Working with orpgs

There are countless articles out there on writing online games for indie developers. We have all seen them. They go on and on, but in the end, all you can say is, "Duh! Anyone with half a brain can figure this out on their own!". When doing my research, I found it very hard to find guides that were actually more then, "Making an online RPG takes a long time, heres why!". With that said, though, that is a very important fact that you must accept. There is no such thing as an easily made, fast, and good game. Anything that can be easily made fast is going to be a very limited "cookie-cutter" game, and have hundreds of games out there just like it.

When you start your online game, you have to decide what you are going to do. It may sound dumb, but many people don't even know what they are going to do, just have a rough idea of what they want to have happen. Are you going to build your own engine? Or are you going to use another engine? How heavily are you going to change that engine? What kind of game do you wish to create?

The rule of thumb is, the longer you spend creating it, the better it will be. If you design your own engine from scratch, you will have complete and ultimate flexibility over what can be done in comparison to if you were to use a closed source engine. The difference, though, is at least one to three (or more) years of development time.

Instead of ranting on about how you need to realize how long it takes to make an online RPG, I want you to just think about it. Think about every little thing that has to be added, and if you can add them. If you can't add them, don't think that other people will do it for you - if you can't do it, then what use are you to them? You better hope you have some great artistic skills under your belt, because no one wants to take orders from the "idea man" unless it comes with a $20/hour check. Even if you use an engine that is fully-functional out-of-the-box, you still have to spend months making maps, graphics, NPCs, objects, classes, skills, spells, quests, etc.

It is never easy, it never will be easy, and no one is going to do it for you. If you want to make an online RPG, you better be prepared to learn and dedicate many months to hard, often unpleasing, work.