As for what to do in terms of designing or choosing a game, there have been some good suggestions already in this thread, but I feel you really do need to consider carefully how you spend this potential investment.

I know this might seem like a downer, but I would be very concerned about potentially being frivolous and wasting a good chunk of money. Its an exceedingly rare position you find yourself in and it would be far more responsible to invest the money at this point in time. You could then use any profit from such an investment to help fund your games later. There is really no reason to be in a rush to spend the money.

So honestly I would not take up her kind offer and invest it in 'designing' a game, instead I'd be asking her to help you invest it real-estate as she has done and shown to have a talent for, as on the face of it, that's the only way you are going to be able to make the money 'work for you'. In fact i'd wager you would stand a better chance making money from real-estate than counting on a success in the game market.

Though don't take this to mean that you should try making games, far from it. I would encourage you as much as possible to continue and follow you dream as programming/game designing can be very rewarding, just not necessarily financially ;)

The problem with making a game is that it has zero guarantee of making any money for you, more so as you don't appear to have a burning desire to create a specific project 'your dream game', hence your original post asking for suggestions. Indeed at the stage you are currently at, you really shouldn't need any funding at all to be developing some simple games, unless you really have zero free time due to educational and working to support yourself.

I think the concern I have with what you are asking is that you don't have a business idea to invest the money into that has a clear and reliable route to generating an income or experience for that matter. For example many business opportunities will usually involve buying stock, which could at least be sold at cost if the venture failed, but with software development the money is basically going on supporting you, along with maybe some hardware/software which will instantly lose value or is non-transferable.

These days there are plenty of opportunities and engines that will enable you to design and create games for almost nothing except you time and devotion. Far better to start with them and avoid the pressures of having to develop a game using some-one else's money. Indeed you'll probably have to create a few game projects before things fall into place and investing money on those would just be wasted. Then once you've hit on your 'perfect' game design and got it to alpha stage you can then use the financing to pay for asset production, invest in software or licenses you might need, put it into marketing, promotion and website creation, pay to enter greenlight ( I think they ended up charging to avoid spam projects didn't they?) etc, all the stuff that you simply can't do without money.

In short then, I'd definitely take up the offer of funding, but invest it, either in real-estate with the help of your cousin or some tax free savings. Then in the mean-time really focus on building a collection of simple games, working up to a cool project that you feel has a good chance of being successful. Use the collection of games as dry runs through the process of designing, making, promoting so that you build experience. You'll then be in a far better position to make better use of the funding which you could then take out of the investment.

If you had about 1,000,000 to spend on the design of your own game, what woud you design?

I'd probably design the shittiest game ever. I think creativity spurs from limitations and finding ways around that.

Besides, 1M$ isn't that much money if you're considering a AAA game.

My ideas right now are limited by the fact that my skill set is limited to programming and even then I have never programmed AI before), and that I am only one person and I would not be a ble to get a whole lot done by myself. Plus it would be great if I had someone(s) to brainstorm and collaborate with in developing a game.

By the looks of it, I would turn the offer down for now...

You answered the second by saying "don't do it" but the first question, and the one in the title of the post, you didn't answer at all, so I guess that Mratthew is technically correct in that respect.

Ah, fair enough (though I somewhat addressed that insofar as "some thousands" aren't unlimited at all).

Given (virtually) unlimited funding (not coming out of my own or a relative's pocket!), I'd probably hire two dozen programmers and two dozen artists and would want to implement a first-person Sci-Fi MOG. Something with laser pistols, aliens, driving vehicles and flying starships, that kind of thing. Maybe not the most inventive idea ever, but hey... it's what I'd do. At least it's not orcs and elves.

And, quite possibly, I'd have a try at an alternative operating system (FOSS, but development driven by 1-2 dozen FTEs), just for fun.

I'm sure everyone would agree that you shouldn't waste the money, but that would hold true whether it came from family, or another funder [...] but no-one goes in to any investment planning to fail.

That's certainly true, but my point is not that one plans to fail, but that one plans for failure (does that distinction make sense in English?). That is, one must be aware that it can fail (and that's even likely), but if it fails, the consequences are much different.

If you have to file bankruptcy, that's a harsh thing, you don't want that to happen. Sure. If you disappoint your backers on Kickstarter, what a public humiliation. If you burn some investor's money, shame on you. But still... move to a different city and in 5 years none will remember. In the end, really... nobody gives a crap. You can live happily ever after.

If you lose 50k of your cousin's/brother's/best friend's money, chances are that in 5 years you still can't talk with them, or at least they don't trust you. That is a very different thing. You cannot just say "screw them all" and move to a different city. Well, you can, of course, but you get me. Chances are you'll hear that story again every time you meet with someone from the family. Look, that's the jerk who ruined aunt Judy -- what a great topic to come up at a wedding party (even if 50k didn't really ruin her).

To say "don't do it because if you don't make any money then your family will be angry with you forever" is entirely speculative.

Well yes, it is somewhat speculative, but not entirely, and it is not unrealistic. It's something that I've seen happen to two friends of mine. They had a good idea, they were skilled, they had a good business plan, they got money from an external investor (and, a bit more than only 50k), but they just weren't lucky. It went fine for 6-7 months, so they went into "big business" with extra funds from familiy to cover some extra investments (that's a perfectly safe thing, right?), and when the dot-com hype went down the drain over night, their 5 biggest clients went insolvent. This meant time and material gone (presumably stolen, you'll never find out), no pay, and open bills. That's a totally un-fun situation, but even more so if your family's money is in it.
12 years later, they still don't talk with each other, and an optimistic wording for the relationship to their families is "strained". You had better not mention anything related to money or loans if you want to avoid a long dispute.

The idea that a rich family member may be offering a small cash injection in order to get a family member on their way in a venture they enjoy isn't exactly an impossibility.

Well yes, but we're not talking "small", we're talking "some thousands or a million" and, by the forum title, "UNLIMITED" (in capital letters). It's about asking for a sum that's somewhere between a few years of net salary and an entire life's worth of earnings to average people.

Of course there exists the parvenu type of rich person who just doesn't know the value of money, but most people (who actually had to work for their money at least at some point in their lives) are quickly losing their sense of humor when it comes to losing such amounts of money, even if they could easily afford it.

I grew up in a family where lack of money has never been an issue. Why live in a dorm at university if you can buy an appartment? Why have a girlfriend in town if you can take an airplane to meet that particular girl every weekend? Who cares what it costs. I'm not kidding there. But if I had lost 50k or 100k with a failed business idea, my father would have been puking fire and brimstone, that's for sure. I wouldn't assume that much different with any other person, no matter how rich they may be.

Wow, thanks for the replies! Well after reading a lot of what you all had to say, I think what I am going to do is first make a demo of my game, and let some people play it and see what the responses are and if I get a good response I will take my cousin up on her offer.

Samoth however does bring up a good point, I won't accept any funding unless I have a successful demo of my game and people like it. I am certainly somewhat weary about accepting money and failing at the expense of my family. So just for insurance I will wait.

The things that I thought I would need to invest in is a new computer, I had some money saved up for one but I had to use it elsewhere. I am currently running on an intel celeron processor and on board intel graphics so needless to say I need a new rig.

Other things that I would need to spend money on is the concept art. The artists are actually two of my good friends, one of the guys I grew up with so we know eachother pretty well. They are both extremely talented, they went to college for art and graphic design and one of my friends actually has his own business where he sells his work online and at art shows. They are both working full time so I would pay them for there work on a part time basis.

Another thing that I would need to spend money on are game assets. I have minimal experience in 3d modeling and I would have to hire someone to do that work. I am not sure however what that would cost.

The programming I will have to do myself, I am reading some books on game and AI programming and I am about half way done. Even thtseln, do you think it would be a good idea to try and get a more experienced game programmer to help? I was thinking it would be.

The game engine we plan on using is UDK 3, which I am pretty familiar with, I have read a few books on it, Mastering Unreal Technology volumes 1 and 2 and a book on UnrealScript Game programming, which by the way are awesome books if you are interested in UDK.

Plus, for the game I want to make I think UDK 3 will give us a great advantage, because a lot of the scripts we would need are already preloaded with the engine because Unreal Tournament is similar to the game I want to make in the sense that it is a multiplayer FPS, so that will help reduce the amount of coding that needs to be done.

As for the game itself...well I was thinking of something that would require minimal work, no story lines and very little cut-scenes if any. A zombie shooter survival game. It would be similar to Left 4 Dead and COD Zombies in the sense that you take on wave after wave of zombies, but the major difference would be that we would incorporate more variety and strategy.

For example: you would have the option to choose from more than one type of player or class. Like an engineer or a Soldier etc. The class you choose will dictate your style of game play because every class will have different abilities and perks. The soldier will be for the player who wants to be like ranbow, and the engineer will be for the pkayer who likes to use strategy.

The soldier class will have more health and armor as well as the ability to double his health, armor (hit points), and clip size in every gun he uses as he gains more points and cash per kill. He will be able to move faster as well. I am not sure what else to add to this class at this time though.

The engineer class will not have as much health and armor, nor will he have as much ammunition per gun, but he will have the ability to build sentry guns to aid him in his fight. As he gains more points and cash per kill he will unlock more features and upgrades for the sentry gun. After unlocking the features the player will have to choose wisely which ones to buy to survive the upcoming waves. For example, before upgrading your sentry gun, when you first build it, it will overheat quickly and it will have to cool down before it can fire again. I also want to add more features to the engineer class but at this time I am not sure what else to add. Also, you can buy an ammunition upgrade for your sentry guns or double its ammo capacity etc.

I want to add a multilayer feature so friends can play with each other and work together to survive.

I personally think that people would like a game like this because you wouldn't have to pay an arm and a leg to play a zombie survival game like you would with COD zombies.

Anyways I am open to criticism...

I know that was a lot, but those are my ideas and what I am currently working with.

Minor suggestion: I would suggest trying to mix up the standard zombie survival shooter thing. Try something like... werewolves or vampires or perhaps some kind of army of frankenstein golem/zombies. The zombie apocolypse thing has been done and I would venture to say that you could do better by trying to add your own spin to it.

Lets say you use werewolves. For your first demo you could just have the enemies be really hairy humanlike guys who creep around with sharp teeth and claws. They are like "zombies" but you get the feeling they have a reason they don't need weapons. Then later you establish that these guys heal or get stronger in the moonlight, so your characters would do better to fight them indoors in dark spooky corridors. If they fight the werewolves indoors, its claustrophobic and scary but if they fight outside the wolves get extra tough and heal their injuries quickly.

Then players figure out that silver kills these guys like nobodies business so they have to loot jewelry stores and melt down the silver to make bullets. Then when they kill a wolf, dig through their insides in an attempt to salvage the silver. If there is an economy among the survivors, you can bet that silver fetches a high price,etc.

Oh, and make wolf howling be terrifying. Alert a woff to your presence and he'll call up his buddies to make things miserble for you. Have random howls in the background to let the player know they are still out there.

That's just what you can put in the demo. If you add stuff, you could include increasingly powerful werewolf forms, new weremonsters, and maybe some kind of thematic point about how the human survivors of the disaster can be just as monsterous as the half-animal things they are fighting.

Or the Frankenstein monsters could be like zombies but more militant and powered by electricity... you see them kill people and drag the bodies back to some lab to mix them with chemicals and renimate them with electricity. Missions could be made to destroy generators that power the monsters (or try to capture them for human use.

Oh, and the protagonists are pirates. They download MP3s, carry guns and swords, and are prone to looting (like pretty much all post-apocolyptic survivor protagonists do).

Just saying that you can think of some simple ways to set your work apart from others to increase your chance of success. Don't have to completly change things, just add a different perspective or an interesting feature.

i d make the game that i would play and of which i would expect others would enjoy playing it as well

Holy crap randel that is an awesome idea! I love you ( in a non wierd kind of way) for coming up with that.

Holy crap randel that is an awesome idea! I love you ( in a non wierd kind of way) for coming up with that.

Thank you! Glad to help. I admit that my only real experience with online FPS games is with Team Fortress 2 and Planetside 2 (both free to play) with other FPS experience from the Bioshock and Fallout games. So my thoughts will likely be more cartoony or "fantastic" than something like Call of Duty (I think, never played it).

Anyway, to elaborate on my rough idea, I think there could be several possible "factions" in this hypothetical game.

Pirates - Basically modern day thugs and hackers. Make use of shotguns and other salvaged/modern weapons and the more technically inclined could set up the turrets and stuff. Not proffesional soldiers but creative and willing to scrounge for stuff and use tech. Occasional nerd lingo seeps in and jokingly act like naval pirates.

Ninjas - Professional killers who are more serious. May be more stealthy than pirates and use better weaponry, but could have trouble scavenging ammofor their better guns (these ninja do use guns, at the very least things like sniper rifles and silenced pistols). They also have melee weapons (potentially silver coated blades later on).

Werewolves - Humans mutated into werecreatures by a curse. Standard grunts are like your typical zombie mooks but maybe faster and have nasty claws and teeth. All have a weakness to silver and more powerful ones heal in the presemce of moonlight. Later on you can find things like weretigers or the like. To add dificulty, werewolf howls attract their allies and the smell of blood frenzy them. Perhaps a "big boss" werewolf could look perfectly human with a coyote head like the Egyptian god Anubis (god of death, I think). Anubis gets something weird like the power to ressurect fallen werewolves or grant them power (as if he constantly radiats moonlight). Killing anubis may or may not end thw Werewolf apocolypse.

Frankenstein Monsters (or Flesh golems, or The Revived) - A blending of mad science and magical necromancy. These golems are made up of stitched together body parts, treated with chemicals (which may include some weird ingrediant like werewolf blood) and animated with electricity. They are moving glaciers, no stealth, no weak spots (shooting them in the headjust could be completly useless if their brains were repositioned to be in their chest or something) they are just a wall of muscle moving to achieve their goal. They kill all their enemies and bring the corpses to some place to make more golems. More powerful golems may encorporate pieces from defeated werewolves. They aren't vulnerable to anything in particular (perhaps fire freaks out the weaker ones) but they do require electricity to heal (like how werewolves need moonlight but moreso). Their "boss" could be some mad scientist who seeks to triumph against Death (Anubis). His golems were at first simply failed experiments to ressurect the dead, but when the werewolves appeared he used them as soldiers to defeat the werewolves (and any humans who get in his way).

For laughs, his very first attempts at ressurecting the dead resulted in something like mummies. Very humanlike golems (possibly with full intelligence) who are perpetually wrapped in bandages since the revival process didn't heal their surgical scars (actually, given the Anubis/werewolf thing it could make sense).

The ninjas and pirates don't necessarily have to be seperate teams (at first). You could have one faction of "survivors" where the pirates are like the engineer and light assault class while ninjas are the snipers, melee class, and maybe the guy with the rocket launcher (since rockets are something only a professional should have access to).

I suppose it would be funny to have vampires show up as enemies at some point.... only to have the pirates, ninja, werewolves, mummies, frankenstein monsters, and possibly robots (from the engineer class) give them a long hard look before ripping them apart.

I have no idea if this would make a good game or plot or whatever, but I figure if you can make a decend shooter game, and maybe toss the labels around (no need to make it cartoony or obvious, modern day pirates and ninja assassins probably look alot like your standard thugs and mercs) but the sheer idea of a shooter with ninja, pirate, werewolf, mummy, frankenstein monsters should help your game stand out from the standard zombie shootemups.