On the implementation of the famous genre on the Minecraft platform
The purpose of this article is to help novice game projects with a non-standard theme avoid basic mistakes in implementation. This article talks about the personal experience of running a game startup within Minecraft.
My interests in many respects did not coincide with the interests of my peers who were addicted to computer games, but it was always interesting for me to create something unique and new for our society. Noticing that most of my peers are addicted to playing Minecraft, I decided to study in detail the reasons for its popularity, including from the technical side. I also began to study the main competitors and the device market Minecraft-servers in general.
Going deep, I began to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the game. My work with this market began in 2015. The search group included mostly Minecraft projects with a bias in the medieval themes of the RPG genre. After a while, despite the fact that the audience showed interest in it, I could not find a high-quality and interesting product in the Russian-speaking segment, which led to the beginning of work on my own project. Also, having studied the work of Western companies, I singled out the study of the advertising market and methods of SEO promotion in the Russian market as one of the main tasks.
')
About a year I was doing useless things, creating boring products, but during that time I managed to get tremendous experience and realize the key mistakes in creating not only game projects, but also IT as a whole. Starting in 2016, I began an already conscious structured work. I started searching for a team through the rubukkit.org forum, which was popular at the time, creating a huge number of recruitment announcements. The budget of my project was small, so after a long time of searching, I gathered a small number of enthusiastic guys. The great advantage of this kind of work was that the guys who were working with were motivated to create something new and interesting. We were able to fully develop the concept of the game server, but then problems began with an acute shortage of specialists (programmers, designers, architects, game designers). It became clear that we need a person who can engage in operational activities, which at that time included the selection of personnel and accounting. Despite the fact that the company was not registered, financial control was necessary. I could do this on my own, but there was not enough time because of the work on the product itself and the assistance to the project departments on individual tasks.
From that moment began a systematic study of the labor market. The only major forum at that time was the already mentioned forum RuBukkit. He was considered first. There are some pretty sad news that was found there. The first is that the market is dying in the abyss of very bad projects . You ask: "Why? After all, people should want to go for good projects, and not for bad ones. The bad ones will not survive. ” But. In fact, people go to such projects. But for some reason, Minecraft was flooded with users of extremely low age (8-12 years old) - children, for whom normal projects are too difficult to play, and therefore not interesting. It was interesting for children to cheaply buy privileges over other players in boring games, which led the market of projects not to develop in the direction of solving difficult tasks, completing quests, creating complex buildings, competing in skills, but in a trivial boast with their objects. So there was a lot of projects, the main meaning of which was the sale of such privileges to children at low prices. Much later, a study fromgate about the computer program TLauncher was conducted and published, which only confirmed my assumptions that the market was not so random. Continuing to study RuBukkit, I looked with horror at how very good projects were closed due to unprofitability - one-day projects brought much more . Thus, there are few good projects left. The most economically thoughtful and those that have influence and acquaintances in the blogger community to get exceptional advertising at a low price have remained. As for the RPG ... This theme in the game was distorted beyond recognition. Thus, I came to the conclusion: if you make a quality project, then there are few competitors than ever. Actually, I began to rely on the fact that a unique project with an interesting plot would be able to capture the hearts of the audience in the conditions of low competition.
The second is, as always, not so simple. Due to the fact that there are few good projects, there are also few orders for high-class tasks. Consequently, there are very few specialists in the ru segment at an affordable price. In addition, the flood of minecraft children led to the loss of a large part of the market by the market. This area has become considered unpromising, unprofitable and uninteresting . In this regard, professionals leave there, and new people do not go there. As a result, prices for the services of specialists in this field soar because of the presence of demand, but almost no supply. However, financing and investors' requests to mid-market did not fall, and the number of these investors plummeted - over time, they were not found at all at the sites, only through acquaintances. And here is the third news: people who are ready to invest money want to get an urgent payback and popularity with the proposed investment of 100,000 rubles . Therefore, it is difficult to assemble a team for a “above average” level project, and it is almost impossible to release it. But it did not bother me; I thought that you can create an alpha version of the project, and then post it, which will attract investors who can see progress and an interesting idea. Due to the poor reputation of several projects with a similar development plan in the distant 2012–14 years, the credibility of projects starting on a voluntary basis fell to zero . Good employees simply do not write on the posted ad, and in fact your project is almost the most promising of those presented on the site. As a result, a lot of time was spent on the recruitment of people and the organization of work, long conversations with each about working conditions, guarantees, etc. And when it came to real work, everything turned out to be even worse: low pay or lack of it does not instill any sense of responsibility in the staff, they are simply too lazy to perform tasks. Payment must be at least some, at least symbolic. Without this, you have no right to ask people for work, and they have every right not to do anything. Thus, the project does not release. And our server once again confirmed it.
So you need to start a non-standard project with a large budget. Of course, this figure will be different for everyone, but the initial investment (before the Alpha Closed Test) should be at least 200,000 rubles . Further - more, but depends on the project. This is taken not from nowhere, but is drawn from the stories of many projects in which I worked or worked with my friends. With proper implementation of funds at the time of the first Alpha testing should be about 100 000 rubles for the promotion of the project in the social. networks, project advertising, rental of server and other equipment for 2-4 months.
We didn't have it on the project; we just could not find financing on time. The start of the project was stormy, cheerful and with multi-colored flags, but when I had to do a lot of difficult work, people slowly began to disperse who was going where. Most went to projects with, at a minimum, the presence of reasonable salaries. We were left essentially with nothing, since a large themed mod without textures, models and a map with two locks and a poorly designed landscape are not real assets that can be shown to someone. All this was done mainly by me and a couple of partners to whom I promised good stakes in the company. The rest of the ~ 20 people whom we had scored with difficulty did not really do anything during the development.
Alpha tests are invented to show the audience an idea by implementing its main points in a minimal amount . Each such test shows the level of public approval of the tasks and identifies unnecessary. After that, the project is sent for revision of the necessary tasks and processing of the rest.
As well as from any story, from two years of life of this project it is necessary to draw conclusions. In general, I think, adhering to some simple rules, you can save yourself from most of the problems at the project development stage:
How it all began
My interests in many respects did not coincide with the interests of my peers who were addicted to computer games, but it was always interesting for me to create something unique and new for our society. Noticing that most of my peers are addicted to playing Minecraft, I decided to study in detail the reasons for its popularity, including from the technical side. I also began to study the main competitors and the device market Minecraft-servers in general.
Going deep, I began to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the game. My work with this market began in 2015. The search group included mostly Minecraft projects with a bias in the medieval themes of the RPG genre. After a while, despite the fact that the audience showed interest in it, I could not find a high-quality and interesting product in the Russian-speaking segment, which led to the beginning of work on my own project. Also, having studied the work of Western companies, I singled out the study of the advertising market and methods of SEO promotion in the Russian market as one of the main tasks.
')
About a year I was doing useless things, creating boring products, but during that time I managed to get tremendous experience and realize the key mistakes in creating not only game projects, but also IT as a whole. Starting in 2016, I began an already conscious structured work. I started searching for a team through the rubukkit.org forum, which was popular at the time, creating a huge number of recruitment announcements. The budget of my project was small, so after a long time of searching, I gathered a small number of enthusiastic guys. The great advantage of this kind of work was that the guys who were working with were motivated to create something new and interesting. We were able to fully develop the concept of the game server, but then problems began with an acute shortage of specialists (programmers, designers, architects, game designers). It became clear that we need a person who can engage in operational activities, which at that time included the selection of personnel and accounting. Despite the fact that the company was not registered, financial control was necessary. I could do this on my own, but there was not enough time because of the work on the product itself and the assistance to the project departments on individual tasks.
Market
From that moment began a systematic study of the labor market. The only major forum at that time was the already mentioned forum RuBukkit. He was considered first. There are some pretty sad news that was found there. The first is that the market is dying in the abyss of very bad projects . You ask: "Why? After all, people should want to go for good projects, and not for bad ones. The bad ones will not survive. ” But. In fact, people go to such projects. But for some reason, Minecraft was flooded with users of extremely low age (8-12 years old) - children, for whom normal projects are too difficult to play, and therefore not interesting. It was interesting for children to cheaply buy privileges over other players in boring games, which led the market of projects not to develop in the direction of solving difficult tasks, completing quests, creating complex buildings, competing in skills, but in a trivial boast with their objects. So there was a lot of projects, the main meaning of which was the sale of such privileges to children at low prices. Much later, a study fromgate about the computer program TLauncher was conducted and published, which only confirmed my assumptions that the market was not so random. Continuing to study RuBukkit, I looked with horror at how very good projects were closed due to unprofitability - one-day projects brought much more . Thus, there are few good projects left. The most economically thoughtful and those that have influence and acquaintances in the blogger community to get exceptional advertising at a low price have remained. As for the RPG ... This theme in the game was distorted beyond recognition. Thus, I came to the conclusion: if you make a quality project, then there are few competitors than ever. Actually, I began to rely on the fact that a unique project with an interesting plot would be able to capture the hearts of the audience in the conditions of low competition.
The specialists
The second is, as always, not so simple. Due to the fact that there are few good projects, there are also few orders for high-class tasks. Consequently, there are very few specialists in the ru segment at an affordable price. In addition, the flood of minecraft children led to the loss of a large part of the market by the market. This area has become considered unpromising, unprofitable and uninteresting . In this regard, professionals leave there, and new people do not go there. As a result, prices for the services of specialists in this field soar because of the presence of demand, but almost no supply. However, financing and investors' requests to mid-market did not fall, and the number of these investors plummeted - over time, they were not found at all at the sites, only through acquaintances. And here is the third news: people who are ready to invest money want to get an urgent payback and popularity with the proposed investment of 100,000 rubles . Therefore, it is difficult to assemble a team for a “above average” level project, and it is almost impossible to release it. But it did not bother me; I thought that you can create an alpha version of the project, and then post it, which will attract investors who can see progress and an interesting idea. Due to the poor reputation of several projects with a similar development plan in the distant 2012–14 years, the credibility of projects starting on a voluntary basis fell to zero . Good employees simply do not write on the posted ad, and in fact your project is almost the most promising of those presented on the site. As a result, a lot of time was spent on the recruitment of people and the organization of work, long conversations with each about working conditions, guarantees, etc. And when it came to real work, everything turned out to be even worse: low pay or lack of it does not instill any sense of responsibility in the staff, they are simply too lazy to perform tasks. Payment must be at least some, at least symbolic. Without this, you have no right to ask people for work, and they have every right not to do anything. Thus, the project does not release. And our server once again confirmed it.
Money
So you need to start a non-standard project with a large budget. Of course, this figure will be different for everyone, but the initial investment (before the Alpha Closed Test) should be at least 200,000 rubles . Further - more, but depends on the project. This is taken not from nowhere, but is drawn from the stories of many projects in which I worked or worked with my friends. With proper implementation of funds at the time of the first Alpha testing should be about 100 000 rubles for the promotion of the project in the social. networks, project advertising, rental of server and other equipment for 2-4 months.
Alpha testing
We didn't have it on the project; we just could not find financing on time. The start of the project was stormy, cheerful and with multi-colored flags, but when I had to do a lot of difficult work, people slowly began to disperse who was going where. Most went to projects with, at a minimum, the presence of reasonable salaries. We were left essentially with nothing, since a large themed mod without textures, models and a map with two locks and a poorly designed landscape are not real assets that can be shown to someone. All this was done mainly by me and a couple of partners to whom I promised good stakes in the company. The rest of the ~ 20 people whom we had scored with difficulty did not really do anything during the development.
Alpha tests are invented to show the audience an idea by implementing its main points in a minimal amount . Each such test shows the level of public approval of the tasks and identifies unnecessary. After that, the project is sent for revision of the necessary tasks and processing of the rest.
findings
As well as from any story, from two years of life of this project it is necessary to draw conclusions. In general, I think, adhering to some simple rules, you can save yourself from most of the problems at the project development stage:
- Before you do something, make a plan. Remember that a project is not a job for you alone, but for a large number of people. A detailed plan will not keep everything in my head and avoid questions in the future.
- Creating a project, soberly assess its value at each stage, work out a business plan to show it to potential investors - the only chance to get investment at the idea stage. Without a good budget, your startup is most likely doomed to collapse, as any work must be paid for.
- Plan your work in advance. Task planners and regular project member meetings will help to organize the work. With this approach, many problems will go away, and everyone will know what to do.
- Make the backbone of a team of personally familiar people. Distribute the highest roles among them. When you're not alone, working with a project is easier. If the project is complex (like RPG), then it makes sense to build a rigid hierarchy in the project. This will allow you to monitor the implementation of all tasks while reducing the load on each individual.
- Read about everything you have to do in your project. The founder must understand everything at least superficially in order to be able to identify overpriced and control the correctness of the tasks in any part of the development.
- Break tasks into subtasks, implement and release content in parts. Communication with the audience will allow you to concentrate on what you need and discard the unnecessary.
- The main tasks on the project should be performed by staff members. Freelance services are generally very expensive, so it is important to have at least one employee in each position in order to avoid overpayments and to be able to get quick advice.
- The availability of the budget should be accompanied by a clear budget planning with an assessment of the need for each of the costs. Even a very large budget does not guarantee success. If you start a project with the thought that there is a lot of money, then you will not have enough.
- Create a database with all the working information about the project, structure all the materials so that you can easily get the necessary materials as a matter of urgency under any circumstances. It will also be useful for employees: they will be able to draw information from documents without distracting you from important work.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/458820/
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