YFO – Yawning Festival Online!
Recently, a lot of MMO development teams have given up on their designs because they were different, difficult to implement, and innovative. The smart ones backtrack, and produce games that duplicate that “same old” experience. Why is this? Because a good franchise with killer art will sell faster than any of your so-called “cool” ideas.
Why should your dev team suffer? (More than you want them to, that is.)
Introducing YFO. Yawning Festival Online’s MMO engine saves you time and development effort by delivering in one package all of the same features you see everywhere. Pluggable modules duplicate everything you’ve already done, and your developers can spend all their time creating all-important “eye candy”. Consider these well known facts that I made up:
- 80% of gamers are happy with WoW’s boring, but nicely polished gaming system.
- 100% of WoW players are bored with WoW, and want to see something “different”, but don’t want to think.
- You’re guaranteed to get financing if you base your game on a popular movie or TV show.
YFO is a skinnable MMO that delivers a predictable, safe game experience to your consumers, but allows you to add one or two twists (chosen from a set list).
Designing a new game with YFO is simple.
Step 1: Get your Franchise On
OK, so granted you can’t just take any franchise and make a violent endless-grind game out of it. Office Space, while funny, doesn’t have much shooting in it. Sex in the City might go over well with the cybernauts, but not so well with the PvPers.
So, you need a franchise with some sort of world, and opportunities for endless violence. South Park, then. South Park Online (a YFO game) allows your choice of weapons, and for a truly iconic South Park experience, some of your favorite characters are NPCs in the game. Drop a few million on art.
Step 2: Choose a Character Class Engine
The character class engine is pluggable. You can choose one of the three standard skill tree systems or build your own module. The skills are all the same, and you can use the stock description and animations (“Lightning Bolt!”) or modify them. The players won’t notice the difference. Trust us.
Step 3: Feature Decimation
You may choose up to four things to change about the core gameplay engine. No developer changes more than this, so you shouldn’t either. If you change nothing, gameplay mechanics are exactly like World of Warcraft. Well, they are different enough that we won’t get sued too often. You can write your own mods, or use off the shelf feature plugins like these:
- Building Stuff – allows guilds to “build” structures, using a menu interface and a whole lot of online time!
- Breaking Stuff – allows other guilds to break their stuff by doing stuff that take a lot of online time!
- Control Points – allows specific zones to be controlled by different factions, based on arbitrary and confusing criteria!
- Crafting – choose from over 35 disturbingly similar crafting systems!
- Travel Systems – Mounts, vehicles, and magic powers. We got ’em. They all work the same, but with slightly different art.
- Guild Support – Guild support features are always the same, and we
never add more. You can selectively disable some of them, if you find
they confuse your customers. - Cross-game Community Engine – Allows in-game chat and guild
features to span multiple games, as long as all those games come from
the same development house. There’s no good reason, we just did it this
way! - PvP and More – Allow players to PvP in instanced worlds and arenas,
or experience the joy of balancing world PvP. Our new auto-nerf feature
automatically detects which features to nerf by scanning the user
support boards for keywords like “favorite”, “uber”, and “fun”.
But there are many more optional features. If you’ve seen it in WoW, we have it. We encourage customers to create one plugin for each world, to make it “unique”. One customer is working on a world with three variations from the WoW formula! Wow! But no need to get carried away; research shows that 83% of players feel most comfortable if your game is almost exactly like WoW. Our skinnable system allows you to deliver your trademarked intellectual property in a game engine that is Guaranteed Not To Innovate(TM), assuring you success!
Contact tekHedd for more information, and get started on your franchise MMO now.
YFO: Haven’t I played this game before?(TM)
