[USA][TECH][5] Gauging interest in online ARPG game.

This is just an exploration of interest right now as I know game development is one of the most difficult products to co-found. If there is enough interest in this with the right talent we'll explore this a bit more and see if there is any traction. I've been interested in starting a game dev studio for a while now and I have a couple games I've been mentally designing. One of the core game ideas I'm keen to develop is a Path of Exile/Last Epoch and Lost Ark competitor with a semi open world MMO-lite approach. There would be some areas of limited open world interactions where synchronizing players is less important such as towns, marketplaces and other central hubs. And many smaller instanced servers limited to a reasonable amount of players. Cross-instance (global) interactions. I want to take the best ideas of the games on the market, learn from the worst ideas, develop our own ideas and use those ideas to build, hopefully, the best ARPG on the market. Dimensions, timelines, and alternate universes ranging from earth to space and mythology to sci-fi. I want boundless creativity in gameplay with a focus on fun to play game loops, dynamic world events, and seasonal events. Fun and engaging group and solo play. Challenging boss fights, discovery based crafting systems, deep and complex character building from skills, trees, and items. Art style I'm envisioning is a rich animated style like "Kena: Bridge of Spirits", "Lost Ark" and "Torchlight III". The goal would be to create an art style that won't age too quickly and we can incrementally improve as the game ages. I don't want to limit ourselves in the artistic space either by going with a too realistic art style. With the possibilities of alternate universes in the game design I can imagine there being a potential mix of art styles in different styled worlds allowing boundless creativity in the worlds we design, similar to how Fortnite has created a mix of different art styles for their characters. Imagine travelling through a portal to an alternate universe where everything has cartoon art styles or hyper-realism. The story is something that I think we can do just about anything especially with varying dimensions, timelines, and universes. I imagine us building a world where we can introduce new stories periodically for players to get excited for and explore. I was initially thinking I would build a team of developers and artists with equity part-time to get a small MVP working and then crowdfund to develop the game full-time. However, I think a better approach might be to build the game design document and illustrations before development begins and crowdfund the initial seed from that. This approach would be leaner and would prove the concept before massive amounts of time or money is invested into developing an MVP. After that monetization would be entirely cosmetics in a F2P game when we get the core mechanics, and gameplay developed. For the illustration crowd funding approach I would be seeking a designer to lead the art direction of the game or at the very minimum be able to illustrate the essentials that can capture the ideas and convey them to our audience. We would be working together on developing a crowd funding pitch deck. However, if there is enough interest from a variety of talent here to co-found the game together, we can potentially go straight to developing a MVP and get more interest in the initial crowd funding phase. I would be seeking a game development lead, gameplay/networking/infrastructure engineers, design lead, environmental/VFX/particle/character/3d/2d/animation/illustrative artists, a lead storywriter, sound designers and a composer. There is also potential to go after lower hanging fruit with a team of people such as mobile games which could provide us enough revenue to focus on more ambitious products. Mobile games have a very low bar for quality and they are simple in complexity that I believe we can get a product or two out quickly. There is potential here to test concepts as well. I'm open to ideas and advice on best approaches here as well. So are you an ARPG/MMO-lite enthusiast and interested in learning more about this game? Do you have experience in game development and want to join the team? Maybe you're interested in becoming a supporter or investor? Post your thoughts, advice, what you're interested in (and at what phase it would interest you), and previous work if you're looking to join the team. submitted by /u/TurboBerries [link] [comments] https://www.reddit.com/r/cofounder/comments/u59oqj/usatech5_gauging_interest_in_online_arpg_game/