Anything I can do with my incomplete "MMORPG"?

[JamesA]

Long story short, I have ended development on the very beginning of an MMORPG in JavaScript, it actually ended up playing very well, and was functional. I worked nearly a year on it by myself.

I was wondering if there is any way I could sell it to someone or something? I have no idea if it's worth trying.

Here are some screenshots:

http://imgur.com/a/jpuyG

 

Thanks!

[mattstyles]

Is it finished? i.e. a complete game?

 

If so, yeah, of course you could sell it, there are links to various publishers/portals/etc in a subforum.

 

Have you got a link to it so we can actually play it? Bit hard to judge quality just on screenshots?

 

While you're working out selling it you could always punt it up to a url and maybe add some advertising banners to try and get a small amount of coin out of it. Even if the advertising doesnt make you anything (it probably wont) its easier to sell a game with a user base (even a small one), plus, you can probably get those users to suggest improvements and/or find bugs/defects meaning that eventually you're selling a more polished and battle-hardened product. Its the modern way to expose alpha/beta games to an audience and get them to do your QA for free (or even make them pay!).

 

Of course, you could take the route of trying to fund on kickstarter or indiegogo (or wherever) and use your existing game as a demo and get crowdfunding to try and take it to the next level. I havent heard of this working for solo indies but in theory its as viable a way of funding as any other.

[JamesA]

Thanks a ton, Matt. I really like your suggestions, gives me a really good idea of how I can get a game going like I one day hope to.

 

The game is not finished, it needs a lot of improvement as well. I am just not sure if it's worth my effort on this game, it may be too complex for me to finish.

[born2bagamer]

Hey James, just wanted to say I like where you were going with this.  The graphics are fairly simple but there seems to be a few good systems in place so far.  I take it the inventory and skill trees are both fully functional?

 

Mind if I ask what, if any, frameworks/packages/etc you used creating this?

[mattstyles]

Perseverance chap, just keep going and keep going and refuse to give in. The programming (and associated) skills are probably improving so even if you are correct about it being too complex now, it wont be in the future.

 

Complexity is just lots of simple steps bolted together, try to break down each section in to smaller and smaller steps. If you're strict about this you can break down any 'feature' into steps small enough that you can knock them out in a maximum of a few hours (its possible to go to a lower granularity but you get diminishing returns), then organise all your small steps into some sort of order (normally if one step requires another then you have an order, but you might order them based on which ones you want to work on) and just smash them out. Once you've done all your small steps you have your feature done and time to move on to the next one. Rinse and repeat. There are a number of apps that can help with this organisation too.

 

In practise this is how stuff gets built. It requires more organisational time than most indies are willing to spend time on but its a useful skill and one that I think probably every programmer of non-trivial apps/demos can do, even if they dont do it formally. Anything non-trivial and you cant hold the entirety of the app in your mind so you have to have some organisation, plus it prepares you for working in a team.

 

If you are worried about not finishing it (either lack of current skills or worry that your attention will just shift elsewhere) you could consider open-sourcing it and seeing if other devs would like to build on what you have started.

[JamesA]

Thanks again Matt. 

 

Born, I did not use much, only node and express I believe, mongoDB for saving the user, items, etc. Yes, the inventory and skill trees are fully functional.