Core system

So, how do you go when you have decided to make a game?

The first reflex I had was to choose a "category". "I want to make a strategy game" or "I want to build an RPG-like game". This has obvious advantages: you are in a familiar environment, and can rely on your players knowing more or less what they will have to deal with.

Precisely because of this, I don't really like the approach. Your creativity will be limited by the constraints of the genre, and the risk of doings things just because they are done in other similar games is big (if I had decided to build a strategy game, I would probably have decided to include several types of resources without thinking about the reason to do so, but only because that is what strategy games are supposed to be about).

So first I want to decide on what my game will be about. What will the main feature of the game be? What will be core experience of my game?

One of my prerequisites is that skill had to play a part. I feel that games where "experience" (which more or less equals the time psased on the game and/or money spent on it) quickly get hollow. However, I am not confident in building a pure skill-based game. You need a very polished and balanced system (that moreover takes into accounts the limitations of the browser-based genre, e.g. some players will have slower platforms, and this should not impact the experience) to build a succesful skill-based game.

What I aim at is a system where the casual player can still have fun (and need only to understand the basic mechanics), enjoy and progress in the game, but which only players who really take time to understand the system can master.

As a core system, I've decided to go for "fighting". It's the most basic element in MMORPGs today, it lends itself very well to multiplayer, and there is a lot of room for innovation and improvement.

Next step will be to draft a basic combat system, that integrates everything above.