A lot of people in that thread are having trouble staying on topic, so I thought maybe it would help if I created a different thread explicitly for people to post their opinions about exploitation of the proletariat, etc..., in. Since this is the off topic forum, post whatever you want, with respect for the rules of the SC2Mapster forums.
About Me
I have had a lifetime goal of becoming a game designer. When I was 18 I left for the US Air Force and spent 6 years there, including 2 in South Korea. I'm almost 30 now, married, and we are talking about having our first kid. I'm running out of time to start a real career as a designer and cannot teach myself everything you need to know to code an iPhone or Android game from nothing. I realize I will have to hire outside help no matter what approach I take.
I'm currently enrolled at Wright State University as a senior, though I will not be attending classes this winter quarter. Instead I will be working to earn enough money to hire the help I need to finish Crater of Carnage as well as save up for the future child before resuming class in spring quarter.
I sympathize with Occupy Wall St. and am a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I have bought food for Occupy Dayton and delivered it to them with my wife (we live near Dayton, OH). In short, no, I am not out to screw anyone who does quality work. I am very disillusioned with our political system in the US and follow Reddit Politics and World News sub-forums regularly. Fuck Fox News and Rupert Murdoch straight to hell. I am an atheist, and a vegetarian. I am not a democrat though, because they are just as owned by private interests as the republicans in the US.
Besides being a project manager for Crater of Carnage, I intend to write all the in game help text and background story, design all 10 initial heroes, and introduce a number of awesome changes that will make people rethink the genre.
Why Starcraft 2?
I've looked into Flash, Game Maker, Stencyl, XBLA, Steam, Unity 3D, Python, and Java, and decided the best platform for me to get started on is the SC2 Map Editor. The following are my primary justifications:
Existing stable network code and infrastructure - This is by far the most important and most difficult thing to achieve when creating online multiplayer games. Since the game I currently want to make requires these things, it makes perfect sense to use a platform that provides them for nearly free. Compare that to trying to create your own game for any of the platforms I mentioned above. You have to do your own net code in ALL of them.
It fits the genre of my game pretty well - I personally love the DotA-inspired genre called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) and feel there are ways I can help evolve it. Since this whole thing began in WC3 custom maps, I don't think there would be a more appropriate place to begin work on a new variation than SC2.
The only thing Battle.net does not offer that I would love to have is the ability to reconnect to games when you've disconnected, but, honestly that is not nearly as big a deal as being able to have observers and record your matches, 2 things League of Legends does not currently have implemented (observers are in beta!), but Battle.net does. My reasoning? The majority of gamers are not on 56k modems any more. They have always-on internet connections and more often than not, disconnections are either intentional, or their internet is so shaky they lag too much to play competitively. In both of these specific cases I am not interested in letting them reconnect anyway.
Design Philosophy and Goals
The overarching priority behind every design decision I make in Crater of Carnage is accessibility. This is a trait MOBAs are notoriously lacking in, leading to typically horrible communities of 14-20 year olds talking trash constantly at new players that are trying to learn a game that doesn't want to be learned. You must spend hours going over online resources to figure out how to play them properly. Valve is trying to address this in DotA 2 via infrastructure and a built in mentoring system, but this seems like a case of not seeing the forest for the tree. Riot has taken a better approach in my opinion by making LoL more accessible as a game, but it did not go far enough. There are 2 specific goals that I have in mind initially, both related to the difficulty new players have getting into the genre:
Clarify Hero Roles - Pick any MOBA you want, you HAVE to go online and do research to figure out how you're supposed to play any given hero in it. There is very little in the way of clear indicators whether your role is initiator, support, carry, etc... Part of this is because some MOBAs try not to pigeon hole their heroes, but usually it is just because it there were never any clear role definitions in the first place. My solution is to establish 4-5 clear archetypes that each hero will fall into, that have a unifying signature ability shared across all heroes within the archetype. This is akin to Summoner Spells in League of Legends, but less easily abused (EVERYONE TAKE FLASH) as they will be fixed to the hero. This is in addition to the traditional 3 skills and 1 ultimate skill exhibited by most MOBA heroes.
Last Hitting - Using LoL as an example again, they did a good thing for new players by taking away denies. It is incredibly counter-intuitive to think you are supposed to attack your own side, so by default they will not even attempt to. The next step is to eliminate last hitting period. How could a new player with zero understanding of DotA know that attacking the enemy team's creeps indiscriminately is a BAD THING sometimes? They have no idea they are just pushing the combat zone into a more favorable position for the enemy laners, and no idea that they are slowly losing the game with every creep death they did not directly claim, even if they did 90% of the damage to that creep. My solution to this is simple, if you are within XP range of a creep or enemy hero kill, you get full credit and any rewards that would typically be reserved for the player delivering the "last hit".
Differences From Blizzard DotA
You would think the elimination of fighting your own team for last hits would make this an ideal game to have support heroes in. I would not agree. Support heroes by definition are detrimental to this genre because they exist to help other players have more fun than you are having. A central figure in DotA-likes is the "star player" carrying their team to victory, but this only happens after their team has done a good job setting them up to do it. Doesn't seem fair does it? Why should one person on your team suddenly become the only one that matters just because they spent all game farming gold that you enabled them to farm?
Crater of Carnage will feature no "support" heroes, every archetype will have their own deadly niche and hard counter. Brawlers that move into combat and recover hp quickly, but are susceptible to enemy focus fire, tanky initiators that both soak and deal a large amount of damage, but are easily kited, and deadly casters that punish careless players relentlessly from afar, but cannot take a punch are just 3 examples of the types of heroes I am designing.
Items are another area that is going to be massively altered in Crater of Carnage, and will not really resemble typical MOBA items at all. Instead of having to memorize weird combinations of arbitrarily named "gear" that you do not actually see your character use, I am going to use a system of direct statistic upgrades. This will also allow me to combine multiple aspects of a hero into fewer stats, again something LoL has done recently with Attack Damage scaling both auto-attack damage and some abilities. I am going to take this further though, for example, Max HP and HP regeneration will be increased by the same upgrade-able Health statistic. Blizzard DotA has a similair approach, but will be more like DotA than LoL because spells will never gain power from items, except in the form of shorter cooldowns.
Looking forward to seeing your map finished, but I think it would take much longer than mine @_@ I intentionally set the story inside the SC2 universe so that the setting and units would make sense by default.
I think it is very reasonably to ask beforehand exactly how much money you are willing to spend, how much work is expected to be done, and more than a very brief description of what you want done. Serious people dont jump blindly into positions like that. If they take your "up front" payment, then decide a month into it that you are too difficult to work for, what happens? Do you demand all of your money back? do you pay for the time they spent? I am trying to express to you, as many people have, that you need to have a lot more of your plans written out if you want anyone to take this seriously. Can you not understand this?
What I understand is that you fancy yourself some kind of advocate for people that did not ask you to speak for them. I already have 3 people that offered to work with me in pm and if people like you would stop derailing this thread I could have more. Reported.
The problem I see is that you don't want to pay someone until their work is "Satisfactory" in your eyes. What does this mean? you want the game to be better than all existing DOTA games before you will pay? There is a huge difference between your ideas, and what will actually work in a fair and balanced game with a high skill curve. If your ideas prevent a person from creating the gameplay you want, are they the ones held responsible?
I already said that I would pay money up front, and full payment when they have met the terms agreed to before they began working on the features. Wrap your head around that, because it is how real businesses write contracts. Contracts exist to ensure both parties receive what they agreed to exchange. Are you a parachute account for DogmaiSEA by chance?
Wow, nobody seems to understand that this thread is not a debate about how good an idea it is to make another DotA map. I do not care at all if you think it will succeed or not, keep your opinions to yourself. Only post in this thread if you're offering to work with me.
You do not know what my plans are, you do not know what my goals are, you do not know what my means are, and you are making assumptions you shouldn't be. Once my map is done you can judge it all you want, until then your speculation is unwelcome. Find some other means of entertaining yourself.
P.S. - If you are butthurt now and respond with more thread derailing posts, I will just report you like I did DogmaiSEA. As the mods said, contribute something useful or get out.
Why would anyone pay for making another dota clone?
I would be happy to do stuff for money as long as I know it has success or it will be cool. But another dota clone wont be any of that. Or you might have cool idea for dota like maps, which you dont want to share with us?
Because I want to do it better. I guess Blizzard DotA is already pursuing a few of my goals in different ways, but essentially I want to give DotA the TF2 treatment of streamlining the gameplay until it becomes very accessible by anyone. Once that is accomplished, polish, polish, polish. I am heavily inspired by League of Legends, which I believe is the best of the current generation of DotA-spawn if only because of the lengths they have gone to make their game more new player friendly.
The fact is that if you can't pay a real job fee (10$/h or whatever) you should at least find someone interested in your project, you pay him less but at least he's having fun.
There is nothing worse than getting a low pay and do something you don't like...
I already stated am willing to negotiate the fees based on what the mapper thinks their time is worth. I don't know how to make it any clearer that this is not charity work. My only preference is that you quote me based on the feature, because I am not paying you in full until the feature is completed to my satisfaction. If in the process of completing the feature the mapper has a good idea or suggestion to improve it, I am willing to talk about it and renegotiate the price if I desire the suggested change.
Edit: Also, I have updated the OP to include some specific examples of the way I am dividing up features. Remember that you can offer to work on as many features as you feel capable of doing a good job on, but you DO NOT have to be able to implement all of them. I will divide the work between the people deemed most capable and willing to work for a fair price. If you know a better way to divide up the features I am open to reorganizing that draft list.
And I repeat for Snyder, you should give a bit more details if you want to be taken seriously. Noone will steal your awesome ideas
I don't mind sharing what my goal is, but that is irrelevant. I'm not hiring you based on whether you like my idea or not, I'm hiring you based on if you want to be paid or not. People who want to be paid to make a map will offer me their services.
A dota like map consisting of two people working full time (40 hours a week), one on tiggers/one on data, keeping in mind that quality level that I presume you will expect will easily set you back $100,000 at AU STD wage.
And you base this on what? I'm not hiring Blizzard staff, I'm allowing people to bid their price to do the work I need done. I will pick people per feature if I have to, as not everyone is good at everything.
After much consideration and helpful advice from members of the SC2 Mapster community, I have decided it would be a mistake to continue work on Crater of Carnage. I think there were a lot of good ideas, but in the end it just wasn't different enough from Blizzard DotA to be worth paying money to create. I had tried to remake it into something not like DotA, but I just don't have enough good ideas for an entirely new play format to be nearly as engaging and fun as the MOBA genre. Believe me or don't, but despite how Crater of Carnage ended up, I didn't actually know anything about Blizzard DotA when I started writing about it here.
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Game Mechanics Thread:
http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/development/map-development/29495-crater-of-carnage-play-mechanics/
Team Thread:
http://www.sc2mapster.com/forums/general/team-recruitment/29176-crater-of-carnage-team-thread-positions-filled/
A lot of people in that thread are having trouble staying on topic, so I thought maybe it would help if I created a different thread explicitly for people to post their opinions about exploitation of the proletariat, etc..., in. Since this is the off topic forum, post whatever you want, with respect for the rules of the SC2Mapster forums.
About Me
I have had a lifetime goal of becoming a game designer. When I was 18 I left for the US Air Force and spent 6 years there, including 2 in South Korea. I'm almost 30 now, married, and we are talking about having our first kid. I'm running out of time to start a real career as a designer and cannot teach myself everything you need to know to code an iPhone or Android game from nothing. I realize I will have to hire outside help no matter what approach I take. I'm currently enrolled at Wright State University as a senior, though I will not be attending classes this winter quarter. Instead I will be working to earn enough money to hire the help I need to finish Crater of Carnage as well as save up for the future child before resuming class in spring quarter.
I sympathize with Occupy Wall St. and am a member of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I have bought food for Occupy Dayton and delivered it to them with my wife (we live near Dayton, OH). In short, no, I am not out to screw anyone who does quality work. I am very disillusioned with our political system in the US and follow Reddit Politics and World News sub-forums regularly. Fuck Fox News and Rupert Murdoch straight to hell. I am an atheist, and a vegetarian. I am not a democrat though, because they are just as owned by private interests as the republicans in the US.
Besides being a project manager for Crater of Carnage, I intend to write all the in game help text and background story, design all 10 initial heroes, and introduce a number of awesome changes that will make people rethink the genre.
Why Starcraft 2?
I've looked into Flash, Game Maker, Stencyl, XBLA, Steam, Unity 3D, Python, and Java, and decided the best platform for me to get started on is the SC2 Map Editor. The following are my primary justifications:
The only thing Battle.net does not offer that I would love to have is the ability to reconnect to games when you've disconnected, but, honestly that is not nearly as big a deal as being able to have observers and record your matches, 2 things League of Legends does not currently have implemented (observers are in beta!), but Battle.net does. My reasoning? The majority of gamers are not on 56k modems any more. They have always-on internet connections and more often than not, disconnections are either intentional, or their internet is so shaky they lag too much to play competitively. In both of these specific cases I am not interested in letting them reconnect anyway.
Design Philosophy and Goals
The overarching priority behind every design decision I make in Crater of Carnage is accessibility. This is a trait MOBAs are notoriously lacking in, leading to typically horrible communities of 14-20 year olds talking trash constantly at new players that are trying to learn a game that doesn't want to be learned. You must spend hours going over online resources to figure out how to play them properly. Valve is trying to address this in DotA 2 via infrastructure and a built in mentoring system, but this seems like a case of not seeing the forest for the tree. Riot has taken a better approach in my opinion by making LoL more accessible as a game, but it did not go far enough. There are 2 specific goals that I have in mind initially, both related to the difficulty new players have getting into the genre:
Differences From Blizzard DotA
You would think the elimination of fighting your own team for last hits would make this an ideal game to have support heroes in. I would not agree. Support heroes by definition are detrimental to this genre because they exist to help other players have more fun than you are having. A central figure in DotA-likes is the "star player" carrying their team to victory, but this only happens after their team has done a good job setting them up to do it. Doesn't seem fair does it? Why should one person on your team suddenly become the only one that matters just because they spent all game farming gold that you enabled them to farm?
Crater of Carnage will feature no "support" heroes, every archetype will have their own deadly niche and hard counter. Brawlers that move into combat and recover hp quickly, but are susceptible to enemy focus fire, tanky initiators that both soak and deal a large amount of damage, but are easily kited, and deadly casters that punish careless players relentlessly from afar, but cannot take a punch are just 3 examples of the types of heroes I am designing.
Items are another area that is going to be massively altered in Crater of Carnage, and will not really resemble typical MOBA items at all. Instead of having to memorize weird combinations of arbitrarily named "gear" that you do not actually see your character use, I am going to use a system of direct statistic upgrades. This will also allow me to combine multiple aspects of a hero into fewer stats, again something LoL has done recently with Attack Damage scaling both auto-attack damage and some abilities. I am going to take this further though, for example, Max HP and HP regeneration will be increased by the same upgrade-able Health statistic. Blizzard DotA has a similair approach, but will be more like DotA than LoL because spells will never gain power from items, except in the form of shorter cooldowns.
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@Nardival: Go
Looking forward to seeing your map finished, but I think it would take much longer than mine @_@ I intentionally set the story inside the SC2 universe so that the setting and units would make sense by default.
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There will be a front page post about this thread soon, and in it I will explain more about the map's background plot and goals. Stay tuned.
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@Nardival: Go
Check your inbox.
I feel like I need to say this again as I've gotten 2 PMs with no attached examples of work:
I will not hire you until I've seen the kind of work you do, so give me screen shots, videos, or actual maps to show off what you are capable of.
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What I understand is that you fancy yourself some kind of advocate for people that did not ask you to speak for them. I already have 3 people that offered to work with me in pm and if people like you would stop derailing this thread I could have more. Reported.
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I already said that I would pay money up front, and full payment when they have met the terms agreed to before they began working on the features. Wrap your head around that, because it is how real businesses write contracts. Contracts exist to ensure both parties receive what they agreed to exchange. Are you a parachute account for DogmaiSEA by chance?
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Wow, nobody seems to understand that this thread is not a debate about how good an idea it is to make another DotA map. I do not care at all if you think it will succeed or not, keep your opinions to yourself. Only post in this thread if you're offering to work with me.
You do not know what my plans are, you do not know what my goals are, you do not know what my means are, and you are making assumptions you shouldn't be. Once my map is done you can judge it all you want, until then your speculation is unwelcome. Find some other means of entertaining yourself.
P.S. - If you are butthurt now and respond with more thread derailing posts, I will just report you like I did DogmaiSEA. As the mods said, contribute something useful or get out.
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Because I want to do it better. I guess Blizzard DotA is already pursuing a few of my goals in different ways, but essentially I want to give DotA the TF2 treatment of streamlining the gameplay until it becomes very accessible by anyone. Once that is accomplished, polish, polish, polish. I am heavily inspired by League of Legends, which I believe is the best of the current generation of DotA-spawn if only because of the lengths they have gone to make their game more new player friendly.
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@DogmaiSEA: Go
TLDR; Stop shitting in my thread.
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I already stated am willing to negotiate the fees based on what the mapper thinks their time is worth. I don't know how to make it any clearer that this is not charity work. My only preference is that you quote me based on the feature, because I am not paying you in full until the feature is completed to my satisfaction. If in the process of completing the feature the mapper has a good idea or suggestion to improve it, I am willing to talk about it and renegotiate the price if I desire the suggested change.
Edit: Also, I have updated the OP to include some specific examples of the way I am dividing up features. Remember that you can offer to work on as many features as you feel capable of doing a good job on, but you DO NOT have to be able to implement all of them. I will divide the work between the people deemed most capable and willing to work for a fair price. If you know a better way to divide up the features I am open to reorganizing that draft list.
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I don't mind sharing what my goal is, but that is irrelevant. I'm not hiring you based on whether you like my idea or not, I'm hiring you based on if you want to be paid or not. People who want to be paid to make a map will offer me their services.
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And you base this on what? I'm not hiring Blizzard staff, I'm allowing people to bid their price to do the work I need done. I will pick people per feature if I have to, as not everyone is good at everything.
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I will provide more details than I already have once I know I want to work with you.
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After much consideration and helpful advice from members of the SC2 Mapster community, I have decided it would be a mistake to continue work on Crater of Carnage. I think there were a lot of good ideas, but in the end it just wasn't different enough from Blizzard DotA to be worth paying money to create. I had tried to remake it into something not like DotA, but I just don't have enough good ideas for an entirely new play format to be nearly as engaging and fun as the MOBA genre. Believe me or don't, but despite how Crater of Carnage ended up, I didn't actually know anything about Blizzard DotA when I started writing about it here.