Hey Programmers! Question here.

Poro Lord·8/11/2018, 9:37:22 PM·2 votes·1,470 views

I am the creative type, with no ability to create a game.

My concept is basically a MOBA.

Obviously creating a triple A game someday would be "The Dream" but I come from the nintendo generation.

I would be happy with less than mind-blowing graphics, animations, and such.

What is the reality of creating a decent looking MOBA?

If I found a few unemployed programmers, who had passion for my vision, what would be a reasonable budget?

Would I need ten thousand dollars? A hundred Thousand? A BILLION?

Seriously though, I am very passionate about my concept, and curious what is realistic.

Thank you in advance for any input!

3 Comments

ModWuks8/11/2018, 9:50:32 PM2 votes

Asamas brushed upon a lot of good points. In the year of Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Gofundme, and other crowdfunding platforms, you don't need to front as much as you would've years ago. If you have a clear idea, a strong plan, and a decent amount of progress to the point where money becomes a necessity to move forward, then with a little luck and a lot of love, your game just might come to fruition.

According to self-reported data from Kickstarter, games (note this includes video games, board games, card games, etc) ranks #3 on the top successfully funded categories on their site. If you have a passion, follow it. Every game starts with a single person.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Finding a team that shares your passion and values will make things a lot easier at every step of the way.

Asamas8/11/2018, 9:43:13 PM1 votes

I am making a big game too but for now it is really only a concept. I have a big foldder with everything in it to lore, art, badies and allies, core mechanics and etc. Do that first and polish the concept. From there start thinking of getting peope to work or to introduce the idea to a company. You really need to polish the concept first and that is free. Would be happy to help for free with that too. I am a good creative writer and world builder. Would be happy to work with you as you polish the vision in your mind to the black and white format that is microsoft word xD

STEG08/12/2018, 9:44:23 AM1 votes

At the base level MOBA is one of the easiest games to potentially program, after all it was originally made in WarCraft III as a custom map with limited development tools.

It suits an Object Oriented Program approach very well because it has very obvious gameplay mechanics without much else going on and just a single map. I can't say what the pricetag should be but it's not something incredible challenging, a hobbyist could manage it. If you have the desire to learn you might have more fun/control/save money, by just getting UE4 and setting it up there, f you can't code it has visual coding (where you attach wires to boxes) which is adequate for writing a MOBA and would make scripting unique character abilities fun. It has a top down click to move template and tutorial also which would basically hand you all the player controls already done. The basic gameplay could be set up in a just a few work days there or by a programmer.

This doesn't mean the feat would be simple to make something impressive: A lot of artistic detail needs supporting code and depending on how far you want to take that you'd need a programmer and some kind of material/texture/partical artist to make cool artistic detail. You'd need some programming to make the animations and interactions look smoother. How much cool detail you want to add is up to you.

Some visual FX might require an actual mathmatician to handle more complex trigonometry or damage calculations. It might be done with just animation but if you think of the Q ability on Kai'Sa something like that to get the curves/angles of the missles based on distance/direction (if it is math based) is pretty complicated for the average person. (and most programmers).

The hardest part would be coding artistic detail beyond the actual MOBA mechanics and setting up online play, servers, managing accounts and security etc., anti-hacking, and AI for bots. As far as I know managing secure logins with proper encryption is a huge expense that pretty much has to be handled out of house, (you have to pay for per x amount of accounts). You could use facebook login like a lot of apps use but i think it's generally hated and it's easy to lose account access on.