game walkthrough", or atleast, keep that towards the beginning.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement