Project I'm working on that I may need help/input

[Leveecius]

Hey guys, this is something I've had on the drawing board for a LONG time now (about 10 years). I had a smaller version of it started a few years back, but never actually got it to the par that I wanted it to be. Mainly because I never had the scripting experience/or time to get it where I needed it to be, and nobody really seemed interested in wanting to help me.

The game I've been thinking about in my head is a Text-based MMORPG. Now at first, it will sound a little cliche and faddish, but just keep with me on this so I can give all my ideas to you guys so you can give me some input/advice on it.

I'm designing a Text-based Mafia MMORPG that has a twist and a lot more detail to it. There will be the typical "crimes" that you can do to earn xp and rep and money and what not. Instead of it being like the typical facebook or myspace games, this game will have 2 options to it on the mafia side, a solo route, or a "family" route. There will be hitlists and family wars and turf wars, different cities you can be in and whatnot. To do a hit you have to be in the SAME city as the person you are trying to hit, and the person also has to be ONLINE for you to kill them. If they are offline they are in hiding and can't be found. (A little safety feature I'd like to keep implimented). There will be an option for you to pay a good chunk of money, depending on the rank, that will hire a "spy" to find the person you're looking for and it will take 10 minutes minimum for the spy to get the results to you so you can find the person, then you will have to pay for the flight to the city the person is in before you can try to make the hit. Then the hit will go off of the level of the person, the defense and offense as to weather you kill them, injure them or in the worst case senario, they hurt or kill you. Once dead, you're dead and have to start all over at the bottom of the totem pole so to speak. Everything you worked for dies with your character. I will have "insurance" you can pay for that will allow you to insure some of your assets to another toon with a security question that you choose. Now you will have the ability to make a family of your own where you can grow with the joining of other members when you hit a certain rank in the game, and you have to pay a large sum of money to get it (thus keeping the amount of families in the game down quite a bit). Each player will have their own "profile" they can have that can show their rank, location, wealth, and other statistics in the game, as well as an avatar picture. Obviously the higher you make it up in the ranks, the harder you are to find/kill, and if you're in a family, it will be that much harder. That makes it so that the people that have worked hard for where they are, will have a better chance of keeping what they have. They aren't invisible, but are really hard to kill, even family bosses/Godfathers.

Now ranks in the solo route, will be decided by the players XP in the game and will automatically be granted to them, however, families will go off of XP, but once they hit a certain rank in the game, when they make the XP for the next rank, the highest ranked people in the family (underboss and higher) will have to allow the person to receive the next rank. This way it kind of makes it that much more gratifying to make the next rank in a family because it will show that your family recognizes your work and passion for the family and will make it so that people have more pride for the family, rather than just making the ranks. I know it will take a little work in scripting but I've seen this system in a game before and would love to impliment that in mine.

I'd also like to impliment into my game a black market for drugs/guns for the criminals to buy and sell drugs/guns, not only to other players in the game to make money, but also to sell and buy directly from the server. And the server prices will change every few hours or so within a certain range so you can buy low and sell high. This is the part of the game that I haven't been able to impliment as of yet. But this is also the biggest part of the game I'd like to have.

I am also going to have family hitlists/cq areas, where this part of the game only allows people in that particular family to access this area. This will have news/chat places announcements for the family so families can interact with each other directly without others knowing what is going on.

I wouldn't mind there being a social place where everyone in the game can chat live in that section with everyone else that is in there and have a good time chatting. Usually it's a bar/pub.

NOW, all that being said, there is quite a bit that people can do in the game as far as doing crimes, killing people, buying/selling/producing guns/drugs, social areas, hospitals to get your character patched up, cities to move around in and families to work with, but I'd also like to put in the flip-side of things. I want to impliment a police force of real people who chase after all the criminals. Obviously the higher up you get in that side of the story, the better you are at catching people and the higher the rank of the criminals you can go after. There will be a jail that when petty crimes are done you can be put in there for 5-10 minutes or so, and you will have a chat box in there to chat with everyone in there, and you can either try to escape early (which with every failed attempt you add 10 seconds to your time in there and you can only try every so often 30 seconds or so), you can have someone bail you out/break you out (which if failed the other person gets locked up too), or you can just wait your time and get out.

With the catching criminals tho, it will be the same as the hitlist. You will have to do research of crimes and such to find the people doing it (like the spy will take about 10 minutes to tell you who did it and where), then you have to go to where that person is to try and arrest them and convict them of the crime. The more crimes they do, the higher the bond/longer the jail terms when arrested by the 5-0. However, unless they hit a certain level on the police side, they won't be able to leave the country they are in until they reach that international level. But the higher the level of the police side, the more attention they get from the families they are affecting. They can be harmed/killed by criminals in the game just as if it was real life, and just like the hitlist, the person they are following/trying to arrest, HAS to be in the same city and online at the time they try to arrest them. And all that depends on their rank and reputation in the police force. The police will NOT have more than one force, it will be one big happy family so to speak lol.

That's the stuff that I have on paper right now, and I'm trying to get all this from my paper into a game. Any suggestions/advise/changes anything you would make for/to this? I'm open to any and all opinions of everyone. I'm a decent HTML scripter, and have a little experience with PHP and MySQL DB'ing. I'm not too sure what else I would need or if there would be anyone interested in helping me get this rolling. I will have things that can be bought in the game for real money through PayPal, thus I know I can make money off this game so I don't mind having some people getting paid to help me. I can get the server and hosting service for a cheap price, so that's not an issue, I just need help with the scripting portion of it so I can put all this together and actually get it running.

What do you guys think?

[Djkanna]

You know what would be cool, to go along with real people as mobsters, and the police force.

Having real people as the judges...

Think about it, you've got an element of realism, like right out of a mob film. This way those real people (police) have to actually argue their case and build up their case (boy how that would work, would be an interesting experiment).

Also another way to look at it, these judges are real people, people can be swayed one way or another to help themselves get further in the game. Human nature is selfish in that way...

The problem, this adds just another in-depth process to add to your game, how would being a judge fit into the game in terms of having things in there that makes it worthwhile to take that path, when they start the game.

As for your help, there is plenty of people around that are looking for projects to get involved with.

P.S: Now either you've watched to many gangster flicks, or you should be a writer. Neat idea pal.

#If this makes no sense, probably because it's stupid-o-clock and I'm watching Castle whilst writing it. - or putting my ideas into words failed. ;)

-DJK.

[Leveecius]

No it makes perfect sense. I could impliment a judge into the game as a higher end police rank. That would be hard to have a trial tho, with 3 people on at the same time, and I can impliment bribes and stuff like that. I wouldn't mind having something like that too, but it may have to come later as I can fit that in and we start getting more people involved in the game and making higher ranks.

[Djkanna]

[...]That would be hard to have a trial tho, with 3 people on at the same time[...]

Which is why I thought to myself it would be an interesting experiment.

Perhaps it could be done in parts, like take turns defense goes, prosecution goes, so on and so forth.

It would need a kind of fail safe, to prevent such stuff as logging off for days when you've got a 'trial'. Perhaps the likes of a if (prosecution|defense) don't answer within x days = auto lose.

If the judge doesn't log on for a while, there would be an appointment of a new judge.

Boy see: Interesting. :)

[Leveecius]

Which is why I thought to myself it would be an interesting experiment.

Perhaps it could be done in parts, like take turns defense goes, prosecution goes, so on and so forth.

It would need a kind of fail safe, to prevent such stuff as logging off for days when you've got a 'trial'. Perhaps the likes of a if (prosecution|defense) don't answer within x days = auto lose.

If the judge doesn't log on for a while, there would be an appointment of a new judge.

Boy see: Interesting. :)

That could work. Scripting that wouldn't be too hard now that you mention it that way. That would put that certain member in jail for a long time tho. Judges would have to be really active people and would have to be "elected" so that way it's the people that know the person is active all the time to be the judge. It would be like a "special" rank so to speak. I like it.

[Djkanna]

Indeed, it would be somewhat parallel to reality, in which judges have to be appointed, obviously they would have to be cops first.

The question is: What power would a judge have? Would police have to operate underneath the watchful eyes of judges, would they require the judges consent to go after certain 'bosses'.

And the plot thickens, would mobsters be able to put one of their own in that position, corruption in government is so cliche, but it makes for an interesting gameplay experience.

So if mobsters can have one of their own as judge, would that happen before they're a judge (which means a police path isn't a strict requirement for a judge), or would they attempt to 'turn' a judge into their own, in which case what would the punishment for such if they got caught.

Also would a mobster be able to change paths halfway through?

[Leveecius]

I can see this plot thickening a bit with this. I'm liking this idea a lot and never thought about it, but I'm writing down ideas and trees/leads on this. I would say judges can be bribed for sure, once a judge is known to be taking a case the "families" will be made known of the judge just in case. As far as putting someone in the place of the person who actually did it, that would be something a lot harder to put into that, but I guess that would be something that depends on the crime and your rank. I guess if your like a family boss or underboss or something like that you can to a "hit" and rig the crime scene to make it look like someone else in the family. May have to think about that one for a bit.

As far as mobsters having their own "judge", guess that would be on how corrupt the judge wants to be and how much money they want lol. I'd have to make something in place where judges have a certain amount of immunity to certain things to kind of protect them from families if they aren't corrupt, or are corrupted as a "family judge" from the other families. Obviously there would be other judges/higher rank police officers that would be able to track how cases go so they can see if there is a corrupt action continuously going on, and punishments for the judges would be relieved of the position/jail/death sentence or put on a hitlist by other families ect.

As far as changing halfway thru, I would say no for now, as that would make it REALLY hard for me to script that to do a faction change so to speak. Having a family boss/underboss switch to the "good side" would make them a prime target/suspect for the families and would almost be an instant kill on them, which would make it unfair for the person switching. I'd have to make it where there can only be 1 user per e-mail address or something like that to keep people from making more than 1 toon at a time. This way they can't have a Godfather of a family and a judge at the same time, as that would make a really biased decision for them.

[Djkanna]

Okay, I understand the last paragraph, it would be an not-so-easy thing to implement.

I wonder though, how much influence would police have into these cases, could they also be bribed, or perhaps overlook something for a friend per-say. Would that effect their game-play, or even their influence within the community as a whole.

I imagine, no one would want or even agree with a police officer who is known to overlook things for certain families.

The plot always thickens, never gets easier...Sucks.:rolleyes:

[Leveecius]

It's all good! Just makes the game that much more unique and in depth for people's entertainment when they play.

[JohnGato]

take a look at the game mafiamatrix.com

the whole game is based on the mafia, judges, military, lawyers,mechanics and so forth

[Leveecius]

Haven't looked into that game, there really isn't much information about it on the site.