Multiplayer game

Hey, me and my friends decided to make a multiplayer fps.
I seek for advices how to manage all of this.
How to prepare good documentation(GDD), what should be there.
A adversising, bussisnes plan?
Make some kind if list what scripts do we need. Animations, models, sounds?
First time i will be making something big and i would really appreaciate your advices

 

Business plan? Are you intending to actually make money off your first-ever big project multiplayer FPS?!?

A labor of love is one thing... but a viable business is quite another. (I have both... and unfortunately, two years in, the former is still a long way from becoming the latter, despite many years of experience on big projects.)

So, I would recommend stepping back, asking yourselves what you really want/expect to get out of this project, and make sure those expectations are realistic. Then you can, most likely, dive right in by making prototypes — I wouldn't spend too much time filling paper with ink.

 

You missunderstood me, bussisnes plan ahh i meant what things do we need to buy, Or will have to buy. So we know how much to ask on kickstarter for.

 

You crack me up. But you don't actually need to buy anything; Unity (personal, which is fine for this) is free, as is Blender. And Audacity for sound editing. That's about all you need.

If the artist(s) among you is using a Mac, then I would recommend getting Cheetah3D (~$100) for 3D modeling. It's very powerful and easy to use. But if you don't have Macs or can't afford Cheetah3D, then Blender will get the job done eventually (some people even learn to like it).

 

Trello is a good way to keep track of who is working on what parts, and assigning projects.

Also I recommend listening to gamedesignzen.com podcast. It will give you a nice reality check, so you have an idea of what your are diving into.

 

We need ufps n fructuring n destruction

 

We, me and my team want to go for kickstarter with our game
So it really should grant us some $ imo
Noone likes to work for free right?

 

Imo, kickstarter is only going to work if you have a strong background in development with a viewable history. Or 80% of the game finished to show off to finish. Just my two cents.

 

before we hit kickstarter we will have a little gameplay , 1 map , and rest of our things( i dont really want to spoiler every thing in game) will that do?
i hope so

 

Can Cheetah3D do anything that blender can't? I have never used it and don't have a Mac. My impression was that its more or less only selling point against blender is that it is easier to learn (not easier to find tutorials for maybe, but "less weird" than blender). Is that incorrect?

I fully agree on your other comments regarding the project.

 

I'm pretty sure it can, though I don't know if the additional things it can do are relevant to Unity development. For example, it does high-quality (and surprisingly fast) rendering, as in the following movie, which was modeled and rendered entirely within Cheetah:

But for Unity purposes, I don't know — I only tried Blender for a day or two, and was then happy to switch to Cheetah, and have never looked back.

I can say, though, that for creating & editing FBX models & animations for use with Unity, it does work really well. (Unity can also read Cheetah3D's native file format, if you have it installed on the same machine. But I usually use FBX anyway for wider compatibility.)

 

I'm still not sold on Cheetah. If that's the pinnacle of lighting scenes in Cheetah, I think blender currently is ahead of it:
http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/top-10-blender-artworks-january-2016/
http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/top-10-blender-artworks-february-2016/
Cheetah might well have the faster renderer, I have no way of comparing them and Blender's Cycles is a bit on the slow side imho.

I don't know, I'd just need a compelling reason to choose a commercial OSX tool over a free cross-plattform tool. On paper (without having ever used Cheetah) Blender just strikes me as the all around better skill investment. If someone really dislikes the blender interface and usage paradigms, that might be a good reason to learn something else.

How does Cheetah handle manual editing of vertex normals? Blender doesn't have a really good solution for that. We've briefly talked about it here:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ho...nity-or-fail-badly.390947/page-7#post-2559311

My example image shows what I mean.

The only way to get that in blender is with a script, and that workflow has its drawbacks. And just for clarification "default script" wasn't meant to imply this script comes with blender, it was something someone posted on a forum. I just modified it a little to get a different effect that seemed more usefull for what we were talking about in the other thread. Blender has some ways of editing normals with modifiers, but those don't do what I'm looking for.

If Cheetah has a better solution for such tasks, offers a solid set of modelling tools and has a non-destructive modifier-stack (or equivalent), then I could see it being a potentially better choice to create game assets with it than blender. Like you said, for use with Unity only a subset of what these tools can do really matters.

 

http://www.goodgamesbydesign.com/2016/02/18-becoming-indie-on-starting-a-business/

 

@Martin_H, we should probably move this over to the External Tools forum; we've rather hijacked the OP's thread. I don't consider myself an expert in Cheetah or in 3D modeling in general; I'm primarily a software engineer, and dabble with 3D modeling now and then as needed. But if you start a thread and give me an @-mention, I will try to help as well as I can.

 

What skills does your group bring?

Start with a prototype. Build this first. A single level, unity primitives, multiplayer, win and loose conditions. Once you have this running you will have a better idea of dev time and costs.

 

Hard to define what skills
We are students(programmers), so if we miss some knowledge we fill it looking how to do something at forums, yt etc.
We have experienced graphics so models are pretty good

Ufps will help us a lot

 

As students on your first game it's going to be rough to convince random strangers on the Internet to back your kickstarter. You will need some impressive game play footage and a good prototype.

You've also picked a genre that's fairly saturated. You don't just have to convince people to play your game. You have to convince them not to play COD or Halo or Destiny or ...

Not being discouraging, just pointing out what you are signing up for. Making your first game into a business is going to be rough.

 

Yes yes! To @BoredMormon you listen!

You really should be setting a plan more along the lines of: my crew and I are going to spend the next 6-12 months building a cool game we want to play, and we'll put whatever crazy stuff we want in it, because realistically, we are the only ones who are going to play it! But we will think it's awesome, and we'll have fun doing it, and (most importantly) we will all level up our mad skills so that 5 or 10 years from now, we will be bad-ass game developers!

That is a plan you could realistically execute on; it will be both more fun and more successful (in just about every way) than the kickstarter-funded-commercial-game-as-our-first-major-project plan. (Well, doing the KickStarter will be educational too, but certainly not in a fun way.)

 

we are all gamers , we have a plan on our game(cant go through details) but im very excited i would love if people could enjoy our game so we will definietly listen to feedback and improve it. This is not supposed to be another common CoD or BF no no no.... this will be way better if its about gameplay(heh i hope so at least) when we will have our first gameplay ill give you link ^_^ and kickstarter , well noone likes to work for free... especially experienced graphic guys who model our characters , map , envirnoment. And at late stage we need good hardware , projects will be very very pc consuming :/

 

Just as people above have suggested, focus on making a good game and a good team.

Figure out how dedicated each team member can be, for how long, and what their expectations are. If your lead programmer has to leave in 6 months to take a paying job, you need a plan to handle that. It's also a good idea to have a general agreement about how each person will be compensated, but don't waste too much time on it. Frankly, most projects never get to that point.

Use something like Trello or Hack'n'Plan to organize your project, Slack or Skype to communicate, and a blogging platform to run a development blog.

Don't think about advertising or fundraising yet. Here's how crowdfunding works:

• When you run a campaign, less than 10% of your existing followers will actually pay.
  
• Let's say you need $50,000 USD to finish your project, which is actually much lower than what most projects need. (Keep in mind that half of that will go to Kickstarter and to income taxes in your country. If you offer physical rewards like t-shirts, they will also cost money.)
  
• If the basic funding level is $10, this means you need at least 5,000 backers.
  
• And this means that before you start the campaign, you need 50,000 people who already "say" they'll back your project. This assumes you can convince a full 10% of them to actually put up money. You'll have to be a very convincing salesman to reach 10%. It's often a much lower percent.

This is why a good team, a good development blog, and especially a good game, are critical. You need those to get enough followers to justify a crowdfunding campaign.

So for now focus on your team, your blog, your game, and having fun!