As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
I want to make Fallout 3
anachronist
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I've been bitching to my friends recently about the quality of RPGs available for the PC. My premise is that there is a large untapped market for RPG games like Fallout or Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale, and that it would not be very hard or expensive to create such a game. So finally, my friends called me on it and said, "ok, so when are you going to start?"
I've got some cash saved up, so I have the seed money to make this happen. I am a project manager in the IT department at a large comapny, so I know how to deliver a project like this. But accounting applications and games are different animals, so I need advice on two fronts - building the game, and delivering it.
Bulding the game
I've got some basic ideas, but I need to know if they are realistic:
Voices - just place an ad in Variety, pay 2 people $1000 and we're be done in one day
Music - use public domain classical music
Sound effects - use some little post-production company's sound library, might cost a couple grand.
Graphics - Hire some struggling comic book guy to do the artwork. Make the game sprite based with scrolling painted background. It does not need to be fancy, remember. I could even put out requests to the gaming community to submit artwork, which would be free.
Ruleset - use public domain d20 system.
Programming - This is the hardest part. I could outsource this to Eastern Europe, but I don't even know where to begin with the designs. What does a game design look like and contain?
Delivering the Game
I have no illusions that this will ever be in a glossy box at Best Buy. I imagine this will either be distributed Mail Order or as a download. Should I look to partner with someone like Stardock? Do I handle marketing? Should I start talking to game magazines and online sites? Anyone have any ideas?
I've got some cash saved up, so I have the seed money to make this happen. I am a project manager in the IT department at a large comapny, so I know how to deliver a project like this. But accounting applications and games are different animals, so I need advice on two fronts - building the game, and delivering it.
Bulding the game
I've got some basic ideas, but I need to know if they are realistic:
Voices - just place an ad in Variety, pay 2 people $1000 and we're be done in one day
Music - use public domain classical music
Sound effects - use some little post-production company's sound library, might cost a couple grand.
Graphics - Hire some struggling comic book guy to do the artwork. Make the game sprite based with scrolling painted background. It does not need to be fancy, remember. I could even put out requests to the gaming community to submit artwork, which would be free.
Ruleset - use public domain d20 system.
Programming - This is the hardest part. I could outsource this to Eastern Europe, but I don't even know where to begin with the designs. What does a game design look like and contain?
Delivering the Game
I have no illusions that this will ever be in a glossy box at Best Buy. I imagine this will either be distributed Mail Order or as a download. Should I look to partner with someone like Stardock? Do I handle marketing? Should I start talking to game magazines and online sites? Anyone have any ideas?
anachronist on
0
Posts
If you can't do that, you can't do any of the rest of it.
Thanatos: Fallout 3 was just a catchy title to the post. While I'd *love* there to be a Fallout 3, there will never be one that is worth playing, and I have no illusions of getting any of those licenses. My RPG would be a d20 based game with a totally original storyline, background and characters. Luckily I work in Hollywood and know people that can help me do the research to make sure no one will sue me.
I suggest you start with something simple, like the NWN2 toolset and work your way up.
A better example would be Nuclear Monkey Software, which made Narbacular Drop and absorbed by Valve to make Portal.
If you've never even made a game, what experience could you possibly be using to decide that this isn't a complicated undertaking?
Chances are, you haven't thought of everything that could go wrong.
If your looking to make a Baldurs Gate-esque RPG, then NWN2 is the perfect place for you to begin. I myself have been working on a project for over a month now. The toolset is a lot more flexible and powerful this time around, and if you really wanted to, you could easily find a way to dedicate thousands and thousands of man hours into creating a campaign that rivals Obsidian's campaign (which was created with the very same toolset), complete with voice acting, cutscenes and everything. All the foundation is there.
However, for your team this should only be a warm up project. If you can't even create a good decent RPG with an already made Toolset, the chances of you making a good game from scratch == a snowballs chance in hell.
Getting cheap when it comes to coding, mostly. Ever heard of Metalheart or The Fall? Failed attempts at Fallout clones, brought to you by Russia and Germany. If you're outsourcing in the region with the idea of saving money, you could very well end up with a worse game that those. I can't see this working unless you actually licensed an existing engine and had it modified (as little as possible) to fit your needs. Preferably an engine that was previously used for 3rd Edition D&D, because getting outsourced coder to implement D20 from scratch isn't going to work well. Hell, Bioware couldn't even get 3.5 Ed. D&D right with all of their resources.
so don't skimp on the story.
Unless that would be you?
My suggestion - start out making some modules for the recently released NWN2. I think some of the fan-made ones for the original Neverwinter Nights were picked up by Bioware and later sold on their site.
There actually were some attempts to make a low-budget fallout-like games, I think you'll find some of the still active projects through No Mutants Allowed.
It's also somewhat ironic that you want to outsource programming, considering developers like Troika who were infamous for the buginess of their games or Obsidian for that matter and their awfully unoptimized NWN2 engine
edit: I wonder if you could do vector-based sprites? That should work for scaling... maybe that would be too CPU intensive, but perhaps it could be somehow offloaded to the GPU?
At night, the ice weasels come."
Ever heard of http://popcap.com/ ?
They are not dead.
A good game is a good game, regardless of the media used for delivery.
I am always in the market for a good game that can run windowed on my desktop. What can I say, sometimes I am bored at work. :roll:
Another good example of ass ugly game that has hundreds of thousands of active players : http://www.tribalwars.net .
And the d20 ruleset is not public domain.
Popcap and the casual/cellphone game market is a completely different animal than the kind of people who would want to play a Fallout-esque game.
I started out with some specific criticisms of your plan, but (again, not trying to be a jerk here), the whole thing is wrong. You're approaching this like an IT project, which doesn't live or die based on masses of happy customers like a videogame does. There is no target market for the type of game you're describing, because there's nothing *good* about it - everything in your list is how to cut corners and discard quality in order to make it cheap.
This is to say nothing of the publishing part. Publishers like Real Arcade and PopCap pay something like 10-20% of the selling cost of games to whoever they bought it from. I'll be generous and assume you can get $10 for the game you're describing. So just in order to pay for your $1000 voice actors, you have to sell 500-1000 copies. You could publish it yourself, but that's a whole other infrastructure of online sales and advertising to set up - more costs to be paid in advance.
If you're going to make a game, do one of two things:
- Make a non-casual game with *some* redeeming aspects, like interesting art and music, even if it's low budget (I'm thinking the Red Odyssey expansion to Battlezone back in the late 90s, which a friend of mine worked on).
- Make a truly casual game, because those can be done cheaply and still sell reasonably well.
Either way, you're still not even guaranteed to break even. A lot of really good games with solid backing by a major publisher lose money.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
Before you spend any money or contact any companies, write a game storyline. If it's a good RPG, make it similar to a "choose your own adventure" with different ways to play. Use a good word processor so you can add options in the margin, such as if you're a spellcaster or a fighter, or heck, write by hand.
Once you have a story that's solid, interesting, and well balanced, THEN look into doing what you're thinking about. And, personally, I would imagine making a DS or GBA or similar game would be a heck of a lot more interesting than a random cheap-ass PC game. At least then you can do 2D without it negatively affecting the game.
You can never set your aim too high or have too lofty of a goal.
Just, know what you want to accomplish, and accomplish it however you need to.
Seriously, if you think you have a good idea/think you can pull it off, go for it.
You should seriously consider teaming up with a friend/friends who want to help you, though. Two+ heads is better than one.
most of all, most of all
someone said true love was dead
but i'm bound to fall
bound to fall for you
oh what can i do
okay, so this is probably going to come off really discouraging...
Game development is nothing like regular IT development, especially for something as complicated as an RPG.
I can already see that you are way underestimating the effort required and have unrealistic expectations about what you might be able to achieve with the kind of team you are planning on pulling together. To substantiate this, consider looking at the credits of Fallout 2 - http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fallout-2/credits Even if you were looking to do something which had just 10% of the content and polish of Fallout 2, you'd probably be looking at a team and an investment larger and more experienced than what you propose.
Game development is hard. RPGs are amongst the hardest of games to create. Most new developers fail because they have no game dev experience coupled with trying something too ambitious. If you execute on your current plan you will be unlikely to finish the project, and even more unlikely to see any kind of return on your investment.
My suggestion? You have money, you have software development and project management experience. Start small by doing something on the side of your current role. Work out something you can build with one programmer and one art guy without any experience in six months, then get it online via some sort of downloadable game portal and get some revenue trickling in.
Use the experience from this to do the next thing, and then the next thing, becoming more ambitious if your experience and financial resources allow.
Eventually you might get to the point where you could attempt something along the lines of your original vision.
If you don't want the long route and definitely want to pursue the RPG genre, then take Casket's advice and mod an existing game. This will be challenging enough in itself.
My 2c
These are the words of a man who has left many things half done.
Seriously, this here is the major warning sign that you have absolutely no idea what you're getting into You don't even have the faintest idea of what you want to do. Go to the library, search the internet, find stuff written by people who know what they're talking about and have actually made games, and then reassess your plan.
Right now, you're saying "I want to build a sweet car, and I'm going to do it from scratch. I hear that this state has lots of iron deposits, and I've got my dad's shovel. Where should I start digging?" What you need to be asking is, "I am completly ignorant of how to make video games, what are the best sources to elimanate this condition?" There have been several threads on this very subject in G&T and H/A in the recent past, so go looking for them as well.
That's going to take a fair bit of money though. I mean, I'm guessing in the hundreds of thousands even for a low-budget game, especially if we're talking about an RPG. But then it'd cost that much to build a team from scratch and then you're looking at a few years of extra work to bring the team together and get to the stage of a working concept. You could skip a big chunk of that by finding a team with a great idea but no money to make it work.
If you had a good idea and the raw ability to put together your own working concept (programming, art, audio etc.) then I'd suggest the other route - make a prototype and try and get an existing publisher to buy into it - but it seems like you don't really know anything about putting together the nuts and bolts of a computer game, so if you've got the cash, financing is probably going to be a quicker route to success (or failure).
1. You have no development team
2. From reading this thread it seems you do not know how to use any development tools
3. You have no business plan
4. You're not an artist
5. You're not a writer
6. You have no vision
7. There is not much of a market for Epic RPGs like Baldur's Gate
I see small indie companies try to do what you want to do all the time and they always fail. If you are dead serious about getting this done I would recommend starting your own studio, funding a dev team, and then start working on getting some service provider oriented projects to build up capital.
I think even do that is a long shot though.
Look, I am not trying to be rude, but for someone in IT, you seem to be rather flippant about the back-(hand?)breaking work involved with coding a project of this nature.
Seriously, you consider BG/ICD type games 'easy'? You have nothing, like literally nothing to base that on. Coding a game of that magnitude takes a fuckload of experience and time- sure, ICD took like 8 months to produce, but that was AFTER they had designed the engine! The infiniti engine took like 2 years to make! With a full team of people who knew what they were doing.
To be honest, this project is way, way out of your league. Maybe not forever, but right now you have no idea what your are biting off.
Why don't you try a smaller project? Like for example, make an RPG 'town' with a smaller outlying area with some monsters. Nothing big, more like a test project so that you can get a sense for the process of designing a game like this. Keep things basic- process is more important than features.
That way you can get your head around- start by emailing some developers- as many as you can- asking for help on how to plan such a project. I am sure one will help you out and point you in the right direction. Then think about stuff like design docs, feature lists, overall story/character arc etc.
That would be a much more sensible start that could set you up for a shot at a bigger project.
You want to make games, get started making something small. Like programming your own version of Pong, small. If you manage that, start working your way up. There is absolutely no chance at all that you are going to achieve what you are hoping to based on what you've written here.
<__<
>__>
Stop reading my mind.
I've actually been playing with the idea of doing exactly this in OpenGL. Still at the planning stages though. I wanted to do a tactical turn-based squad combat game in the style of XCOM, but got absorbed by this aspect instead.
Also, yeah, there's not really a chance in hell of making a decent game after having just decided "Hey, I'd like to make a game in the same vein as some of the deepest and most respected RPGs of our time".
It should also be noted you'd need lisencing to use the d20 ruleset as it's owned by Wizards of The Coast.
Seriously dude lots of us have had good ideas for games but actually making them isn't easy. Start by map building or modding for an alkready existing game like NWN2.
The G&T forums once tried to make a smash TV clone with the XNA platform(which is one of the easiest platforms to make a game). The project fell through after a week due to lack of intrest. Everyone who writes a single line of code has once (or will once) try to make thier own video game. 99% of them terribly fail because they underestimate the complexity and work that comes with making a video game.
But no words on this forums is going to persuade you. The way you will learn is by the hard way. Get a book on OpenGL or DirectX and a (good) book on game programming. Start with a tetris clone and then work on some open source games. Do this for about 3 years then give some thought on leading your own game project.
A lot of people have said that I need to learn a lot more about programming games. I am not really interested in development, nor do I think that will ever be a strength I can bring to the project. My programming days are behind me, and I would be playing catch up for years just to get back to where I was in 1998. But I do appreciate that I need to learn the technology, so thanks for that. I also appreciate hearing about your experiences, and your advice for contacting people who have tried this in the past.
Some real gems:
"And the d20 ruleset is not public domain." I had no idea about that.
Writing - Yes, I didn't mention this, and I probably should have. This is something I and my friends would bring to the table, along with sotryboarding and character development.
Right now, you're saying "I want to build a sweet car, and I'm going to do it from scratch. I hear that this state has lots of iron deposits, and I've got my dad's shovel. Where should I start digging?" - This made me LOL.
Thanks again everyone who wrote for your time and honest feedback. I'll take what you said to heart, continue my research, and if I decide to go ahead with anything, post back here and let you know.
That doesn't take 2 years to build.
I wrote a basic sprite based engine in C++ with D3D in a week, and I am not that good as I am rusty as shit in C++.
I would agree with most people on this thread if we were talking about a cutting edge 3D engine, but for 2D...
my 0.02 dolla.
Yeah, I made a 5 level roguelike using PASCAL when I was in high school. Static levels but random items/characters/enemies. I spent about 30 minutes each class for about a month doing it, so about 5 hours. It was a lot of fun, especially thanks to the randomness, so I could actually play it and enjoy it. At the time it was pretty horribly coded, with some rand generators and lots of if then and while etc. But it worked and was fun. Makes for a much better project than a full on game, as you can do it in your free time.
it's one of the reasons there's still so many MUDs out there. It's fun for a group of people to code and for others to play, even if the audience isn't massive.
Then you think that youre somehow gonna be able to create a pipeline between some random programmer who lives in a foreign country with the assets youre creating in the US. And what if the programmer fucks up somewhere. Are you going to be troubleshooting the code? Whose gonna do the game testing?
This is coming from a game artist, and Im telling you, ALL YOU MONEY IS GOING TO DISSAPEAR INTO THIS HOLE BECAUSE IT WILL FAIL FAIL FAIL.