Opinion on my game design and your ideas for more characters/worlds

[ProtzerPotz]

Hey guys, since october I worked on a game design and started modelling two weeks ago. I like to have your thoughts about it and ideas (more detailed later in post).

Currently you start as a school boy with social issues (currently not planned to add female version or character creation due to time). MC found a novel at the ground, pretty destroyed, and learned to love reading novels, mangas and watching animes. You start to work part-times besides school till you bought your first story. The game has the small part of living your normal life and earning money and the greater part... the "stories".

If you read or watch something you are getting data points or so called memory fragments. With enough data points you can play an alternate life in the story. The more data points you've obtained the more parts of the story are available. There should be severel stories, where I want your opinions and thoughts which franchises should be in the game. Your aim is to make a lot of friends (with or without sexual desires is your own choice). It uses a bit of the system of collecting characters.

There are some more things I have thought off, which I don't wanna public right now.

So it's a game where you travel to different worlds and playing with lots of different characters. For example if you are in a Shonen story you probably fight much, if you are in a high school story there isn't any fight.

The playstyle is gonna be 3D RPG and I use UE for it. Don't want to use Koikatsu or similiar, so it takes some time to create characters. Due to time (can't ignore my job ) I planned with up to 5 different stories in the beginning with 3-5 characters each. So there are gonna be up to 25 friends to collect. All of this gonna take time. As I don't have any playable version out in the near future, I don't want to create a Patreon or something.

 

[Codehog]

This sounds like you want to create 5 games in 1.

Honestly speaking: I don't think this will work out.

- The protagonists 'normal life' sounds like boring money making just to enjoy the fantastic stories in the novels. I have to work a boring job in my real life, I really don't want to do the same for the protagonist. If the stories are the fun part, just let me enjoy them without money grinding
- If the stories the protagonist is 'reading' are worthwhile, why not make smaller games out of each of the stories!?

I would recommend to make it 1 or 2 stories and get a prototype together (use Koikatsu or whatever) fast.
That way you can easily see whether you idea is fun and adapt if you need to improve.

 

[♍VoidTraveler]

Currently you start as a school boy with social issues

You lost me here.

 

[Winterfire]

Unlike the previous feedback, I thought this could work out nicely, but...

The playstyle is gonna be 3D RPG and I use UE for it. Don't want to use Koikatsu or similiar, so it takes some time to create characters. Due to time (can't ignore my job )

You lost me here.

Even if you had previous experience with game development and even if you did not have a job, and therefore tons of more time, you still wouldn't make it.
You are probably clueless to how big of a scale that is, but you'll quit way before your project goes anywhere.

The story itself and your ideas were nice, but you really need to scale your dream down by a lot if you want to go anywhere, and even then it'll be hard.
I'd start by dropping the 3D RPG, UE, and the idea of making them from scratch... If you are so against KK, use Vroid Studio instead.

 

[Cosy Creator]

Ideas are easy, implementation is what will make or break you. Immediately I would recommend tempering your ambitions for your first release - 25 characters split between 5 different stories is just way too much to meaningfully implement unless you plan on developing it for the next 18 months without releasing anything. Your concept lends itself to new versions really well too, each new update can focus on a new franchise/short story, so starting with 5 seems unnecessary.

Regardless of what you choose to do though, I want to wish you good luck!

 

[Man don't hop]

I'll give a different point of view, keep doing what you're doing just make sure to learn along the way. If you become proficient at even one of these skills you've achieved more in your game dev career than most. I've used Unreal for 100s of hours and can say that it has a steep learning curve but if you know what you're doing you can prototype this kind of game in a few weeks and even if it fails (I'm cheering for you because it sounds rad, different characters is a smart way of having people not get burned out on the same characters) you have experience in one of the most in-demand engines in the industry. The same with modeling. I agree that this is very ambitious for a first game, but as long as you don't allow it to burn you out on Game Dev even if this fails if you learned skills along the way you've won.