Team of Path Writers Needed! (Potentially Lucrative Project)

[Mooncalf]

Concept
Initially, I had wanted to make an animated, offline, 2D single player Path of the Vampire RPG with Xcom style combat mechanics and an open world to explore. I wanted it to be around 30 hours of gameplay and heavy story focus. While I still want to do this eventually (indeed, work on that has been progressing very slowly for months), I want to create something less demanding for now, and something we can roll out much faster.

The idea is a single player cross between a visual novel game (simple art, dialog and descriptions shown in text), mixed with intermittent early Final Fantasy RPG battles (first person perspective, where you control a team of fighters against visible enemies, using powers and tactics etc), and a Mass Effect style choice and consequence system (branching dialogues, romance options, multiple endings), set in the world of Path of the Vampire.

Each of these visual novel RPGs would be quite small (perhaps only taking 5 hours to complete), take only around a month or two to create, and available on Android and iPhone.

The focus would be on the writing, which is why I'm looking to put together a writing team. The artwork would likely be simple for our first games, created using photoshopped royalty free images overlayed with the signature Path art filter in order to create all backdrops and characters as quickly as possible (example here). The music would also probably be royalty free ambient and cinematic music. As for the gameplay, I'd be using RPG Maker (heavily disguised) in order to tie everything together, create a powers and levelling up system, and to create the battles against NPCs. RPG Maker can also publish for Android / iPhone apps, so things would happen very quickly as soon as we had a story. Once we've done one, the next would be far easier to make due to the coding being in place and us being more used to working with the system.

I'd be fine with putting together a kind of tech / concept demo if somebody is interested in helping but would like to see the idea in action first.

Ideally, it would be great to put together a big team of artists and composers and programmers to create something really epic, but I feel like we have to start small, and this is a good place to start because we already have a heavily fleshed out canon for Path. After a while, of course, we could improve our system and get artists on board, etc, but the focus right now, I think, is to get the team paid as quickly as possible in order to encourage them to make something bigger the next time.


Team roles needed
- Writers (1-3)
My first instinct is to have the writing team work together in the most part, but to have one of them more responsible for the overall branching plot outlining (with some direction from me regarding game design and canon, etc), one more focussed on creative descriptive writing, and one responsible for tying both things together with character dialog and prompts for the descriptive writer.



Commercial Viability
Visual novels are huge business on the Google Play store, and most of these are badly written, silly, offer very little choice and consequence or branching dialogue, and offer no RPG mechanics at all. Moreover, other visual novels aren't too cheap for the level of content they offer. Some sell you the game flat out, but most sell you 'packs' for extra characters and content, and do so at $8 a pop.

Our visual novels (if they could even be classed as such) would have interesting RPG mechanics, would be well written, offer multiple endings, wouldn't try to advertise to people constantly, and would be set in a world that's interesting.

Though there's very little on the google play store that offers anything approaching a similar experience, the most similar games available have between 3000 and 30,000 downloads (some have closer to 500,000, but these are rare). The devs which do sell the game outright charge an average of around $3 per download. With a team of 4 people, we're looking at anything between $3000 - $30,000 each, per game. If each game takes even 3 months from start to finish, that's potentially a minimum of $1000 per development team member, per month, for doing what you love in your spare time. Yes there a chance it might not snowball at all, but at the very least the money would continue to trickle in each month from people who enjoy experiencing what you've made.


If you're interested in joining the dev team for these mini projects, please drop me a PM on this forum. Thanks!