So let me tell you a little bit about theĀ āeverything is generated by the playersā bit. As an indie dev there are a few ways to create massive amounts of content for a game, which an mmo surely requires massive amounts of content. One way is to use procedural generation. If youāre not familiar with procedural generation, just think minecraft world seeds, youāre probably familiar with that. If youāre still not itās basically programming functions that will create content based on rules that you provide it, it could be random, but usually itās based on something deterministic so that you can repeat it.
Anyway, thatās one way, and quite a popular one, Iām actually a big fan. Another way is crowdsourcing. You might be familiar with that in terms of Kickstarter projects, where a crowd of people is used to generate funding. Well instead of funding, I think the game world can be populated with content by the players.
Iām not just doing this because Iām lazy (tho I surely am lazy), or because I donāt have a huge team and millions of dollars to spend on content. I actually think it will make a fun game world. Each player will have an opportunity to create any kind of character, be it a human, goblin, wolf, dragon, skeleton, you name it. Any creature that can exist and fight in the world. Similarly, all of the towns, dungeons, and other points of interest will be created by the players as well.
One of the big parts of game content besides monsters and dungeons and towns is the lore of the world. That too will be generated. Stories are told and books are written of heroes and legends past. From the moment that I get the system for this up and running, the game will need to start recording history. I suppose at the beginning there wonāt be much that would get recorded, things youāll read about inĀ āThe First Ageā type of lore books will probably only be about major events. The things that are built however will still be there to leave their mark in history.
At first itāll just be me, Iāll be adding content to the game, just as I would for any game, except Iāll need to do it by playing the game. Iāll create some humans, and use them to build a village to live in. Even though there arenāt monsters at that point, the village will be there. Then maybe Iāll create a goblin tribe, and a pack of wolves. Perhaps Iāll use the goblins to harass the villagers, maybe all of them will be wiped out, their buildings ransacked and their stuff stolen and hauled off back to the goblin camp. Whatās left of that village will be there, and perhaps someone else will stumble upon it, maybe pick the bones clean or maybe try to use it as a starting point for their own village.
Another thing that is important for this to work is that there needs to be permadeath to all characters. Also, since I wonāt be able to control more than one at a time, and because they are game content, all characters that Iām not using will become AI controlled. There will need to be some kind of user friendly AI builder, as well as a bank of premade behaviors. I think at first itāll be me and some alpha testers (friends and family, etc) that create the world ofĀ āThe First Ageā. Iām hoping it will be awesome and memorable. TheĀ āSecond Ageā might be a more public alpha/beta, players will come and go, create new things and those things will be killed and/or destroyed, but they will become part of the history and lore.
More later... btw, the game name is Legendary Realms.
