Nouns VS Monsters, an action comedy video game

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Description:
We are going to make a free-to-play video game make it accessible for all players from all over the world to be released on popular stores like Steam, Google Play, and the App store.
That will be an action comedy game for +7 years olds.

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The Nouns community has so much potential to make content for and we are going to make an entertaining video game introducing it to all fans of video games.
We were inspired by games like Fall Guys and Minecraft to be able to make an entertaining game. We are going to tell a comedy story and make it memorable by creating Nouns as heroes.

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This idea is unique for the following reasons:

1- Video games are so popular therefore a free-to-play video game can bring so many new fans from the outer world (out of blockchain and NFTs) making Nouns more popular than ever.

2-Video games are one of the best advertising platforms therefore important events and news of the Nouns community can be effectively broadcasted through them.

3-By what a video game grants us, like in-game events (Imagine game streamers stream playing those events) we encourage people to make content for free making the Nouns community even and even more popular than before.

4-We are going to add all already generated and future generations of Nouns to the game so, we are covering Nouns for always.

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Why are we going to do so?

NounsDAO is one of the most attractive phenomena of the blockchain so, the experience of producing amazing content with the help of this DAO will be fantastic. And also we think that it can inspire other indie game studios and artists to create more creative projects for this DAO.

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Who are we?

Genius Slackers team is an independent producer of video games. the company was founded in 2016 by Arash Negahban and Saeed Abbasi.
The business began with contract work, however, after obtaining the necessary experience and gathering a talented team ‘Genius Slackers’ began work on its projects.
The purpose of the company is to produce unique stories and gameplays.

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Phases of execution:

Q4- 2022 Pre-production:
Pre-production includes concept designs, game design, gathering ideas, and making a playable prototype.

Q1-2 2023 Releasing an Alpha version:
Technical and artistic experimental implementation of all ideas( Programming, level design, sound design, etc).

Q3-4 2023 Releasing a Beta version:
Technical and artistic implementation of all ideas, ready to be broadly tested and debugged.

Q1 2024 Public release of Nouns VS Monsters and post-production:
Immediate updates for fixing possible bugs and game community support.

Beyond: Android and IOS versions.

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Budget:

Pre-production: 50,000$
Production: 200,000$
Post-production: 22,000$
Community management and marketing: 42000$

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Nouns VS Monsters is a free-to-play co-op isometric comedy shooter that is based on the Nouns project, in which you must take control of captured lands in cooperation with your friends in a team of four super cute Nouns.
Resist and strike are your only ways to defeat the monsters, so reload your guns and sharpen your blades because your enemies are bloodthirsty creatures.

Do you have any samples of games that your company has produced from start to finish? This is obviously a massive undertaking and having some previous work to compare would be very helpful. How big is your team? It seems like an incredible amount of work for just a couple people.

This isn’t my realm of expertise, but those were the things that stuck out to me. I just wanted to comment to hopefully get some more eyeballs on this. Sounds like a really neat concept.

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What you see above in the videos is all made by some pre-made assets which we got from online markets to speed up the prototyping of our ideas.
But all assets of the final product will be purely unique, from the smallest particle to the whole game environment including all characters and sound effects and music will be unique to this particular project. We as an indie game studio know that being unique is the key to success.
So, now you must have got an idea about the volume of the work.
So let’s break it down a little bit just to get started to know what happens behind the scene in making a video game like this.

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Pre-production: it takes the most powerful push where all team members must synchronously start gathering resources and ideas and very soon test them, and mix them to make a prototype to be decided if the current plan can be interesting.
For example, before everybody else, our concept artists draw the overall atmosphere of the game’s main levels while the sound designer makes effects and pieces of music that go well with the concepts.
Game designers first draw the gameplay ideas on board and discuss them with programmers about them, long story short, everybody makes a prototype of what they must do.
After we have everything prototyped ( Characters, Models, Effects, Code features, etc) we can play the prototype game.
After all the pre-production is never limited to what I described.

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A brief of expenses:
Technical director 40,000$,
Art director 40,000$,
Game designer 30,000$,
Programmer 20,000$,
Level designer 15,000$ ,
Environment artist 20,000$,
3D artist 10,000$,
Character designer 25,000$,
Animator 20,000$,
Concept artist 10,000$,
Composer 20,000$

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The above numbers are not the annual salary of each but the salary for the amount of work during a year and a half.

Post-production: It takes the whole team working together and being alerted about possible bugs to be immediately fixed. as we have already done this process we estimate a total of 22,000$.

Marketing: A video game does not exist before being broadly shared and it cannot be played before being seen and known so, having the world see it takes a lot of effort and money.
Participating in popular events and exhibitions like Gamescom in Germany, Game Connection in France, and Digital Dragon in Poland is a must.
Costs of YouTube ADs and Twitch streams.
Costs of PR marketing for producing content ads and spreading them to famous video game media.

The minimum cost for doing marketing stuff is estimated to be around 42,000$.

There is a big plus in here that should not be forgotten, * The game itself is going to have regular revenue from In-game ADs and In-game purchases that will turn back to the game to make it shine more than before. (This whole process of game’s revenue is a completely different paragraph that we think must be discussed separately and does not fit the current topic)

The Genius Slackers team’s members each have years of experience working on different kinds of projects for different companies and the only common in-house project of the team was the game “What Happened” released on the Steam store in 2020.

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2 Likes

The Genius Slackers team’s members each have years of experience working on different kinds of projects for different companies and the only common in-house project of the team was the game “What Happened” released on the steam store in 2020.

We are a team of seven in our studio and several freelancers working remotely.

I appreciate the extra budget insight and team info. I also watched the trailer for ‘What Happened’ and now I’ll have nightmares for a week. Appreciate that. :joy:

In all seriousness, it would be fun to see something like this begin to move forward. It’s tricky because it sounds like pre-production is a lot of the work and many of us will selfishly want to see more before whole heartedly endorsing it. I like the concept of what you have so far though.

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Thanks for your comments.
Our previous game was about suicide of teenagers.
This video is a part of my speech about the game which was released on IGN website.
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Hey love this!

One thing I think could help here is a starting point. As with a lot of creative builds, the up front costs are high, and in these instances, I think a smaller ask to get the ball rolling could be mutually beneficial.

For this concept, the examples are really well done but I’m not sure how much it connects with The Nouns brand.

A good first step could be a layout of the game theme (storyline, basic description) with some artwork specifically for the Nouns game. You could do this via Prop House or NSFW maybe?

Once the proof of concept is laid out- I bet the larger vision will be easier to get across the finish line.

Good stuff!

3 Likes

This is Epic Ser and based on your previous Game Creations I believe this totally worth a shot
You are a master in this field, Also Gaming is the greatest industry and a great entry point to onboard many to Nouns Family.

keep up the great work.

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It is a good idea. This idea can be implemented in Nouns dao.

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We are working on it and we need the Nouns DAO community to help us.

Click play to watch Nouns VS Monsters present the proposal

Thank you, we are trying to do this in the best possible way!:goat:

You have given a lot of energy to our team, we hope we can produce an interesting game and return this positive energy to you. :heart:

Any game play footage?

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You can see a few gameplay features in this video. This is entirely in the prototype phase, we are going to have a presentation of actual gameplay after pre-production!!

Dope, looks good. Thanks for sharing.

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Ask us everything you can think of about this game!
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Why don’t we provide a playable demo of our proposal game?

Because when it comes to providing a proposal for producing a video game, it must be considered that producing a video game needs to be analyzed and thought of in a way that an animated series doesn’t.
For example, It is completely possible to make the first episode be shown in the proposal, or if the proposal is about producing clothes it is possible to make a piece of that.
But producing a playable demo of a co-op video game is way more complex and needs months of the dedication of a whole team of programmers, artists, designers, etc.
The image below is for the game “God of war”.
The image on the left is the prototype that is done after months of work and design and tells the core of the flow of the gameplay and the narration of the game.
This will also be true for our game, so providing a playable demo is a part of the production that cannot be done without spending a large amount of time and money.

And the below is a sample of the game “Apex Legends”

Why the contents we have provided in our proposal don’t sound nounish enough?

We are going to have the best presentation of a nounish game.
But having that needs a team of artists and an art director to first design concept arts and sketches and then the 3D parts of the game will be designed based on those concepts, this is a part of the definition of a professional workflow of developing a video game.
We promise we’ll have an absolutely beautiful nounish video game.

How is it all going to work for the Nouns DAO and why it is going to be beneficial for the Nouns DAO?

Our previous game was about a depressed student and his tough moments leading him to commit suicide. The game was released at the worst possible time at the peak of the pandemic in Jun 2020 when the world itself was depressed as a result of it the publisher of the game couldn’t do much marketing and our game “What Happened” did not succeed and failed but even though it happened to our game it could have millions of views by the contents the YouTubers and other content creator made.
The number of views and the number of contents will be insane for a nounish free-to-play action comedy co-op game as it can be popular for all ages from all over the world.

We could have used the body of the Nouns themselves in our proposal videos but their bodies are so simple and can’t be animated to perform complex tasks like doing martial arts.

So, it may sound that we only made the head of Nouns but, to create a pure nounish gameplay we need to test all possible ways and select the best with your help of course.

We are going to pass the most correct way to create each element of the game so, bear with us.

I would really like to hear more about the game mechanics. What does ‘taking control of captured lands’ consist of? Would it be fair to classify the proposed game as a Co-op PvE?

I think having elements of community and building in the game would make it more Nounish. I am struggling to see the connection to the brand with this proposal. Do you have any more details on the storyboard or lore? Why are the monsters after the Nouns?

1 Like

Nouns VS Monsters

Pitch Document

Herooo

Introduction
Nouns VS Monsters is a free-to-play third-person action comedy.
co-op game based on the Nouns DAO in which players can play with the cooperation of their friends in a team of four super cute Nouns and their main quest is to take the control of the lands that have been captured by monsters.
Players must take the lands of the Nouns back by using a large variety of weapons and then try to resist invading monsters by upgrading the defense mechanisms of the lands.

Description
Players are put in a city full of monsters. At first, the missions are to destroy monsters and save the people bringing peace and comfort to them, and then after taking the entire city back from monsters they must resist invading monsters.

Key Features

Nouns VS Monsters:
Nouns VS Monsters let players freely explore the fantasy lands of Nouns and secure the lands against monsters.

Compelling New Story:
The story of the game is its turning point. "The land of Nouns had been in peace until an enormous asteroid hit the land and the energy released from this hit caused a sudden evolution of some animals of the jungle turning them into scary monsters.
Monsters invaded the lands of Nouns and captured the people, at this moment four heroes rose against the monsters.

Graphics:
The graphic of the game will be fantasy stylized and the game will be made by Unreal Engine 5. We are going to use a variety of cultures in our level designs, for example, there will be eastern realms like samurai’s realm or western realms each will have its unique atmosphere.

Game World:
The game will be open-world and players will be free to explore the world of the game, there will be so many easter eggs to be discovered and achieved.

Dynamic Camera Angles:
The camera angle will be dynamic, changing from third person to isometric and vice versa.
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Sound:
The sound design of the game is so important for us. We are going to create a funny spoken language for Nouns characters with a mix of funny sound effects.

Difficulty:
As the new techniques of modern game design suggest we are going to create a dynamic difficulty level system that dynamically changes based on how players play.

Combat:
We are going to create both melee combat and ranged attacks, for example, a sword made of hotdog.

Genre:
Nouns VS Monsters is a free-to-play third-person action comedy co-op PVE game that puts players in funny situations making them cooperate for resisting invading monsters.

Platform:
This game will be first released on the Steam store and Epic Store and then on Google play and AppStore.

Game Mechanics

Core Gameplay:
The core of the gameplay is constituted of three main parts.
Shooting: with a large variety of guns.
Melee combats: with hand-made customized funny weapons.
Exploring: searching for monsters and easter eggs.

Shooting:
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Shooting mechanisms will be different for each camera angle; for example, for the third-person angle it will be over the shoulder like in Gears of War but for the isometric system it will be top-down, and shooting in the direction where the enemies are will be enough.
There will be four different categories of guns.

1-Hand guns.

2-Shotguns.

3-Rifles.

4-Launchers.

These guns will be designed based on the real version but in a childish form like toys.

Fighting:

Melee combats are performed by funny customizable weapons that are upgraded by the items players get from monsters they kill.
The closest example of this melee combat system is the combat system of the game “Hades”.

Explore:
By exploring the world of the game players can find items used to upgrade their weapons and also can find monsters carrying special weapons.
Realms are marked at different points on the map and are categorized as cities and villages.
Villages are small realms that are easy to take back from monsters and have fewer monsters.
Cities are large realms and are not easy to take back. There is a boss fight in each city and there are many monsters in them.
After taking a realm back, players must find the hidden prisons and free the captured Nouns.
By finding the hidden prisons you can earn scores to be later spent on upgrading the realm.

Game Flow:

The progression of the game won’t be linear, players can choose which mission they want to do.
Players can fight any monster they want or put some aside until they are upgraded enough.
Following the main storyline will be always optional, some players may want to spend their time exploring and discovering the world or upgrading their base.

Characters:

Nouns:

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Player characters will be fully customizable, after you select your Noun character you can customize it by skins and attachments, therefore each player will have a unique Noun to play with.

Monsters:

Monsters are categorized as small, big, and boss fights.

Small monsters are often fast and there are many of them in the game, their appearance varies from each other but their behavior is anticipatable.

Big monsters are so powerful and they are too hard to beat but they are very slow.
They are fewer than small monsters, there are usually one or two of them in each herd.

boss fights
Each realm that is captured by monsters has its unique boss and each has a unique power.
Bosses are impossible to beat alone and players must highly cooperate to take them down.

Game Physics and Statistics

Movement:
In outdoor and battle areas players can switch between jogging and running, players can also dodge attacks.
Fast travel system will be there to let players fast travel between realms.
Game design and documenting of this game are regularly advancing and it continues until the end of the pre-production.

We are going to let you know all the details and you will have your part in all decisions.