Every labor of love has to at some point venture forth from the bottomless vaults of creativity into the harsh light of criticism. I think blogs are pretty harsh. I (also) think that 'some point' is almost always better sooner, than later.
Frankly, there's no easy way to introduce a project of such scope, especially not when it's sole proponent is a 20-something working stiff who hasn't touched a single development kit in his entire life (intuition tells me to 'keep it real' at this stage of promotion).
In the current market, it is statistically impossible to manufacture and produce a commercially successful, genre-redefining blockbuster hit in the MMO industry. With a team of fifty professionals. To reiterate (man, keeping it real sure is humbling), I am one guy.
So okay, there's no easy way. Consider then, all my efforts henceforth to be 'hardmoding'.
Here I lay out the design notes in a coherent fashion for a triple-A, 3-dimensional, fully interactive open world MMORPG, perhaps the first of its kind since the original IT college MUD/MUSH thought experiments. A true sandbox game, in the fullest sense of the world 'game'. A place where the player can overcome obstacles, known and unknown, in the pursuit of any desirable goal covered by the game's robust set of broad interactive mechanics.
An impossible pipe dream? For damn sure.
Frankly, there's no easy way to introduce a project of such scope, especially not when it's sole proponent is a 20-something working stiff who hasn't touched a single development kit in his entire life (intuition tells me to 'keep it real' at this stage of promotion).
In the current market, it is statistically impossible to manufacture and produce a commercially successful, genre-redefining blockbuster hit in the MMO industry. With a team of fifty professionals. To reiterate (man, keeping it real sure is humbling), I am one guy.
So okay, there's no easy way. Consider then, all my efforts henceforth to be 'hardmoding'.
Here I lay out the design notes in a coherent fashion for a triple-A, 3-dimensional, fully interactive open world MMORPG, perhaps the first of its kind since the original IT college MUD/MUSH thought experiments. A true sandbox game, in the fullest sense of the world 'game'. A place where the player can overcome obstacles, known and unknown, in the pursuit of any desirable goal covered by the game's robust set of broad interactive mechanics.
An impossible pipe dream? For damn sure.
But the genus of this blog comes from just this cognition. If I don't start putting SOMETHING down on paper, creating an idea into the future if you will, it'll just as surely never come to fruition. The least that can happen is a rapid devolution into cynical doomsaying MMOG punditry. And we certainly don't have enough of that on our blogrolls. ;)
The name of the game? Epoch.
The name of the game? Epoch.
This blog is primarily a testing bed for all the design notes and concept work I will be doing. Everything from theories to essays, rough drafts of systems to art motif sketches. I don't really expect it to ever amount to more than that.
In the next post I take up opening conceits of game design, define a few terms and my stance towards them, and discuss (exhaustively, I'm sure) the significance of the number three.
