Hey people,

My name is Daniel Leese and i am a student at Stoke-on-Trent College studying all basic aspects of I.T. for a huge part of my life i have sat and played countless games and it has always annoyed me when you wish you could do something in game but you cant do it or when you are always stuck to a story line with no way of going slightly off target to do something else. if you know how i feel then message me because i just want to find a small group of people and make a difference. make a small independant MMO that could change the way people look at games. yeah ok im young but i know exactly what kinds of things people want in a game and with the current video game industry, the developers are rushing and not thinking about there creations properly. i love video games and especially MMO's and i know with the right help from the right people we can do this together :) if your interested then pleasee message me ASAP! :D

not really sure what you are looking for.

I would say im kinda a developer, but not really a programmer, I mean I can write lore and ideas type of person just have trouble putting them into game form.  I am actually gonna start a blog soon with my ideas, open for anyone to take I just want a game that all of us old time MMO'ers would want, yet wont be developed

if your doing basic IT, may i ask if people join you what do they get out of it and TBH you dont really know what gamers want. you may htink you know but no one knows when the next wow wil lcome out.

+ weres the money gonig to come from??

Hey Daniel, so what do you have in mind to break the mold?

May I ask how you plan to help in the development life cycle?

heyy man :)

well basically i just want to create a game people will really enjoy and wont get bored of. something that could be fun for any age. im hopeless with graphics but i have all these ideas in my head and id love to collaberate with you and other and get something solid down to work from :)

heyy dude :)

well i have tuns of great ideas lurking around in my head but most MMO's consist of level based characters starting really weak, Fighting a group of weak enemies and then going to another city and doing the same thing. i would love to see the start of something new. A game that could possibly have a story but something with endless paths of possiblilty. i dont want to say to much because its up to you guys to help me. everyone has an equal say :)

I think a lot of people have "ideas" which they think is great, and not a lot of programmers. Good luck to you! Is it a sandbox or themepark type game which you have ideas for?

thanks dude,

that decision is entirely up to the people who ill be working with :)

i am going to  be a bit of a dick here but trust me it wont happen, not soon anyway.

theres 2 things an indie game needs and that leadership and money, you need both if you are going to make a game.. the only exception is if you find a group of people who want to make the same game as you.

you will need leadership as everyone has there own perfect MMO in there head but it will not be the same as everyone else's and if you do not take charge the ideas are gonig to be lsot or people will just get fed up as the game is not what they thought it was gonig to be and this leads into money.

if they are being paid then fair enough but if not, agian your gonig to go down a bad road of people doing stuff they hate and therefore not doing it.

Danielson,

Sounds good. I have good news and bad news, though. First, the bad news. If you don't have money or programming skills, then you are like literally thousands of other people out there, mostly young guys, who all have ideas and know what gamers want and just need someone to provide money, programming, graphics, project management, legal advice, marketing... in short, pretty much everything. Obviously the hard part is convincing people who have all that that they need you for anything. If there were only a few people with good ideas and lots and lots of investors and programmers, it would be different, but the supply of inexperienced people with good gaming ideas is much, much greater than game development team members with programming expertise, graphics expertise, money, etc.

Now, the good news. It's very hard, but it's not quite impossible to put together a game development team by yourself, even if you are inexperienced. Usually MMORPG development teams that create successful games have hundreds of members and large amounts of investment capital available -- often millions of dollars. But many small teams have far less people and lots less money. I know a bit about this because I created an MMORPG of my own. It took a year out of my life and a bit of money, but I did it.

It was called Magic of the Gods. It was a sandbox type Tolkienesque fantasy game with just about all the features that hard core role players are constantly asking for. We never got to the point where we advertised because we were still working on it, but players who tried it started telling their friends and a gamers guild with no connection to us started promoting it on their own. The few people who ever played it really liked it and we were getting regular donations even though it was free to play.

It went offline due to technical problems with the software development tools we were using and I didn't have the time or the money to fix it when I really needed to redo it from scratch with new development tools. It's been offline for about two years now.

Anyway, here's some more good news. If you can find someone -- or a whole team -- to work with who actually has created a game before, you are on a whole different level from where you appear to be now. Getting a game done becomes more of a real project and less of a dream. Normally finding someone like that is hard and if you do, they probably have their own ideas for what to work on. Well, you've now found such a person. Me. Of course, I have my own ideas on what to do for a game. But I would be willing to consider working with inexperienced, enthusiastic people, especially if they know how to use html, can program in php or are willing to learn or if they can create graphics, even 2-D graphics and would consider working for little or no money up front.

Experienced game developers will undoubtedly laugh at this and say it proves I'm not serious or not real.  What it really means is that I can't spare the money to hire professionals right now, but I am impatient to get my next game project underway because I see an opportunity for a game that is very, very easy to create, would be unique and could be quite profitable, but the market is changing. It would be a facebook app game and although right now most of these kind of games are ridiculously simple and low quality and yet wildly profitable, they are getting more sophisticated and by next year the opportunity to throw something together quickly and easily and make money to finance other game projects may be gone.

I have another business that is established, is generating good cash flow and is rapidly growing that I am planning to use as a source of funds to finance game development projects. Within six months, and maybe more like three months, I'll have the money to do this right.  It just kills me to wait when I can see this opportunity so clearly.

Charles

Hey Daniel,

If you'd like to put up a design team, I think it's a good idea to start with writing your Game Design Document (GDD). Tom Sloper has made a great GDD template, as well as Mark Baldwin.

When you've lined out your ideas like in the above mentioned templates, it will be a great help for all the members of your design team. And the most important thing:

It will give you an idea, in the end, what you'll need from your design team and what you want to do yourself.

Be as specific as possible, instead of only saying: "I want it to be something everyone wants to play and that's different than other games."

Have fun in making your game!