Introduction
So, you've got some unique ideas that'll work really well, you've got the commitment and skill, and you want to build your own MMOG ...but you're not entirely sure where to go next? This isn't a step-by-step guide to building an MMOG (do you have the next 6 months free?) but instead a mixture of specific advice, gotchas, and general pointers that might help you.

I work for one of the MMOG technology companies - we build development systems and server engines to drive MMOGs, and to speed up development. We often get asked for advice on “where to start” with building a new MMOG, and sadly there are precious few resources we can refer people to. Certainly I've not yet found a good guide to building MMOG's anywhere.

This article is split into three major sections, each aimed at a particular type of reader. First of all, we have one for individuals and enthusiasts. This is where most of us lie – people who're hooked on MMOG's in one form or another (either playing them or inventing them) but who aren't employed by a commercial games studio to actually produce the things.

The second section is aimed at small teams, usually a bunch of friends who have been working in other industries (typically as developers) for a decade or so and include a few highly skilled programmers. It should be just as relevant for groups of recent Computer Science graduates (or “soon-to-be” graduates) in a similar position, of which there are quite a lot entering the games industry.

Finally, there's a section devoted to producers at commercial games studios, looking to make an upcoming title into an MMOG. I'm including this to give everyone else a strong flavour of what it's like to build an MMOG from that perspective (for instance, the presence of large sums of money and skilled staff make a big difference!).

Enthusiasts
The first thing I want to say is that I do know, personally, individuals who have created whole new MMOG's from scratch – almost without anyone else – and ended up with tens of thousands of subscribers; it IS possible.

It's also about as wise as head-butting yourself into unconsciousness, and more often than not will produce the kind of game you'd expect from someone who liked to reshape their forehead against a brick-wall. The main problem is that you're attempting to build something akin to a 500 foot suspension bridge with no power tools, no labour, just the output of your own little workshop (based in your garage/spare bedroom). Usually the only way to stand a snowball's chance in hell of releasing the game is to make it almost entirely crap (...and this is what the successes I've known had to do initially).

In practical terms, you may be the longest-serving player on every one of the top ten MMOG's, but you have probably have no direct real experience of building one, and “walking the walk” is a heck of a lot harder than “talking the talk”. There's lots of things you know, but that doesn't mean you'll remember (or have the willpower) to actually implement them all. There's also some really important things you don't know – like whether you have the strength of willpower to develop an MMOG (which is about as exhausting and painful as giving birth to centuplets (100 babies)...). IMHO, the best way to find out is to do a MUD first. You can't just walk into Ferrari and get a job as lead designer of their next major car – you have to work your way up first, building up experience on smaller projects. Similarly, a MUD is much quicker, easier and cheaper to build than an MMOG. Note that many many people who start MUD's find they can't even get a MUD finished – better to find this out before you commit your life to an MMOG. You will also learn a heck of a lot about managing people (players) which you've probably experienced a lot of (and have good ideas about) but haven't yet had a chance to try out.

Another place to start is on the WorldForge projects – although you should be aware that you won't get much (if any) practice with real games there for some years to come; you can learn a lot about the design, technologies, implementation, etc.

Small Teams
For small teams trying to get started in the mainstream games industry – either to produce a portfolio to get employed by a big studio, or trying to make a living as an indie – the advice is nearly always the same: make an innovative but fairly simple game that you can complete inside 3 months. Everything you do should be judged by KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!), since so few games that are started ever get finished, even by really good teams.

Most importantly of all, don't even dream of trying to out-do the current games industry. If you dream of writing a new 3D engine that makes Doom 3 look dull, wait until you're part of a team of 20 or more full-time fully funded developers – not when you're starting from scratch.

The advice for making MMOG's is quite similar, with some interesting differences that actually make an MMOG a much more attractive choice for your first game. An MMOG is a service, not a product, which has several immediate consequences: firstly, every player costs you money (even if you don't provide ANY customer support; think bandwidth, think BIG costs), which tends to focus the mind! Secondly, people don't just play your game a few times then stop – they potentially will play every day forever, with new experiences each time; you can keep changing the game as much as you like whilst people play it. Thirdly, a large number of players is a source of income EVEN IF they have no money or would refuse to subscribe (and if any of them do subscribe, you have a stable revenue stream - retail games tend to make 90% of their sales in the first 3 months after launch, and then almost nothing afterwards): e.g. (this certainly isn't the only source of revenue) you can make enough advertising revenue off the backs of 50k regular players to be very rich indeed.

This gives you a unique opportunity: make your game and get a few hundred (yes!) people playing it, don't aim for any more than that (be realistic). Trust me, you'll be very very appreciative when the server crashes, or the support requests come flooding in, that it's “only” 500 people...Then, *once it's complete*, you can actually continue to extend and improve the game, and attract more people. 12 months after your initial launch, you could easily have gone up to 5k players (nb: you want to keep the increase gradual; it should be slow enough that by the time you need extra money to fund costs (both your own living expenses and the bandwidth/hosting/support) you have had time to get some revenue streams in place). Once you've got your billing in place, you can accelerate, and the “simple first MMOG” that you started for a few hundred players can – in just a few years – miraculously morph into “the best MMOG in the world...ever” that you dreamed of.

You'll be following in a great tradition:

“The game design was done for 300. Nine months or so before ship, we got the order from on high to make more players fit into the game” - Raph Koster; Ultima Online

“...the path that Mythic took to success – launch small games with lower margins until you have the technology to do something like DAoC”

“Most of these guys [publishers of MMOG's] do not know how to think small. TSO could have been done for much, much less, and if so, would have been wildly successful.” - Damion Schubert; Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Shadowbane

However, there is also something else that it is essential for small teams to bear in mind: no “small team” is ever going to be big enough to write a real MMOG. Five-person teams regularly produce very slick polished single-player (or small multiplayer) first-games in 3-4 months; when you bear in mind that in an MMOG you have to do all that work just for the client side, and then you've still got ALL the server-side work to do, PLUS all the time it takes to integrate the two (and don't be fooled into thinking that is anything other than a very long job).

The secret is licensing; license everything you can get your hands on that will reduce your development time and let you concentrate on the bits you most need first-hand experience of. For starters, this usually means avoiding writing ANY networking code (there are half a dozen good network layers specifically designed for games development; use them!). Equally you usually want to avoid the more esoteric and specialized parts of server development (you're games developers, right? Not DBA's, nor Distributed Systems engineers, etc...). Of the handful of companies that license MMOG server engines, several – including the one I work for – offer zero-cost licenses for small teams / independent developers / academic research. Use them! However, be very careful: the market for MMOG servers is far from mature, and only about 25% of the licensable MMOG server engines are worth using at all – in the long run the rest may cost you more time than they save. You need to do some research (do these people seem to actually know what they're doing?) before adopting someone else's technology.

Commercial Games Studios
Whilst the previous sections contain good advice that many commercial studios would benefit from, it's a whole different ball game. Commercial companies have something that other games development groups don't: money. Generally lots of it, too.

Careful management and planning of an MMOG usually starts by looking at five major aspects:

• Planning
• Design


• Development


• Customer Service


• Experience

At the planning stage, commercial studios need to produce a watertight financial plan. This can be a horrific experience: working with huge unknown and almost inestimable factors, you have to calculate precise figures for everything, to within small tolerances (overall approximately to the nearest 1%). If you stick a finger in the air and just guess, you'll have a spurious financial plan with no relation to reality. Then, halfway through, you (and possibly your entire project) get fired (or cancelled) for not meeting your original targets...

This is inevitable because of the way that funding works; funding in the games industry is no different at all to funding in the wider world, except that usually the investors specialise in games (much as VC's often specialise in a particular industry, only more so). Everything you've ever heard about the difficulty of getting funding for a startup comes to bear at this point. Fundamentally, financial plans have to be precise because you're asking someone else to risk millions of dollars on a project they will probably have nothing to do with – so they need really accurate projections from experts (you and your team) to be able to make up their mind. Financial planning is hard; getting this part wrong leads to many of the “bizarre” public decisions – like cancelling a game just before it's finished, even though it looked set to do really well (there is often no spare money set aside beyond what was originally planned for!).

Design is much closer to traditional games development. As most serious MMOG players know, however, there are a great many special considerations for gameplay in MMOG's – griefing, attracting all of Bartle's suits, destructive cheats, community formation, etc. It's somewhat depressing that the earliest MMOG's (e.g. UO) were careful to employ people with formidable relevant experience (e.g. the recruitment of several LegendMUD people to Origin), and yet so many modern MMOG's (any number greater than zero is large for this particular brand of foolishness!) by commercial studios fall by the wayside because of apparently elemental mistakes. Fortunately, we're seeing the rise and rise of small specialist consultancies, mostly formed of old-hands from the MUD and (less often) MMOG industries; these can only flourish if games companies are being wise enough to employ them for their expert knowledge, so the signs are good that elementary design mistakes should mostly fade away in the coming years.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Development, commercial studios have so far been very reluctant to follow the advice given earlier to small teams – start small, grow big. The nearest we've really seen is “start small with a big staff, grow nowhere”. If your game is too small but requires too large of a team to support, then you will spend all of your money treading water - supporting the game without improving it drastically or having the cash to really do a new project. The good news is that you'll never die, the bad news is that you never seem to grow.

Customer Service becomes a major issue when you expect from the start to be charging money. It's an even bigger issue when the number of customers you expect will require a huge team of full-time CS reps (usually a large multiple of the total number of development staff who wrote the game in the first place). I recommend Jessica Mulligan's recent book - “Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide” (ISBN:1592730000) – which goes into considerable detail on the planning and execution of an MMOG, particularly of Customer Service. In the words of Gordon Walton (The Sims Online), “If you master this one element, you would have a competitive advantage over all online games today...no current offering is the benchmark”.

Given that there are 3500 new games developed each year, of which perhaps 10 are MMOG's, it's rather difficult to find experienced personnel/staff within the market. The main options are to borrow expertise by hiring consultancies or partnering with a more knowledgeable company, or to look for “complementary” experience in completely unrelated industries – although this is often avoided due to the problems (whether perceived or genuine) of integrating “outsiders”. Typically the biggest problem here is the mandatory reduction in salary; although in some cases that can be offset by royalties on the finished game, this doesn't seem to happen much for MMOG's. The other approach, of course, is to find someone who has the potential to become an expert, and train them up. Usually by sacrificing your first game for their experience, and then firing them so they can be snapped up by a competitor (at least, that's the way that EA seems to do things...).

If you want to make a big splash, starting your game with tens of thousands of customers, the most important thing is to have incredibly good project management. A very smart move is to visit a head-hunting agency and hire a top-notch “Programme Manager” (preferably with experience on international corporate projects with 100-200 staff) and similarly hire an expert in Customer Service with a background in luxury goods companies (NOT the games industry). There are thousands of people in the world who know this stuff *on this scale* better than anyone in your company. Making an MMOG work as a project and as a service is orders of magnitude more complex than producing a single-player game, and requires little in the way of games-industry-specific knowledge.

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