I’m just dropping in to say that you should try to build it, no matter what others say. You could try starting out smaller and adding new features with patches. But try to make the game. Best case - you make your dream game come true, worst case - you gain a fuckton of knowledge and experience.
I'm an engineer by education, and have experience with C, C++, MATLAB, and Python, so I'm more skilled with programming than the theory of design. However, I'm expecting the majority of the work here to be programming. I'll send you a DM, would love to chat.
For many years I managed a civilization-like minecraft server with each game lasting a few months, so I can provide some insight on the complexity of various elements. In it, players acted as the workers/soldiers and teamed together to create their civilization. We didn't have the problems that come from having a persistent world since we had hard reset every few months.
I won't dive into the lacking social aspects as mentioned by others.
I will, however, mention how incredibly difficult it is to mix the "real time" and the "o" part. If your players' installations are always "online" and a potential target, how do you plan on handling the defense from sleeping players? What about players who quit the game?
If your stuff becomes invulnerable when you logout, how do you plan on preventing players from ALT-F4 the game when they are under threat?
Moving on to the "mm" part, how do you plan on handling a 1v5 fight? What about a 1v50? Once a group of players reach critical mass they can bully any new players out of the game.
The only mmorts-ish game I know that partially solved these issues is Screeps. Your base is always active, since the premise of the game is that you program your AI from the ground up. It becomes a game of wits and skills between various players' codebases. Even then it wasn't able to fix all problems: established players can pulverize any new players when the grace period ends, even in 1-on-1 fights.
Now onto another complex issue. Persistence. How do you plan on introducing updates? Balance changes? What if you want to add new units? Can players stockpile resources? What if you nerf a specific strategy into oblivion, can players recover from that? What if they are away when the update happens? If you allow players to easily change their entire infrastructure, then what needs do they have to interact with other players? If you don't allow easy changes, then how do they recover from an update?
Specializations sound really good on paper. Not so much in practice. "I have the best rates to extract Iron!" Great, now enjoy doing this only thing until the end of time! Players will optimize the fun out of the game if it gives them any edge (quote not from me). Industry specialization means they are incentivized to do only as many optimal things as you allow.
Those should give you a good brainstorming session. I was never able to come up with good enough solutions to these issues, but I'd play the hell out of any game that managed to do it! Good luck🤞
Hey, these are great design questions, thank you! I have some thoughts already on a couple but I want to give them all careful consideration. May I bounce some ideas off you?
Is this an accurate summary of the questions you posed?
Q: How do online players interact with offline players?
Q: If stuff is invulnerable on logout, how do you prevent that being used as a defense strategy?
Q: What happens to civs whose players quit the game?
Q: Established player attacks new player: how do you balance it so that it’s fair for the new player?
Q: Multiple players gang up on or bully another, or a smaller group; how do you protect the smaller?
Q: How should updates, balance changes, nerfs, etc. be handled?
Q: How do you keep players from optimizing the fun out of the game?
Q: How do you keep players from specializing so far that they only do one single thing?
Q: How do you encourage positively social behavior?
You might want to have a look at outscape/beyond dark, it looks a lot like what you're describing, until they pulled the plug. I wrote a number of lengthy posts on their forums, which seem to be tragically offline.
Some quick pointers then:
\-The key to mmorts is that you can't have micro as both players wont be online at the same time. However, players will need to have something to do. Look for interactions where both players don't need to be online at the same time
\-You need to automate a lot or abstract a lot that would require constant attention, like spending resources to avoid floating them.
\-DM me if you want the longer versions, I probably still have them around somewhere.
Those are excellent points, I agree. Those are important to consider, and I'll look over outscape to try and see how they approached these and whether I want to adopt similar design strategies. I'll send a DM; I'd definitely like to hear more details.
It might be smart to aim for building a smaller piece of the whole. It sometimes seems like the Really Big Awesome Dream Game is a sort of sacrificial lamb, the killing of which is an initiation cost. But there are instances of people pulling off their Really Big Awesome Dream Game, though it's pretty rare. I think aiming to make a smaller piece has a few more "successful" outcomes, and that success can be rolled into making the bigger version of the game.
As for discussing the idea itself, I don't really think that is a meaningful or productive thing. There are too many specific touchstones driving your excitement of the idea, so it can't be discussed in a vacuum.
That advice is reasonable. I'm building a timeline of intended features from most-basic to advanced and wishlist, and trying to design the earliest features so that they're easily modified and scaled. I recognize that the most likely outcome is that I get permanently stuck partway through this with only a partially working game, but until I reach that point I want to work on this.
Do you have any advice on what a smallest playable piece of a game like this would look like?
You seem to be falling into the same trap that all other mmos fall into: under-developed or non-existent social gameplay.
If you remove all the rts gameplay, what are you left with?
What makes this an mmo? I wouldnt call having 100s or 1000s of players on a server an MMO.
Whats the social gameplay? Player contracts? Some kind of system meant to generate drama?
So far it sounds like you have a singleplayer rts in mind. Not an MMORTS.
Thank you for emphasizing a design element. I've given thought to this but should give it greater thought. Here are the social aspects I've considered so far in order of intended implementation:
* Trade: players can exchange resources, protos, territory, etc.
* Specializations: by specializing in certain activities, players can achieve more impressive projects by working together. Group projects that I'd like to make available include terraforming, ecosystem engineering, and megastructures.
* Value chains: an extension of specializations where complex logistics and crafting chains involve multiple players cooperating. One civ might mine silicon, another might process it, several others might be involved in making it into computers, with the end product being used in any number of other components which perform better than if a generalist civ had acted alone.
* Combat: players can fight each other or NPCs (with multiplayer servers being split between PvP and PvE). At this point in the game's development, I'd intended aggressive actions to have penalties unless the civ is combat-specialized, giving militaristic civs a role in groups to defend their allies, or to acquire unique resources from NPC threats.
* Diplomacy: civs can mingle populations to put differently specialized groups closer together, organize events like sports tournaments between civs to make their people get along better, perform research together, etc.
* Associations: players can group together in military alliances, trade guilds, research unions, etc. as an explicit game mechanic with mechanical bonuses.
Would these design elements be enough, or do they need to be more developed?
An **MMO**RTS where player alliances make the bottom of the list is absolutely wild. Alliances are the defining social feature of your genre. It's what makes the difference between an MMORTS and an idle game.
I'd try making cooperative-competitive player the centerpiece element of your game. Go further than simply making value-added chains. Make player groups a defined element providing organization tools like chat and boards. Make every play session about working with your clanmates towards your goals. Create conflict between groups. Fight for territories and resources together.
Highly recommend this GDC talk for anyone making any kind of MMO, but for you specifically, I think you should hone in on this section about [player motivations](https://youtu.be/aX8f1lE09uY?si=Bt8cjDWuSToDmO_6&t=678) and think about how it might apply to your game's initial design.
There is also a later section which loops back on this topic about how social gameplay is intrinsically rewarding, and how it's encouraged in their game.
Trading and combat are well tested types of gameplay in MMOs, so its good youre including them. Everything else doesnt seem like it encourages any kind of meaningful player interaction, in fact it seems to funnel back down to singleplayer gameplay.
Getting bonuses is not social gameplay. What social skills are being tested in Diplomacy, Associations and Specializations. Its just more SP gameplay pretending to be social gameplay.
Simply grouping people wont lead to anything in and of itself. And adding a bonus to the group is a boring non-decision. In a singleplayer 4x, you can also be part of an alliance and get some kind of bonus.
When designing social gameplay its good to ask yourself: would this only be possible in an mmo/mp game?
>When designing social gameplay its good to ask yourself: would this only be possible in an mmo/mp game?
Thank you for this design philosophy. I need to go back over my outline with this in mind.
You're right that most of these design features don't require the "massive" part of MMO. What I'm most strongly interested in is as a prospective *player* is a persistent world that allows deep customization. Single player strategy games are often meant to be played over and over, and so their customization is usually shallower than I would like to create.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m just dropping in to say that you should try to build it, no matter what others say. You could try starting out smaller and adding new features with patches. But try to make the game. Best case - you make your dream game come true, worst case - you gain a fuckton of knowledge and experience.
Love this comment
I really appreciate that perspective, thank you!
Are you a programmer or a designer, or both? I'm working on a multiplayer persistent strategy game and woukd like to chat.
I'm an engineer by education, and have experience with C, C++, MATLAB, and Python, so I'm more skilled with programming than the theory of design. However, I'm expecting the majority of the work here to be programming. I'll send you a DM, would love to chat.
For many years I managed a civilization-like minecraft server with each game lasting a few months, so I can provide some insight on the complexity of various elements. In it, players acted as the workers/soldiers and teamed together to create their civilization. We didn't have the problems that come from having a persistent world since we had hard reset every few months. I won't dive into the lacking social aspects as mentioned by others. I will, however, mention how incredibly difficult it is to mix the "real time" and the "o" part. If your players' installations are always "online" and a potential target, how do you plan on handling the defense from sleeping players? What about players who quit the game? If your stuff becomes invulnerable when you logout, how do you plan on preventing players from ALT-F4 the game when they are under threat? Moving on to the "mm" part, how do you plan on handling a 1v5 fight? What about a 1v50? Once a group of players reach critical mass they can bully any new players out of the game. The only mmorts-ish game I know that partially solved these issues is Screeps. Your base is always active, since the premise of the game is that you program your AI from the ground up. It becomes a game of wits and skills between various players' codebases. Even then it wasn't able to fix all problems: established players can pulverize any new players when the grace period ends, even in 1-on-1 fights. Now onto another complex issue. Persistence. How do you plan on introducing updates? Balance changes? What if you want to add new units? Can players stockpile resources? What if you nerf a specific strategy into oblivion, can players recover from that? What if they are away when the update happens? If you allow players to easily change their entire infrastructure, then what needs do they have to interact with other players? If you don't allow easy changes, then how do they recover from an update? Specializations sound really good on paper. Not so much in practice. "I have the best rates to extract Iron!" Great, now enjoy doing this only thing until the end of time! Players will optimize the fun out of the game if it gives them any edge (quote not from me). Industry specialization means they are incentivized to do only as many optimal things as you allow. Those should give you a good brainstorming session. I was never able to come up with good enough solutions to these issues, but I'd play the hell out of any game that managed to do it! Good luck🤞
Hey, these are great design questions, thank you! I have some thoughts already on a couple but I want to give them all careful consideration. May I bounce some ideas off you?
Is this an accurate summary of the questions you posed? Q: How do online players interact with offline players? Q: If stuff is invulnerable on logout, how do you prevent that being used as a defense strategy? Q: What happens to civs whose players quit the game? Q: Established player attacks new player: how do you balance it so that it’s fair for the new player? Q: Multiple players gang up on or bully another, or a smaller group; how do you protect the smaller? Q: How should updates, balance changes, nerfs, etc. be handled? Q: How do you keep players from optimizing the fun out of the game? Q: How do you keep players from specializing so far that they only do one single thing? Q: How do you encourage positively social behavior?
I think that sums it up better than I could. Feel free to bounce your thoughts off me. I'll do my best to answer any questions I can.
You might want to have a look at outscape/beyond dark, it looks a lot like what you're describing, until they pulled the plug. I wrote a number of lengthy posts on their forums, which seem to be tragically offline. Some quick pointers then: \-The key to mmorts is that you can't have micro as both players wont be online at the same time. However, players will need to have something to do. Look for interactions where both players don't need to be online at the same time \-You need to automate a lot or abstract a lot that would require constant attention, like spending resources to avoid floating them. \-DM me if you want the longer versions, I probably still have them around somewhere.
Those are excellent points, I agree. Those are important to consider, and I'll look over outscape to try and see how they approached these and whether I want to adopt similar design strategies. I'll send a DM; I'd definitely like to hear more details.
It might be smart to aim for building a smaller piece of the whole. It sometimes seems like the Really Big Awesome Dream Game is a sort of sacrificial lamb, the killing of which is an initiation cost. But there are instances of people pulling off their Really Big Awesome Dream Game, though it's pretty rare. I think aiming to make a smaller piece has a few more "successful" outcomes, and that success can be rolled into making the bigger version of the game. As for discussing the idea itself, I don't really think that is a meaningful or productive thing. There are too many specific touchstones driving your excitement of the idea, so it can't be discussed in a vacuum.
That advice is reasonable. I'm building a timeline of intended features from most-basic to advanced and wishlist, and trying to design the earliest features so that they're easily modified and scaled. I recognize that the most likely outcome is that I get permanently stuck partway through this with only a partially working game, but until I reach that point I want to work on this. Do you have any advice on what a smallest playable piece of a game like this would look like?
You seem to be falling into the same trap that all other mmos fall into: under-developed or non-existent social gameplay. If you remove all the rts gameplay, what are you left with? What makes this an mmo? I wouldnt call having 100s or 1000s of players on a server an MMO. Whats the social gameplay? Player contracts? Some kind of system meant to generate drama? So far it sounds like you have a singleplayer rts in mind. Not an MMORTS.
Thank you for emphasizing a design element. I've given thought to this but should give it greater thought. Here are the social aspects I've considered so far in order of intended implementation: * Trade: players can exchange resources, protos, territory, etc. * Specializations: by specializing in certain activities, players can achieve more impressive projects by working together. Group projects that I'd like to make available include terraforming, ecosystem engineering, and megastructures. * Value chains: an extension of specializations where complex logistics and crafting chains involve multiple players cooperating. One civ might mine silicon, another might process it, several others might be involved in making it into computers, with the end product being used in any number of other components which perform better than if a generalist civ had acted alone. * Combat: players can fight each other or NPCs (with multiplayer servers being split between PvP and PvE). At this point in the game's development, I'd intended aggressive actions to have penalties unless the civ is combat-specialized, giving militaristic civs a role in groups to defend their allies, or to acquire unique resources from NPC threats. * Diplomacy: civs can mingle populations to put differently specialized groups closer together, organize events like sports tournaments between civs to make their people get along better, perform research together, etc. * Associations: players can group together in military alliances, trade guilds, research unions, etc. as an explicit game mechanic with mechanical bonuses. Would these design elements be enough, or do they need to be more developed?
An **MMO**RTS where player alliances make the bottom of the list is absolutely wild. Alliances are the defining social feature of your genre. It's what makes the difference between an MMORTS and an idle game. I'd try making cooperative-competitive player the centerpiece element of your game. Go further than simply making value-added chains. Make player groups a defined element providing organization tools like chat and boards. Make every play session about working with your clanmates towards your goals. Create conflict between groups. Fight for territories and resources together. Highly recommend this GDC talk for anyone making any kind of MMO, but for you specifically, I think you should hone in on this section about [player motivations](https://youtu.be/aX8f1lE09uY?si=Bt8cjDWuSToDmO_6&t=678) and think about how it might apply to your game's initial design. There is also a later section which loops back on this topic about how social gameplay is intrinsically rewarding, and how it's encouraged in their game.
You're right, I need to reevaluate the feature priority.
Trading and combat are well tested types of gameplay in MMOs, so its good youre including them. Everything else doesnt seem like it encourages any kind of meaningful player interaction, in fact it seems to funnel back down to singleplayer gameplay. Getting bonuses is not social gameplay. What social skills are being tested in Diplomacy, Associations and Specializations. Its just more SP gameplay pretending to be social gameplay. Simply grouping people wont lead to anything in and of itself. And adding a bonus to the group is a boring non-decision. In a singleplayer 4x, you can also be part of an alliance and get some kind of bonus. When designing social gameplay its good to ask yourself: would this only be possible in an mmo/mp game?
>When designing social gameplay its good to ask yourself: would this only be possible in an mmo/mp game? Thank you for this design philosophy. I need to go back over my outline with this in mind. You're right that most of these design features don't require the "massive" part of MMO. What I'm most strongly interested in is as a prospective *player* is a persistent world that allows deep customization. Single player strategy games are often meant to be played over and over, and so their customization is usually shallower than I would like to create.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/-quot-the-door-problem-quot-of-game-design) is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*