Yes lets skip wow (you are right you shouldnt have brought that up :), people get triggered, and rightly so). Plan your next move, not your next 20 years in the industry (as would be the case for making something like wow).

The other games you mension for scope (fortnite and overwatch) are also HUGE. And mutliplayer games complicate stuff immensely. Even if you were 5 skilled and experienced developers (which you already said you are not) starting with a project like that is NOT WISE.

As suggested, just clone tetris and so on until you understand more. Then it will be easier to plan ahead. People who have not completed games have no idea of how much time it takes:) Note: this is MUCH more time efficient than jumping on a huge project directly.

It's very, very common for people to start their game development "career" like this:

• Want to start off with "the dream project right away", which is huge, unrealistic (but very cool)
• That failed miserably
• Lost interest in development (or at least lost lots of time)

Dont be another of those guys ! Cause even though you seem mature and realistic enough for a newb, this is where you would be heading with your current plan.

On 9/29/2018 at 10:35 PM, bilbo92 said:

and it would be stupid to do a lot of "small" games first that I have no motivation for, because that will definitely not help me

It won't help you? Why not?

Think about this: you have your dream game idea, right? Now tell me, do you want your dream game to be made by some beginner with no experience whatsoever? Of course you don't. You don't even want your forum question to be answered by someone with no experience. Your dream game deserves to be made by someone who knows what they are doing. So go do something else, make "a lot of small games first", get experience, stop being a beginner, and once you know what you are doing, then go make your dream game.

Plus, since you will not care that much about the small games, you can use them to learn, experiment, and make all the mistakes that you will not make later. All in all, they definitely will help you.

16 minutes ago, 1024 said:

It won't help you? Why not?

Think about this: you have your dream game idea, right? Now tell me, do you want your dream game to be made by some beginner with no experience whatsoever? Of course you don't. You don't even want your forum question to be answered by someone with no experience. Your dream game deserves to be made by someone who knows what they are doing. So go do something else, make "a lot of small games first", get experience, stop being a beginner, and once you know what you are doing, then go make your dream game.

Plus, since you will not care that much about the small games, you can use them to learn, experiment, and make all the mistakes that you will not make later. All in all, they definitely will help you.

This is one of the best replies that can be given to this subject, and handled so very well.

Re: Bilbo92.

If I were in your shoes, and as driven to make an online game, then here is how I would do it...

Take a look at Atari's Gauntlet and explore the development of that game.  Its two main selling points were cashing in on the D&D craze of the 1980s and delivering the best example of its time of a multi-player game.

Doom is obviously an important game, but its sometime overlooked as the greatest leap forward in gaming since Gauntlet.  Doom was also inspired by D&D and had multiplayer, but now it was a realtime 3D game with more than just four players( I think was something like 16 players. ) over a network.

Who remembers Everquest? Is that still a thing or did WOW wipe it out?  I'm not sure.  What I do know is that Everquest was blatently inspired by D&D and then supporting an entire online community inside a single game. Wow.  No pun intended...

There is a pattern forming here...

Basically, you need to start at Gauntlet and support the game with just a handful of friends who want to chill out together and have a good blast.  Worst case scenario, your players will end up with mutliple gamepads sat around the same computer.  Best case is an online lobby room where players can chime in at anytime so long as a game is playing...

If you are part of a 3 person team, I think you can pull this off in Unity.  You handle the game design and unity stuff, a programmer to worry about the C# code and network/internet complications and finally an artist/musician to focus on all artistic assets.  How long will it take?  Totally depends, but so long as you are not complete strangers to your fields and hard working and fully committed, then I'd say about a years work, possibly two.

I hope this helps.

Steve.

I think sometimes people develop unreasonable expectations (or even dreams) about game development simply because they exist in the virtual world. A large game like WoW or even a game like Overwatch has what amounts to hundreds of thousands of man-hours poured into them generally. Scale wise it's like having built a pillow fort before and wanting to build a skyscraper, I think it more easily occurs to people that "I can't do this alone, or with a small team" when it comes to a skyscraper, but with a game it is much harder to see the work involved.

Reality is I wouldn't set your sights that high if you want to make something for yourself, even if you get friends to help, games are an absurd amount of work. You can start on an inventory system for a game, something that seems simple in theory and even if you know -exactly- how you want to design it, you can finish it and see that you put a couple hundred hours of code into all the different functionality it needed, and that's just one tiny part of a game and one field! Most people vastly underestimate the programming work involved in something, you can click through what looks like a few pages of code and in reality in took weeks of typing and thinking to finish that.

Games really are work, you can say you love them or always wanted to make them or dreamed of working on them as much as you want, but at the end of the day they are a ton of work, it's not uncommon for phone games to take people months to make even if they are designed to have quite simple functionality and game play. How long would you really work on a dream game for? A year? Ten years? Twenty years? Would you learn modeling? Animation? Sound? Programming? Design? Quality is a thing too, do you really expect to compare to people that devote their careers to the task? There are people that spend their entire lives making 3d models, get degrees in computer science and a dozen programming languages, work on many projects to acquire design experience. Each field has great depth and many things to learn.

I'm not trying to be rude or a dream crusher, I'm glad that people aspire to make games, but in reality out of the many many people I see talk about the industry or try to get into it at a hobby level with big dreams, almost nobody ever even ends up completing a moderate sized game, I've never seen anyone create a notable large scale game by themselves off of sheer willpower. If they're that serious they usually find a job first, or realize how ridiculous a scale what they are thinking about doing really is. A month doesn't go by I don't see someone here asking about an MMO or something similar, these people have no idea the sheer amount of work they are talking about embarking on. I see people sometimes throw together very basic prototypes of games but then they hit a roadblock as they run out of technical knowledge or need things that libraries or engines can't readily provide.

My advice would be to rethink what you want and set your sights a little lower. If you really want to make games with others out of university then work on something much smaller and much more realistic.

If you're interested in other developer's experiences, Slayemin's blog has a pretty good accounting of what he's been through. If you consider the size and complexity of his project and that he started the project as an experienced programmer, hopefully you can get a sense of what you want to know.

Good luck in your endeavors.