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Hi!

I was doing some brainwork on a game concept on the subway on the way home today, and jotted down some ideas.
I'd like some super early feed back to see if the idea is any good, or if it's allready been done :)

Inspirational sources

Realm of the Mad God
Diablo (1/2/3)
League of Legends
Warcraft 3


Core ideas

• Coop dungeon crawler with small parties (2-5 players).
• Minimalistic/simplistic attribute and equipment system.
• Fantasy world with swords and magic.
• Permanent death (more on this later!).
• Separate worlds/servers with a dedicated God-player.
• God player generates new content.
• Good gods make popular worlds.

Gameplay (Mortals)

Players create a character with a name and a class, and get placed in a lobby room.
From here, you can join queues to play in a set of available dungeons, or team up with friends and join as a party.

The dungeons are fairly small, between 15 and 60 minutes clear time. Each character has a very limited set of abilities, perhaps 2-4.
Dungeons should have a World of Warcraft-esque feel, where you kill 1 pack of monsters at a time, and end up killing a boss for magnificent treasure.

Gameplay should be fast and hectic, with bullet-hell elements.


Gameplay (Gods)

Gods create new dungeons and can modify or remove existing ones.
They decide what items can drop from monsters and bosses, and how strong the bosses are.
The less limitations a god has, the better.

Gods need to create good content to make their world popular.
They must create some easy and some difficult dungeons, and make loot drop often enough for the world to be fun to play, but not so fast that the world gets "played up" too fast.


Monetization

This is where shit gets serious.

The game should be driven by microtransactions:
Characters who die are put in the graveyard. If you want to revive your character, you have to pay for it.
Having trouble with a dungeon and want to become stronger? Buy items or stat upgrades. Because it's only coop, selling char upgrades won't be gamebreaking if you limit how much you can stack purchasable upgrades (one upgrade per dungeon boss kill for example).
Want your rogue to have all black clothes. Pay for it.
Want to be a god? It'll cost ya.
50% of all money earned from microtransactions goes to the god.


What am I envisioning?

Gods that create great worlds get more money.
If they are good enough, they might even be able to live off being a god.
The task of the god will be to balance their world to make it live (have players who play on it) as long as possible, but worlds dying out because of corruption or lack of input is part of the game.

The amount of worlds available will be adjusted automatically by supply and demand of worlds.

Half computer game, half psychological experiment, half economic experiment. With 150% computer game, how can you go wrong!

Coop-dungeon crawlers are awesome. Hopefully, people will have fun playing!




Any and all input is great. I don't have anything close to the time or experience to make this, but if I think it's a viable idea, I might develop it more.

Honestly, I wouldn't charge money for items that make you better. I would only charge for convenience items. This is a proven method in games. If you charge for weapons, gamers just call your game "Pay to Win" and they won't go near it.

As for the actual idea, I think it's interesting. It's pretty much virtual DnD. Dungeon Masters make the world, and players experience it. Any ideas as far as how you are going to handle server costs from the start?

It's impossible to judge an idea. You lose much of the design during implementation.

The Mortal-God link needs some strong synergy, at this point looks like both are playing different games.

Don't see if there's a link between different God-worlds. Like could a God just drop tons of nice stuff on one world and have the mortals from that world use it to win other worlds?

Not really enough incentive to play a Mortal. And your 'economy' here is heavily based on Mortals. This is probably the weakest point.

Wary of the permadeath thing. I love the idea of buying back resurrections, but this will bring forth the problem of people purposely killing their mortals for resurrection money, probably by pulling them into addiction and throwing in subtle instadeath traps or something.

@enthrallstudios:

Server costs is too far ahead to worry about at the moment. I think the biggest chance I have of realizing this is trying to pitch it to some semi-large game company (in exchange for a job as a game designer?  :lol: ).

I was thinking more like this:
Items grant percentage-boosts based on stats like Strength, Intelligence, Vitailty, Agility.
Stat increase potions can be bought by a combination of Dungeon Points (Á la League of Legends Influence Points) and money, or purely with Dungeon Points (will take more time to farm).


@Muz:

One of the things that attracted me by the idea is actually the fact that gods can be greedy or corrupt. They would be pretty similar to the gods in old mythologies. The title I'm thinking of at the moment is "Corruption".

The community itself will have to work out the dynamics (Good god or bad god?).

The gods definately need a way to communicate with the players. Either through a stone tablet on top of a mountain, an ingame chat, a world-forum etc.

Offer ye goods to thine God and blessings ye shall recieve.

Obviously, the gods are not allowed to do things like move 200 monsters directly ontop of the players to intentionally kill them.

In Realm of the Mad God, people die even though you can instantly teleport to safety at the click of a single key.
You don't need to make traps to kill people, they'll do that to themselves because of their own green for fat loot.

I actually agree with him on making the items one buys to be more of a convenience than give a player a clear edge on the others who don't pay for boosts.
I myself have been at the short end of the stick for not paying for better items on other games and it sucks :(

However your game is very interesting, but like the other guy mentioned before you're gonna want to get the players to WANT to be a Mortal.
Gods seem to be the only ones that are able to make some CASH here, so what about the mortals?
Shouldn't they be able to haggle some of their items to others aswell?
Or should the Gods be the only ones getting some dough?

Well they get to play a Free To Play dungeon crawler with user-made content. Isn't that incentive enough? :D

I think I understand what your concern is though:

If being a god can earn you cash, wouldn't everyone want to be gods?

I think this would solve itself, because if the god : mortal ratio is 1:1 then most of the worlds will be empty of players, and the gods of those worlds won't get any money or players for their content anyway.
Also becoming a god would be a bought privelige, so you had to consider if the investment is worth it. This might help prevent too many worlds.


On a side note: Can someone with Unity-experience say if this project could be realized in Unity? I'm leaning towards getting to know Unity, and it would be cool if this could be my learning project.

Idea for you: tie the two together, no Gods/mortals.  You go adventuring to get materials to use to build your own dungeons.  Building and improving your dungeon increases your 'magical potential', or ability to use higher level equipment.  Adventurers entering your dungeon generate energy, but you get less energy the further they make it into your dungeon.

This is a much more interesting and sustainable idea.

My current work touches this. It... combines the idea of players generating content, other players exploring it, and in-game and out-of-game (i.e real) currency being transferred in payment/reward for good stuff.

I will tell the take-aways from my work so far:
  1. Micro-transaction games are their own beast. If you've never built one, or aren't confident in what makes them unique, then keep that in mind.
  2. Player generated content games are their own beast. They demand that users make good content, and that that content gets to the right person. Think about the free market. People already have the option to profit on what they make. Just giving them tools to build and sell won't be enough. They need guidance on how to build things well, how to learn from their mistakes, how to notice their mistakes, and most importantly, how to find the content that is most likely to appeal to them. This final issue is non-trivial. Also, the act of creation has to be as compelling as the act of consuming. Money itself isn't reward enough.
  3. Making a good game is hard all by itself.

I'd forget micro-transactions. If you can get a core mechanic that is fun to play with, and a "level editor" that is actually usable, fun to use, and produces quality content; and you solve the problem of 99% of user-gen content being irrelevant to most players (look at Steam Greenlight); then you can start putting in transactions. Getting people to pay with their time will be a challenge all on its own. Though I don't know your experience level, so use your best judgment.

If you can make it so the "God" portion of the game integrates with the actual gameplay that is even better. In fact, if you can't do this I wouldn't recommend carrying on with the game at all. There are currently 0 big games in which the primary draw is generated content by users through an editor. Minecraft's brilliance, among many things, is that the gameplay _is_ the level editor. After having an adventure you can share what you did right away. You don't have to go do "something else." Also, that content is share-able through the normal-ass web.


Hahahahahah.

You're proposing making two different games that interact. That is a very hard problem. I'd try thinking how this could be one game. Maybe every player is both god/adventurer, and can gain abilities in either according to their choices i.e. time spent doing things.

It will be painful to sort this out, but I promise you, if you do your game will seem so much more engaging to you.

For clarity, by "editor" I mean whatever in-game tools players use to do "God" things. "Editor" is an abstract term.

Again, Minecraft, Minecraft. The Minecraft player is always simultaneously an explorer and craftsman.


---

"This" is not a good learning project. Unity would be fine. If you need to "learn" how to make games, just try and nail a couple of mechanics. It makes it painful to accept that your game is "small;" maybe that doesn't motivate you, but it's a necessary step. Shrinking ideas is a critical tool in the designer's box.

But these are just my thoughts.

It sounds like you want to create a tool set to allow average people to create and host their own micro MMORPG worlds. I remember seeing a facebook game created by "Wizards of the Coast" that worked along these lines. Their monotization model was far less aggressive than what you propose.

If you want to use your customers as content creators I would strongly advise against charging them for the privilege.

Also no matter how brilliant your game idea is, other people are not going to make your game unless you have a crap load of money. Getting hired as a designer to work on the game idea you pitch is unheard of.

Yeah, I missed your caveat that you don't have the expertise to implement this yourself.  At the very least you should try to master game development tools like GameMaker enough that you have a working prototype that lets you design the dungeon, then take a party in to explore it.  If those aren't fun, then your game doesn't work.

Thanks for more input :)

I probably should have pointed out that this is more of a personal gamedesign-exercise, not something that I plan to make any time soon.

The issue with aggressive monetization scaring off customers is probably right, but I'm handling this idea as a mix of a game and a psychology experiment.
I'd love to see a game like this where the mortal players would bribe their gods in real life to give them advantages in the game world, drama between gods and other funsies.

Adding an economic aspect to the game is probably a good way to tempt people into acting immorally (spelling?).

I've seen microtransaction games work. They sell just like every other business - people buy it when they don't feel ripped off.

The Starbucks model works well... build a good place for people to sit down, chat, relax, and sell them coffee while they wait.

I like the idea of people making worlds with competing dungeons. Then again, that sounds a lot like Backyard Monsters. But I guess with more creativity.

The idea's a little too abstract to see what would make it stand out. I'd love to see something like a multiplayer Evil Genius kind of game, but not a Dungeon Keeper kind, because Dungeon Keeper keeps most of its charm single player.

I assumed that much. I was just warning against the dangers of inflated scope. If you're really interested in the God/player model, try really hard to make it one interface.

My best design would be like this:
  1. All players are regular players.
  2. They can earn the right to "god time" by accomplishing things. This is some kind of currency.
  3. They can spend their "god time" by doing god-things. Have a single-player component where they can build dungeons for AIs to go through, even if they are really simple ones, so that players can taste the God experience without going multiplayer.

Maybe extra god time can be purchased, or certain god abilities can be purchased.

Note: In both farmville and minecraft players can create things they themselves can appreciate _and_ other players can see. That's a good double-whammy to go for.