Cultivating Your MMO Ideas - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 47

Warhammer game) would certainly be a good place to start. If you are
looking at a game with many vehicles in it, there are a large number of
car magazines, such as Top Gear, that you can consult.
n Movies : Movies and TV shows can provide lots of inspiration for your
games. They don t have the depth or accuracy of historical or factual

topics, but do contain character interactions, which are very important in
bringing a sense of realism to games. Even if you are making a game that
contains zombies or aliens from another planet, the game has to be believ-
able or the players won

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t be engaged with the story/game. There are many
games asking for players

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time, so if your game is not engaging enough
they will decide to move on to a different one. This is a bigger problem
with MMOs because the investment in making such games is quite large,
so it

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' s important to keep the number of subscribers as high as possible.

Note

You can use games, books, and films for inspiration, but be careful not to duplicate others ideas. Using

general game ideas such as an MMO that contains dragons is fine, but if you decide to use images that
look and are named the same as an existing game, this could be a problem. You cannot use other
people

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s trademarks or products without permission from the trademark owners. For example, if you
are making an MMO that has vehicles in it, you could not legally use a road car that is owned by
someone else. Consult a legal representative for the exact details on your rights and responsibilities.

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Cultivating Your Idea
Once you have done the initial research you should have a better idea of the type
of game you want to create. You should create a list of the best ideas that you
have so that you can see them all in one place. Don t make the list too big, as this

will make finding the right MMO idea a lot harder.
Before you create your list, you should think about some key aspects of making
an MMO. Doing so will make your list more streamlined and more accurate:

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n Technology: How big is the game going to be? Are you making it for
just a few friends or are you hoping to make it for a large number of
people? What hardware will you use, a home computer and a broadband
connection or a server?