Current state of the game, it's history and future plans
I would like to let you know about our current workflow, the game history and future plans.
tldr;
1. How the game got started
2. How the game has been progressing
3. Current plans and how we are looking for investors
I started this game as a side project because at the time when I was playing League Of Legends actively I felt I really want to play a management game based on moba genre however none were existing then.
I started working on the game while attending mandatory military service in Estonia and as the service was really boring and depressing for me it was a good activity to have something in life. I started with the champion evaluation project to start off and made a Reddit post about it some time ago to gauge if people would be interested in this type of game.
The post went really successful for me and the champion evaluation project gained very motivating traction with over 500,000 total votes acquired.
If you don't know about champion evaluation - it was a project to determine which champion would be good at which aspect of the game. You were asked a question such as 'who deals more physical damage?' and were given a choice between two champions and according to ELO ratings coming from the votes all the skills used for the game were generated based on this data. You were also given an accuracy rating and whether you predicted correctly according to which was a predicted winner based on previous votes.
Because of that interest I wanted more and more for this game to happen. Unfortunately I could not spend enough time working on the project in the service so I had to get 'hospitalized' - which is an interesting story in itself for some other time - in order to get out of the service and start working on the game.
Once I got out of the service I went back to work for Optimist Digital (web agency that Olari and Allan own) where I used to work before the service as well.
I talked to them and Geio about the project and they decided they want to join and make this game happen.
If you do not know yet then Geio (oww) is our designer and main goto meme specialist. Olari (Netstand) is who has been working on motivating us, project management and attracting potential investor leads as well as any third party communications. Allan deals mainly with servers and helping out with other things whenever he has the time for it.
From then on we didn't have enough resources to spend our actual working time on the game so we did it on tuesday, thursday evenings and on some weekends.
There were ups and downs in our motivations during that time period when at certain point we didn't touch the game for few months, but in this time we managed to gather enough resources to have me working on the game 3 days of our regular work time a week and whatever I manage to put in from my free time.
We then had a testing period which we rushed to end I'd say quite prematurely and what would have been best case scenario for game development. That's because we needed to see if there is enough interest and possibility for this game to economically exist because we were running low on the resources to build the game.
We had plans to look for investors which we are now doing so I could start working on the game full time and we could hire some extra help as well to make this game into what it should be. I'd say the game is currently only 10% complete, and I think it would be more appealing to bigger crowds when it was atleast around 40% or so.
Of course for this type of game the evolving possibilities are IMO endless. I have plans to start up with different fun competitive strategic minigames for the community, but these are probably quite far in the future right now as the game itself is the real priority here.
Lately what we've been focusing on is finding an investor for our game, but this process also takes time, finding connections, going to meetings and presentating our game.
This has taken some of my dedicated 3 day's time, but it's a necessary investment right now to have a chance at this game succeeding because the game right now is too premature (not enough in-depth gameplay, visual attractions and items to buy in store or subscriber benefits to be earning enough to enable us work on this full time ourselves as well as hire extra help).
I try to keep up with the deadlines mentioned under the features section though and I probably will start working on the game sim as scheduled.
We do have some potential leads now, but processing this will take some time as well and it's nowhere near certain whether we manage to actually close a deal. In Estonia there are not many investors who are knowledgeable about the whole gaming and e-sports market so it's hard to find one who could understand this game. We do have some difficult decisions to make. Such as do we try to make the game more attractive to investors or do we try to put the game quality first - which features do we work on first? Because I'd rather want the game to be more complete before we try to monetize it more or try to do marketing in order to attract more users while the game is still not fully complete for an average user.
Making it more attractive for investors right now would for example be doing another Reddit post - which is a bit risky as we do not want to come off as spamming or abusing the self promotion part so I'd rather wait on this until the game is more complete. Or we focus on features that would increase the retention rate and prove with minimal marketing costs that we can attain users with a decent retention rate.
It's easier to sell the game to investors when they see a larger userbase and higher retention rate.
In general I do believe that this game has potential and it's possible to make the game more attractive for a larger proportion of the moba and e-sports players by adding more content, visual aspects and dopamine increasing rewards in the game. As moba and e-sports genre is growing massively with already over 100mln + users having interest I believe this type of game would have potential to appeal to many of these.
The interest and feedback I have seen for the game so far has been really motivating and it would be a dream for us to be able to work on the game full time and make it into something great, but of course we need to stay realistic, wait and see what happens.
I just wanted to let you in to see what we are doing or trying to do with the game some more.
If you have any ideas how you can help us out then contacting us at info@lolmanager.gg is welcome and appreciated!