This happened on January 3, 2013. The New Year’s frenzy was over. Ahead of me lay the rest of the session and another stream of gray student everyday life. To distract myself I launched World of Warcraft. With every passing minute, the realization that the only thing keeping me in the game was a paid subscription was ingrained deeper into my head. After 20 minutes my patience ran out. The love for the game, which occupied me for many hours, was slowly but surely dying. Out of desperation I decided to take up my studies. As fate would have it, I needed last year’s notes, which were stored in the attic. While searching for the necessary notes, my eye caught the cover of an old notebook. The cover alone brought back a flood of childhood memories. At that time, a computer was a rarity, and owning a console caused the envy of the entire yard. At that time, the number of viewers on the “stream” was determined by your mother. At that time, we came up with games ourselves, because for this we only needed a thick notebook and a few sheets of cardboard. Overwhelmed by nostalgia, I re-read all my childhood notes and realized that I had wasted 3 years on MechMash. That’s how, sitting in a dusty attic with an old notebook in my hands, I realized what I really wanted to do. I want to make games.
Flashback and lyrics are over. Let’s move on to the dry facts.
Game genre: MMORPG with Sandbox elements.
Setting: Fantasy.
Controls: Keyboard+mouse, Gamepad (needs optimization).
Platform: PC, if you can optimize the controls for a gamepad, then Xxx One and PS4 consoles.
• Healthy minimalism. This principle extends to the interface, graphics and customization system. I don’t see the point in a bunch of icons, panels and bars on the screen, an abundance of textures on models and hundreds of perks, spells and character characteristics.
- o "Cartoon" realism. Eye-pleasing colors and beautiful but simple designs. With the help of these things it will be easier for the player to perceive the game world. In addition, being in conditions of information deficiency, the brain will begin to create it itself. The realism is that the player should not have the thought “why doesn’t this warrior get his head cut off with his own shoulder pads when he swings?”?” or “how this armored bra saves an elf from a huge fireball?”.
- o Customizable interface. I am against user interface modifications in the game. Instead, the player has the opportunity to flexibly customize the existing interface.
- o Simple customization system. Each character has 8 ability slots. Each slot has 3 abilities to choose from. Each ability has 3 upgrade options. As a result, the player chooses 8 out of 72 abilities that he will use in battle. It is also possible to switch to an alternative build right during the battle.
• Experience is more important than chance. All dodges, blocks and critical effects fall on the shoulders of the players, and not on the random number generator. To do this I used a shift system which will be described later.
• You are not a hero! The player should not feel like an invincible hero who is not afraid of even a 6-meter dragon. Dying in the game is more than easy, especially if you are not covered from behind by a bunch of your comrades. This also means that your character is not by default a distributor of goodness and an arbiter of justice. The player is free to choose his role in the chaos happening around him: to be a ruthless killer, a good Samaritan, or a silent spectator.
• References to reality. The game is educational in nature. While exploring the world, the player will encounter places, characters and events that are references to things from the real world.
• Endless Adventure. There is almost no concept of high end in the game. The relevance of items and adventures does not depend on the character’s level, but depends on the specific situation and conditions.
From now on I will post more highly specialized parts of the design doc. This will be done in portions of varying sizes, because it is important for me to see your reaction, opinion or criticism to individual elements, to understand what needs rethinking and what does not. Also, large posts take more time to design and layout, and I’m in the mood for more dynamic communication.
Entirely yours, Falkan.
Best comments
Wow… How neglected everything is. Now it will be painful and unpleasant. If anything, I warned you.
Firstly, you need to leave PC, T.e. first comment. This is so that the post goes live (inset block on the right side of the page).
Secondly. But religion doesn’t allow you to immediately upload the document somewhere into Google Docs and give a link? Or you want to play ping-pong with the “target audience”? Say, here is a piece of text for you, express your opinion. Considering that the text has little content, such table tennis will not lead to any good. And, to be honest, I’m tired of waiting for the “after” to give birth to an update. Need feedback or a pack of cons? How to decide whether you want to “checkers” or “go”.
Thirdly. I’m not a https://noidverificationcasinos.co.uk/review/spinscastle/ grammar Nazi, I sometimes make misspellings myself, but “warrior” and “war”… these are, damn it, different words. This is my personal freezer. I only get stronger ragequit from zhY-shY. And yes, literacy is still important for game design. There is a possibility that you will have to proofread or even immediately write in-game texts/dialogues. And the first complaint: where, exactly, are the mechanics?? It is, of course, commendable that you are thinking about the player’s convenience in terms of the interface and all that. It’s true that even here you are rushing along the rake, not counting the bump.
For such a blurry technical specification, your artist will hate you with every fiber of his soul and will be absolutely right. Where are the references?? Cartoon realism
Each character has 8 ability slots. Each slot has 3 abilities to choose from. Each ability has 3 upgrade options. As a result, the player chooses from 72 abilities
Well, exactly, the talent tree. Maybe then it was worth writing like that? And by the way, either someone is bad at arithmetic, or the whole matter should have been described in more detail. 3*8=24. T.e. the player has 24 perks, and he chooses from them, and only then selects improvements for them from 72 options. And here an immodest question arises. How are you going to balance all this obscenity?? Especially considering that even in WoW everything was reduced to 21 talents and 6 characters. T.e. 27 points in total.
Experience is more important than chance. All dodges, blocks and critical effects fall on the shoulders of the players, and not on the random number generator. To do this I used a shift system which will be described later.
Yes, somewhere else later? And yes, a potential balance break is possible in this place. For a more detailed assessment, we need information on these “shifts” of yours.
You are not a hero! The player should not feel like an invincible hero who is not afraid of even a 6-meter dragon. Dying in the game is more than easy, especially if you are not covered from behind by a bunch of your comrades. This also means that your character is not by default a distributor of goodness and an arbiter of justice. The player is free to choose his role in the chaos happening around him: to be a ruthless killer, a good Samaritan, or a silent spectator.
The game is educational in nature. While exploring the world, the player will encounter places, characters and events that are references to things from the real world.
There is almost no concept of high end in the game. The relevance of items and adventures does not depend on the character’s level, but depends on the specific situation and conditions.
Great again. How? How is such a system implemented?? Why does everything have to be scratched out with pincers, like during an interrogation??
You can ask many more questions, of course. For example, why is the camera position not described?? First person? From the third? Isometric? Target or nontarget system? What a fight? What does she look like? Real-time or turn-based? What platform? What input scheme? What are the reference mechanics/games other than WoW?? Where is all this?? Or again, sorry, we’ll have to wait until the cuckoo’s spell?
One of the main tasks of a game designer in a team, if we are talking about a team, is communication. T.e. you must not just describe your dream game, but create a complete image, a picture, in the minds of your fellow sufferers. It will not be possible to completely avoid discrepancies, but you need to try to paint everything so that the picture is approximately the same for everyone. Otherwise it will turn out to be “swan-crayfish-pike”. At the moment, you have a short tail of “disdoc” here, which raises more questions than it answers.
I’ve seen porn that started out exactly like this.
The guy above described everything (and even more). I’ll add on my own that such a piece of information about what-are-you-doing-there and feedback is somehow strange once again, because on paper it’s still just another MMO with a “user” interface, and it’s not possible to comment on this, because there’s only a blurry image of the community.
Here you are.
So this is early access. You pay two hundred rubles and receive the rest of the design document as you write it ;)
This is already a tragedy. Or some kind of sexual perversion. I always felt like a Korean trapped in a Russian body. Or what is it called when you want to make Korean MMORPGs in Russia?
You were born in the wrong country. When you were given a choice of which piiiiip to get out of, you were cheated. Although there is always the opportunity to go to Mail and from there make your way to Korea. To your brothers)
Don’t be so categorical, now there’s a fashion for all sorts of MMO survival, and for them a fantasy setting is just right
When he finishes the design, the fashion will already pass) And Korean MMORPGs are eternal. Even if a nuclear strike is launched on Korea, Mail will save the developers, because they will never die) And here it seems that followers are being trained in Russia. Think about it)
Where’s the continuation?? At the moment, it doesn’t look like a serious debunker (even if it’s just a small part).
Yes, this is an extremely small, general part. If I may say so, an introduction.
I don’t intend to give up my idea, but now I have a crunch at my main job. I’ll finish the sequel by the weekend.
Painful, unpleasant, but extremely useful and instructive. The bumps will heal, mistakes will be corrected, only experience will remain.
Here I wanted to reveal the main concepts that guided me when writing the remaining sections of the design document. I agree, it’s worth adding examples somewhere, but most of your questions will receive a detailed answer in future posts dedicated to a specific topic.
It is initially stored in google disk, but I’m not ready to let people there yet.
To be honest, I haven’t fully mastered stopgame yet. For example, I never found a tag that added a picture (But I had the desire). Maybe it has something to do with my karma.
Don’t be so categorical, now there’s a fashion for all sorts of MMO survival, and for them a fantasy setting is just right
For me, as a person who loves everything kawaii and especially the armored bra, the prospect is very, very, not fun :(