Chroma Coders — Fun Game Dev Club :)

Ok,

You’ve made a very rough MMO on Facebook. It is very rough, but the system is in place. For artwork of items, you went on Flickr and found pictures that are under the creative commons, commercial license.

For example, if you are making a simple MMO about players being movie stars and having to do quests to become a world-famous movie star…you may need artwork of sets and scenes to help set the mood and atmosphere. You may want to get pictures of the Hollywood Walk of Fame (the sidewalk with stars). If you are making an MMO based on traveling, you may want to gather scenes from interesting areas of the world.

The important thing to note here is that you do not need to spend thousands of dollars and lots of time to get custom-made artwork. Yes, it can help. Yes, later on it may be a good idea to get it. But we need to get this MMO out now. We need to keep things rolling otherwise the excuses will start piling up and slow everything down. Put the artwork in and think about upgrading later.

Ok, so you have a rough game, and it’s really rough. It’s not too great. It’s a good start, though. Now we need to release. Why do we release roughly? For a couple reasons…
1) We need to get something out and keep the momentum
2) We need to rely on early users to give us feedback. I’ve found it compelling and motivating when I have a user directly telling me something is not working instead of prematurely optimizing code and the game beforehand. The other thing is that this is your chance to show the early users that you’re dedicated to make this work. The faster you implement the feedback, the better your chances of having them stay.

There are folks doing simple MMOs that have grown…not because the MMO looks like World of Warcraft, but because the text-based MMO was updated quickly and constantly whenever a user made a request. It made the players feel like they were being listened to and that the developer(s) care.

Earning the trust of the players because of your high level of responsiveness helps to build a community in the game and keep people engaged in the game.

When you release your game, have a banner at the top that links to the application’s wall/discussion board and ask for specific feedback. It will encourage feedback and also demonstrate that you are committed to improving the game.

To release, send it out to friends. Get some preliminary feedback. After that, find groups on Facebook with topics/themes that resonate with the theme of your game. That will be a good way to attract more folks to the game.

Study other games on Facebook too. Note how some of them get you to invite friends into the game. Borrow those ideas for your game and also think of new ideas. You need to figure out a way to inspire people to invite their friends into the game. You can do this by traditional ways found in other apps and by new ways.

You can also use the game mentioned in this book to make your own MMO. We’ve created a mission in it that you can play to create an MMO in 5 days You can also get help from other players in the mission. Click here to start the 5 day mission