I see some possibilities that haven't existed for other teams makinf MMO games that you could have, and the most important one is the idea of "clans".
Many games have systems for grouping people together socially, but a college already has a social structure and multiple ways to divide up the player base.
One possibility would be to do it by house/dorm. Let the competitive aspects of inter-dorm competition come into play. For example, in a fantasy world each house could have its own town. Depending on how each house does in the game (or even in real world competitions) the town could thrive or become dismal.
You could even make real life events a big part of the game. A football theatre where everyone can watch a live feed of the game? Or better yet, a "dueling" system where two characters could meet in real life and duke it out in a race/game/eating contest.
Also, you could connect your player classes to the majors of the students, giving each major special skill bonuses and abilities.
I'm rambling, you should be able to have fun with this ^_^
University to Provide Server for My MMORPG
I think it would be cool to incorporate the real school into it as much as possible. Use roughly the same layout, and roughly the same names. Even rooms in buildings layed out roughly the same. Make it like a fantasy knock-off of the real thing. The chemistry labs in real life become a magic store, the gym becomes a training center for warriors, the football stadium becomes a "Thunderdome" for combatants. Hit it with a dash of Harry Potter, so that in the game, you are students that are attending a school for magic, etc. Put in NPC instructors that represent their real-life counterparts. Then it would be cool to get crossovers - people meet, in game, talk, battle, chat, whatever, but then get to meet in real life in the same places.
Quote:Original post by Taolung
I think it would be cool to incorporate the real school into it as much as possible. Use roughly the same layout, and roughly the same names. Even rooms in buildings layed out roughly the same. Make it like a fantasy knock-off of the real thing. The chemistry labs in real life become a magic store, the gym becomes a training center for warriors, the football stadium becomes a "Thunderdome" for combatants. Hit it with a dash of Harry Potter, so that in the game, you are students that are attending a school for magic, etc. Put in NPC instructors that represent their real-life counterparts. Then it would be cool to get crossovers - people meet, in game, talk, battle, chat, whatever, but then get to meet in real life in the same places.
that's actually a really cool idea
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Egad, I get distracted at work and this thing slips to page 2! *bump*
As an update on my progress so far, I just now started writing the multiplayer framework in C++ using SDL_net. It's looking pretty good so far, though it is in its infant stages yet.
For scripting, I was thinking of compiling to a bytecode that can then be passed around over the network as necessary and executed. I had an idea that I think is really neat which involves having a live world editor -- a version of the client (which shall have extremely strict rules about who can run it, I assure you) which can stream world-changing instructions over the network to the game world. I envision being able to just draw on the game world just as you might in a tilemap editing program, and the game would automatically update (either instantly or perhaps fading into the changes over the course of a second), even as player characters are running around in it. A malevolant game master could draw walls around players, trapping them inside, if they really wanted to...I'm hoping to engineer a very nice and easy-to-use pointy-clicky-phooey-gui (as one of my CS professors would say) live script editor (which would include this map editor) one could use for sculpting the world, creating scripts, and either executing them outright or attaching them to triggers.
Tying the game world to the real world is indeed a really cool idea, and the thought of modeling the school virtually had crossed my mind (though damn, would that ever be quite a task!) and sounds fun to run around in. Probably rather than model it exactly after the school, we might start with the same general layout, but let things get a bit more fantastic, as you suggested.
In real life, the university is divided up into various colleges, which are basically housing areas and where some of the classrooms lie, and various schools/departments, which have their base of operations in some area along with most of the classrooms the department uses. I was thinking we might divide the game up into various lands, one for each of these colleges and department headquarters, and maybe even do things like have players spawn at their college and give people special access to various areas depending on their major.
intrest86, giving each house (or dorm) its own town sounds cool. We might let those in charge of a particular dorm take creative control over the arrangement of the town, either giving them limited access to the godly map editing client or somehow engineering this kind of landscaping into the game proper. Each player might then get his or her own house in the dorm, that'd be cool...And hmm, maybe when people move out of their dorms and into the nearby city, they could do so in the game? Maybe this is getting a bit complicated, but it does sound fun. And connecting majors sounds cool too...There are a lot of different majors though, and we'd have to be really creative about how to properly represent each so that it fits well into the game world.
Mushu, about the Japanese conversion, cool beans. That's the right character for chichi, it's just understood to be read as "chichi" when one is taking about their own father (they say something a bit more honoring, "otoosan", if talking about someone else's father). My only criticism is that you forgot a small tsu between ka and ta before the desu -- it's oishikatta (past tense of deliscious), not oishikata (the way of deliciousness? Hehe). Japanese is a fun language; what else do we know that's in post-fix (verbs coming at the end)?
As an update on my progress so far, I just now started writing the multiplayer framework in C++ using SDL_net. It's looking pretty good so far, though it is in its infant stages yet.
For scripting, I was thinking of compiling to a bytecode that can then be passed around over the network as necessary and executed. I had an idea that I think is really neat which involves having a live world editor -- a version of the client (which shall have extremely strict rules about who can run it, I assure you) which can stream world-changing instructions over the network to the game world. I envision being able to just draw on the game world just as you might in a tilemap editing program, and the game would automatically update (either instantly or perhaps fading into the changes over the course of a second), even as player characters are running around in it. A malevolant game master could draw walls around players, trapping them inside, if they really wanted to...I'm hoping to engineer a very nice and easy-to-use pointy-clicky-phooey-gui (as one of my CS professors would say) live script editor (which would include this map editor) one could use for sculpting the world, creating scripts, and either executing them outright or attaching them to triggers.
Tying the game world to the real world is indeed a really cool idea, and the thought of modeling the school virtually had crossed my mind (though damn, would that ever be quite a task!) and sounds fun to run around in. Probably rather than model it exactly after the school, we might start with the same general layout, but let things get a bit more fantastic, as you suggested.
In real life, the university is divided up into various colleges, which are basically housing areas and where some of the classrooms lie, and various schools/departments, which have their base of operations in some area along with most of the classrooms the department uses. I was thinking we might divide the game up into various lands, one for each of these colleges and department headquarters, and maybe even do things like have players spawn at their college and give people special access to various areas depending on their major.
intrest86, giving each house (or dorm) its own town sounds cool. We might let those in charge of a particular dorm take creative control over the arrangement of the town, either giving them limited access to the godly map editing client or somehow engineering this kind of landscaping into the game proper. Each player might then get his or her own house in the dorm, that'd be cool...And hmm, maybe when people move out of their dorms and into the nearby city, they could do so in the game? Maybe this is getting a bit complicated, but it does sound fun. And connecting majors sounds cool too...There are a lot of different majors though, and we'd have to be really creative about how to properly represent each so that it fits well into the game world.
Mushu, about the Japanese conversion, cool beans. That's the right character for chichi, it's just understood to be read as "chichi" when one is taking about their own father (they say something a bit more honoring, "otoosan", if talking about someone else's father). My only criticism is that you forgot a small tsu between ka and ta before the desu -- it's oishikatta (past tense of deliscious), not oishikata (the way of deliciousness? Hehe). Japanese is a fun language; what else do we know that's in post-fix (verbs coming at the end)?
Woah, that sounds way slick. I bet that will be tons of fun. =)
The one thing I'd keep in mind though is it sounds like you are already getting way ahead of yourself. The first things you want to be asking yourself are what EXACTLY you want the gameplay to be like, how the reward systems are going to work, and how the play will actually unfold. Normally I'd have all of this done a month prior to even touching the code. Will there be leveling, or is it a glorified chatroom? Comparing to the old college MU*S, will it be more gameplay oriented like the traditional MUDS, or more freeform/roleplaying centric like MUSHS? In what ways are characters customizable? What will the exp tables look like, how will the physics of combat work? What's the viewpoint? Get the base layer down before you start thinking about what the buildings will look like, how guilds will work, and even before you start the code (I know we've all had an experience of coding ourselves into a corner because we want to add something later that we didn't take the time to think of earlier.)
If you are lead programmer you might want to bring in an experienced designer to help out, as those are two huge jobs to try and tackle at once. A solid MMORPG doc can be in the hundreds of pages with content, and most coders I know wouldn't touch a project without at least a gameplay doc (minus content) to build a coding doc off of.
Keep us updated on this project bro. Hopefully people off-campus will be able to play as well. =)
The one thing I'd keep in mind though is it sounds like you are already getting way ahead of yourself. The first things you want to be asking yourself are what EXACTLY you want the gameplay to be like, how the reward systems are going to work, and how the play will actually unfold. Normally I'd have all of this done a month prior to even touching the code. Will there be leveling, or is it a glorified chatroom? Comparing to the old college MU*S, will it be more gameplay oriented like the traditional MUDS, or more freeform/roleplaying centric like MUSHS? In what ways are characters customizable? What will the exp tables look like, how will the physics of combat work? What's the viewpoint? Get the base layer down before you start thinking about what the buildings will look like, how guilds will work, and even before you start the code (I know we've all had an experience of coding ourselves into a corner because we want to add something later that we didn't take the time to think of earlier.)
If you are lead programmer you might want to bring in an experienced designer to help out, as those are two huge jobs to try and tackle at once. A solid MMORPG doc can be in the hundreds of pages with content, and most coders I know wouldn't touch a project without at least a gameplay doc (minus content) to build a coding doc off of.
Keep us updated on this project bro. Hopefully people off-campus will be able to play as well. =)
check out secondlife.com for a really great 'social' game.
My advice would be to make your game action-packed, since you're trying to attract a variety of audiences.
My advice would be to make your game action-packed, since you're trying to attract a variety of audiences.
Quote: Though I'd like to make complete games, I've had trouble finding many others to take on the non-programming burdens
About the non programming burdens- what do you want Im an artist, and creative thinker with game designs. dont think of me being a laid back idea spiter. I write long design docs, and currently learnig AI principles with my designs. I'kk work for free for one, so if you wanna join and make somthing... PM me? besides this can really get somthing on our resumes' to work with in the future. don't you think
You have a lot of work to do before you even start looking at what requirements you're going to need and all of that requires a bunch of questions to be answered.
Are you going to be running 'zone' based servers or seamless?
How are you going to handle communications?
How are you going to handle in-game chat?
How are you going to handle login?
What type of database?
That's just the start, once those are answered, you get a bunch more questions to answer. Each question has to be answered before you can figure out what hardware/environment you need.
Just for example: Unix isn't an assumption, I'm not sure if any of them actually use Unix, per se. EQ uses Win2k (started on NT), DAoC uses Linux, I think that UO uses Windows and a world runs on 1 box. Each game is different and handled differently.
Are you going to be running 'zone' based servers or seamless?
How are you going to handle communications?
How are you going to handle in-game chat?
How are you going to handle login?
What type of database?
That's just the start, once those are answered, you get a bunch more questions to answer. Each question has to be answered before you can figure out what hardware/environment you need.
Just for example: Unix isn't an assumption, I'm not sure if any of them actually use Unix, per se. EQ uses Win2k (started on NT), DAoC uses Linux, I think that UO uses Windows and a world runs on 1 box. Each game is different and handled differently.
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