4. Product Concept

The fantasy that DGA supplies is to turn a player into a military commander going into a battle with a historical weapon unit on a historic map of choice. DGA aims at letting the player get a bunch of feelings from control over the weapon unit, estimation of its historical authenticity/accuracy, and eventually, immersion of the player into the art of warfare and the sense of war. DGA also aspires to guide the player through military routines and operations with weapons as they are practised in reality.

Since entrance into the Game, the player has to choose a weapon unit to go into battle; the first types of weapons being realised are mechanised/motorised land combat vehicles and guns, dating from the time of World War I up to the Cold War, with giving preference to World War II. The weapon units are arranged by weapon types and countries, thus the player first selects a weapon type and then a country. Every country registered in the game has a set of technology trees for every type of weapons. The weapon units manufactured, and/or exploited, and/or developed by the country are distributed across its technology tree by model, year of entering service, and technological epoch. The player selects the desired model of weapon units according to the proper interest and without any limitations. If the model is chosen for the first time then after having manufacturing a weapon unit, the player can additionally customise its standard parameters at a weapons factory. After having passed the first battle, the weapon unit becomes a battle unit and can be customised according to the field modifications made in real life by soldiers at the tactical level, which the player implements at a front-line repair shop.

After having prepared the desired weapon unit, with which the player can go into a game battle (also called a battle session). For doing that, the player has to choose a battle mode, which define the level of historical authenticity/accuracy of the game battle, and a battle type, which specifies a method of recruitment for game teams. The player always battles in a team. In the single-player mode, the player can battle with mobs and against mobs; otherwise — when mobs are disabled — the player can train and study the game alone. In a multi-player mode, other players always accompany the player into battle.

Battle sessions are limited on the time duration and amount of players participated in every team. During the battle, the player aims to put out of action all the weapon units of the opposite team or to accomplish some victorious condition (capture the flag, maintain a position against enemies, make the opposite team surrender, etc.). After having finished the battle, the players receive their rewards in experience points and cash according on their performance during the battle.

The player can spend the gained experience points to explore the battle unit's new modules and field modifications, which combinations are intended to be open-ended in variety and scope. The player can spend the accumulated cash for buying special equipment and materials to augment the battle unit’s performance and skills of its crew. The battle unit’s repairs, refuelling, replenishment of ammunition, changes in weapons and camouflage, as well as other routine military activities are made automatically and without any interruption for the player.

Towards player experience, DGA’s main idea as its motto suggests is to provide gamers with a game that requires them only to game by concentrating on the game’s aspects without being constrained by farming, grinding, and other meaningless actions, which have nothing common neither with the art of warfare nor military technology.

At the end of the day, an overarching experience DGA seeks to discover to its players is to show through the mechanics of warfare and war the importance of human life and why war must be avoided at all costs.

DGA's visuals promise to be art-intensive, clean, and performant at the same time. The game is intended to have a light, airy feel with bright, vivid colors, which reproduce natural scenery with picturesque landscapes and camouflaged military machines acting in various seasons and weather conditions. Since the game combines role-playing, cross-platform, and massively-multiplayer-online requirements, its visual style will be performant as much as possible to provide the most stunning gameplay available for Java games.

DGA’s audio style also corresponds to natural environments, including machinery, weapons, gun sounds and the like. Music will consist of opening themes and atmospheric melodies to accompany gameplay.

DGA's game worlds are battle maps, also called battlefields, where players can apply their combat skills as military commanders. The battle maps are based on geographic locations where famous historic battles and conflicts involving significant numbers of military machines were fought. The first battle maps being implemented in the game are locations of the prominent battles of World War II.

For improving gameplay feel, the battle maps in different battle modes can vary in structure and details. It means that in the realistic and simulator battle modes a battle map will exactly correspond to the historic battle’s geographic location, of course, with all reasonable assumptions made for a computer model imitating the real world. But in the struggle battle mode the same battle map can bear some fabricated modifications to improve play experience and fast-pacedness of battle sessions. Nevertheless, such modifications wouldn’t be too substantial for the sake of preserving historical accuracy.

Moreover, DGA’s concept assumes that additional geographic locations for the corresponding time periods can be added to the game. It means that some places where thenadays no battles took place but which are of interest to be modeled — such places could also be added to the game as battle maps for study and fun purposes.

As a free/libre/open-source software application following the free/libre-to-game business model, DGA implements cutting-edge business strategies for monetisation and commercialisation, which promote but not limited by the following business methods:

DGA has been conceived as a complex software product intended to bind a bundle of technical requirements, some of which are contradictory, conflicted, and ambivalent. This section roughly estimates how these requirements can meet technical parameters.

As in case of any free/libre/open-source computer program, the scope of the DGA Game is quite difficult to designate.

On one side, DGA is simply intended to satisfy a personal want of a well-designed, well-balanced MMORPG featuring armored warfare and working on a GNU/Linux operating system, maybe for a reasonable price. In the world of free/libre/open-source software this situation is called 'starting by scratching a developer’s personal itch'. (CATB, p. 23)

On the other side, MMORPGs are the most difficult and demanding kind of computer games for implementation. From the technical challenges of building and maintaining a massive online world, to the design challenges of creating and updating diverse and engaging content, to the balancing challenges of ensuring a fair and fun gameplay and economy, which constantly face a lot of competition and pressure from the market and the players — MMORPGs require a lot of resources, skills, creativity, and efforts to make them worth it and justifiable for a game studio over any other game project. In other words, it’s completely meaningless to make a small, feature-limited MMORPG, because it merely doesn’t worth the effort.

But how an indie developer can make a game that requires development and marketing budgets available only to large AAA-studios? Here the F/LOSS Way comes to help to leverage on people, skills, and resources in a unified effort to get an outstanding game product of the world-class quality.