16 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:"1.) God Era: Players pay premium cost to become a deity and shape a religious cult"
Is this really a good idea? This is placing a large part of the game behind a pay-wall, last time I checked that is the whole reason people hate microtransactions.
Maybe allow players to be gods at different days of the week, or have a god charge bar that fills as the players follow quests made by other gods.
How will the quests work?
Will the player select a target, condition and amount? Example: Target = Condition= Kill Bears Amount = 5 resulting in quest for killing 5 Bears.
Unless your players are in fact professional programmers with 4-8 years of experience, they can only make boring repetitive quests. Finding a way for players to make quests is one of the most important parts of this game.
"2. Alder Saga"
Placing races behind a paywall is again a bad idea, you will need a way for players to earn these races. It's really going to be a large problem for this game.
You need free players so that the paying players can "god" over them but at the same time free players will instead play other free games that give them more.
"I want to give the community mod ability and direct input into the lore and mythology."
Then you need a way to prevent people from messing around with the system. For example what if there are two conflicting entries to the lore? How do you solve this?
What if one player just types random stuff into it, what makes their lore entry invalid?
A AI is: 1+ X = Y; in other words a AI is just a math function that follows conditionsions. There is no known way to make a AI so smart that it could play "god" over a server.
You will need moderators. A programmer costs > $80 000 a month. Servers for this type of game start at $300 each a month. You can expect to pay in total $100 000 a month to keep a server running and to prevent players from breaking it; if this is a small game.
You did, the moment the game became multiplayer. To explain, 5 people working in their spare time eats and uses +/- $150 000 worth of resources to stay alive for 2-3 years. This allows them to make a simple 2D indie game or very-very simple 3D game.
Good news is that they can pay that themself if you get them to agree to help you for some kind of late payment agreement.
However, the server you need to test the game is going to cost >$500 a month. Say you only need to work on that part for a year it is 12*$500 = $6000. These numbers are from my last mobile game.
That means even before you can have a demo for crowdfunding you need the minimum of $6000, to make a indie level multiplayer game. You can scoff at $6000 and say that is nothing, but $500 less from your monthly budget is a huge thing. You also need servers on launch day and a way to pay for extra servers once you start getting a lot of players.
This is only the cost for a mobile multiplayer game. A MMO sized game is going to bankrupt the average person.
This tells me you aren't a 3D artist.
This tells me you are not a programmer.
This tells me it's your very first game you are making.
My advice is first learn a skill so that you can contribute to the game. Programming, art, sound, design all of these help, it takes 3-4 years to learn one of these. Once you have a skill you can form a team, you will find more skilled people if they know you have skills. You can also use these 3-4 years to practice making games.
I quoted you to let you know who I'm speaking to, but since I can't be honest and express my opinion of your critique without getting forum mods in an uproar. I'll just leave it at you assume too much, and I disagree thoroughly with your presumptive analytical analysis in nearly every corresponding exigence.
And I'm not "Job's", but I do program, smart guy.
