Developing a New Major

Making a MMORPG - ch 7 from Massively Multi-player online role playing games by R.V. Kelly 2 (2004)

good for beginning designers because it lists lots of different jobs and the complexity - of design doc, of building, of testing, and of the business end (attracting audience, making profit, continuing development, timing of next version)

steep learning curve, can’t do by self or with a group of friends (pretty broad statement - maybe can’t make a WOW substitute but with tools like Metaplace maybe ya can - are they really mmo’s or just multiplayer games - what’s the difference?)

designers have to make lots of decisions before starting (lists on p. 167) - backstory/lore, what races players can choose between, the economy basics, how players earn XP, how quests work… - - big decisions…..and then a bunch of little ones including how many XP you get for each quest/task/skill use, how hard it is to do certain tasks, how long a monster will chase you…then have to balance everything so it’s fair for all the different races adn classes — these are the rules for how everything works in the universe (aka the game system)

• need landscape artistst (3d guys to make the basic shapes, work with the wireframes and 2d/texturer guys to add the colors and photos over hte wireframes)
• need architect types to design buildings and designers to build furniture clothes, weapons - basically decorate the place with buildings, roads, trees rocks stuff
• need 2d guys to work on the interface
• need animators - people to add bones and build libraries of motions/actions for all types of characters and objects
• need programmers - scripters, physics engine builders, C++, to make all the game system rules come to life
• need database guys, client server programmers
• need audio guys - sfx, music, voices, sound loops
• need story guys - some players want intricate backstory, some games hire writers to flesh out the story for hte players
• need testers and people to run alpha and beta tests
• need people to be on the live team to do all the updates and to build new content (fromt he time system goes “gold” until a new version is intro’d)

takes 1.5 to 3 years cost several million dollars to build - can make money with about 30k players based on purchase of software and monthly subscriptions (wonder how accurate those still are and how those will change with new tools)

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