Is this a PC version of your award winning board game? I'd like to pre order a copy.

It won't be reasonably small. It will also be 3 -ish as well as novel on a few levels (so there's unlikely to be a how-to for everything I want) so I think I'm right to assume I can't do that myself. It will be more RPG-ish than top-down strategy-ish.

I'll try not to use -ish anymore.

@fiedler: Weren't you supportive of my endeavours? Or was that someone else? I don't mind the sarcasm but it is confusing :-)

Being a software developer I'm often approached by friends./acquaintances with ideas for a software product (especially mobile apps). They mostly expect you to realize the genius of the ide and work for equity.

Unfortunately this is like asking a petroleum driller to drill on his time off, on the off change he makes a hit, while other companies are paying for him to make test wells all day. Noone wants to do what they're paid for for 8 hours per day for free I'm afraid

If you really believe in it, and are willing to put cash down, I used to work for vcoder.com which is like eBay for coding projects. It's fairly fair and if you're careful and know what you want it's good bank for your buck, but don't expect to be the idea man and some coders will work out the details; making any idea really work is a monumental effort (from my v limited experience).

Hail kestas!
I'd be willing to put cash down where needed, yes. I don't have a clue what kind of cash we're talking about, but it definitely won't be a reason to shut it down immediately. I can always try to find investors/do crowdfunding, for instance.
I'm also willing to do stuff that I *can* do, but apart from working out my ideas in as much detail as possible, paying bills, recruiting, advertising and playtesting, I'm not sure what else I can do. Maybe supervise but I'm not even sure whether that's a good idea?

What exactly would be expected from the idea man?

Can I find good people that *don't* do this as a regular job somewhere? :-)

I don't suppose you'd be interested, even if it pays?

Vcoder.com seems to be offline?

It depends a lot on how flexible you are with your vision, how much content you want and what quality you are aiming for. Without giving away your awesome idea, tell us what existing game is most similar to it (in terms of graphics, content, number of users, etc), and I'll give you a cost estimate.

Without any of that I'll take a shot in the dark and say $1 million.

"3 "

good luck getting that million.

also
"novel"
"RPG"

i know you don't want to tell us anything, but i doubt that.

I would say Mount & Blade: Warband would be most similar, but my idea has significantly more features and in the most ideal version, it could be played as an online sandbox with some or lots of players as well.

@kasimax, You don't think there is room for innovation in RPGs? Just off the top of my head, I'd say Undertale is a solid counter-example.

RPG might be misleading. More like a giant sandbox in which the player is a 'regular' person influenced by many things which are out of his hands initially, but he might become more influential through some means eventually. For instance. If the sandbox and the gameplay works, you can probably pick many different types of starts, from poor beggar to influential dude.

I'm not particularly secretive about this one actually, although I don't want to spell everything out on a public thread either.

A few key things would be that the player is not a hero by default, is not OP and does not have full control over the situation.

What I want to create is the game I've literally been looking for for years and I've never even come close to finding because nothing is quite like anything I'd be looking for in my ideal game.

Okay, I'm not going to comment on the idea, but I'll address the technical side of things, since I have experience there.

In the core of it, you have a 3 RPG, open world, sandbox, massively multiplayer.

On the programming side of things, things are better than ever with many AAA engines available practically for free. However, a game is so much more than an engine. Without MMO level of multiplayer that's probably $500k just in base coding. Add another $250k for MMO component, plus support costs go up astronomically.

Art: If you want original art of a AAA level (not too fancy, let's say Skyrim), that will be around 3-6 million, if invested wisely (i.e. modular models). Again luckily, you needn't pay nearly as much if you buy premade art, but that means that 1) you have very little control of details and 2) other games may have the exact same models in them.
But if you are doing this smartly, and don't have any outlandish requests (e.g. My races all have four legs and twelve arms!) you can probably get everything for $200k.

Story... The good thing about MMOs is you don't need many writers.. Sure, there is the overall arching story, but that takes one person to write.. Writing NPC dialogs and such takes a lot, LOT longer. Consider it an average of $200 per NPC of reasonable depth (i.e. not just "show me your wares [open store]").

Voice acting.. If you want your NPCs fully voice acted add another $500 to the per NPC cost. If you don't do full voiceovers but just voice sets (i.e. only generic "hello","bye" and similar lines per set), it goes down a lot. You can probably get a good voice set for $200.

Music - You'll probably want background music, a theme, etc.. You can either pay a composer or licence an existing score. Either way, set aside say $10k for it, you'll need it.

That's the very rough outline of what you need to make the game. Now, if you want to sell it to actually make a profit, you have two options:

1) Hope it goes viral in some way. The payout here is pretty good, but the chances are somewhere around 0.005%, based on existing data. If it is AAA quality, then probably something like 0.3%

2) Get a AAA marketing budget. This starts at around a million dollars and doesn't really have an upper bound. The more you put in, the more you get out of it.

Oh, and if you yourself are willing to work without pay, you can deduct $30k (if you just do overall design, testing), $60k (if you can program) or $100k (if you can make good art) from the total cost.

@kasimax Since you are skeptical about "novel RPG", let me present my own dream project:

...

An MMORPG.

It has NEVER BEEN DONE. You have MMO games that are top down hack and slash actions, that are graphical chatrooms with fantasy economics, or that are cyberbrothels, but there is not a singled game where you actually roleplay. It is a "novel RPG". It is also, obviously, something that will never turn a profit.

Well, that's a lot. I'd need investors/micro-funding, obviously :-)

Anyone has a clue what amount of funding Mount &Blade needed, for instance? I think it's rather budget but alright quality-wise. I just have no clue how much.

I couldn't find the budget for mount&blade, but this should give you a feel: http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-game-1501413649

Note that they separate marketing and development budget, so usually the article shows only one.

@Sherincall: MMO RPG? have you ever heard of Eve online, i mean sure, you role-play an imoortal asshole who care's about nothing but his own cash flow and insane schemes, (or some people actually do some roleplaying...) but everyone is actally playing this role, and it informs their every action in the game...

i'm sure this is not what you meant, but compared to other mmos, Eve actually has a pretty well built in-game justification for the players acting the way they do.

I am producing a PC game right now: http://www.int-game.net/ if you want me to discuss the formation and what I did and the effort I've put in for over two years feel free to contact me. :)

I know of EVE, and it actually does fit mostly. Because it is SF, you could possibly justify all the out of character stuff that happens as being normal in the future setting. I haven't played it, so I can't say for sure.

But a few things that automatically make a game not roleplay:
- chat speak, l33tspeak, LOLs and smileys.
- Talking about your stats (I have 18 strength! My horse has 36 speed!)
- Using knowledge your character doesn't have (Dave is in area X fighting orcs, let's meet him there)
- Things that break continuity, like dungeon instances. (this group we are following went into the dungeon. If we go after them, we'll get our own instance.) - Unless, of course, it is justified by lore (setting has multiple dimensions?), but it never is.
- Being unable to do something because mechanics don't allow it (I want to ask the nice NPC a question that wasn't pre-written. Touch luck)

Know any game that doesn't tick any of these? There were some ~10 years ago, but they were missing the first M in MMO.

We could probably knock out a knock-off of Eve over the weekend. It's a lot of work though so I'll need at least $50 bucks and 1% equity in this shooting star.

Bumping for the Majors thoughts

Eve's 'instanced' missions are generated when you talk to a mission agent. Each one has a unique location in space.

You can scan down players while they are in these instances and join them (or be invited) - you can ninja their wrecks, and even steal any loot ( though you become a valid target for them if you rob their loot... players do do this when they are pvp fit and want go bait some poor pve fit mission runner ino opening fire - because once they shoot you you're entitled to defend yourself) In this way Eve is huge, and has a lot of empty space - because this is sci-fi and space is huge. (Spontaneously created instances also exist, which you have to scan down, and anyone can attempt)

"Using knowledge you character doesn't have" - a lot of this can be justified by assuming player created respurces exist within the universe (there is still an ingame browser, so you can view the third party killboards from inside the game - this kind o research is important for pvp because you want to research someone you're planning to fight)

"Talking about stats" - again, there is an ingame reason for spaceships to have stats - like max speed in m/s, effective hitpoints which the ingame authorities hve definitions for.

"Chat, leet speak and smilieys" - can all exist in the future.
Infact eve has local chat as one of the main ways of knowing whether you are safe of not. Your local chat windows tells you who is in the same system as you, you can even see if they are friendly or not (assuming you setup your friend or foe settings correctly)

Non-local chat channels are a little harder to justify, except in assuming that there is instantaneous communication within the game setting (sci-fi) and given that the apeed of light isn't the ultimate speed limit in this setting, that is fine.

"Being unable to do something because mechanics don't allow it" - unfortunately i know of no game which doesn't suffer from this issue. Eve encourages players to create their own content - so if i want good hauled to another part of New Eden i will contact the Red Frog corporation, which is a player group who hve decided to dedicate their time to hauling... I can indeed have unscripted conversations with them.

But that is the best we can do with current technology.

The biggest deviation from my claim is actual role players - they tend to 'pretend' they are not immortal assholes, and actually remember their life before becoming capsuleers - they care about in-game universe events (the NPC ones rather than the player driven ones) This can be explained by the way skills work; your character's clone can die and a new one can't necessarily keep all the skills - you lose memories when you die, thus some characters can have prioritize their family and nation, while most people care more about their ability to pew pew, and make spaceships explode.

The other issie is alt-characters (which ccp encourages, even allowing trading characters for the cost of a couple of plex to the company) you can train a scanning alt an leave it logged off until you need to scan something down. This makes very little sense in-universe.

Fair. I'll accept EVE being a true roleplaying game, albeit one with a very characteristic setting. I may even give it a try at some point, but I'm not a fan of such SciFi.

> unfortunately i know of no game which doesn't suffer from this issue.

If you've ever played D&D or some other pen and paper roleplay, you can appreciate how a game master can work around most mechanics through the story. PC games can have game masters, and they can really bring a videogame close to the PnP experience.

Most recently, Sword Coast Legends appeared like it could be one, but they decided to dumb down the DMing aspect, and limited it to 4 players. The closest thing ever done was NWN1 - it was a modding heaven, with a powerful DM client. There are still good roleplay servers around, but it is getting really old and many limitations are popping up.

Point is, it can be done.

That's an interesting idea as well, actually. Making a game that utilizes a DM by design..

Yes, actually diplomacy used to use online 'gm's to process orders before we had such good automated judges like the webdip one.

But for a computer game it requires a lot of work from the DMs (i did play some baldur's gate 2, and saw some of the room for stuff like that in NeverWinterNights)

You have a sort of player-based content creation in a game like Minecraft, where indivuduals can (and do) host their own servers. That gives them extra control over the world, but it is not a narrative drive game. Something which most pen and paper rpgs thrive on. (as did Baldur's Gate/NWN1)

Getting decent narrative from players on a consistant basis is rather difficult. Infact even getting decent players can be a challenge - i've GM'd various pen and paper games at conventions, and some players just want/expect a different experience from what the game as written wants to deliver. (i've also run one Live Action RPG wherethe palyer's interpretation was completely off from what i thought i had written, but everyone really enjoyed the game, so who i didn't care at all...)

The kind of creativity you can get from players is interesting. From inherently creative games, like minecraft, to open world games where players (some not all) will post videos of their stories, creating a narrative.

@Steephie, if you're interested in making a game which relies on player-driven content, i suggest you start small and simple (the KISS principle) and also 'Fail Early, Fail Often!'

Steephie, make a 2-D scroller and after you see how much work that is, see if you want to keep make something more complex.

Won't be going that way ora.

@abge: I've actually made an easy 2 game for school, but it's all beside the point. I'm fully aware of my own uselessness in actually creating it, so unless I find people who *can* do it, it's not happening anyway. Just want to know what lucky breaks I need so I can do something with it if a chance arises.

Just a shitton of money.