Instructions Clear is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) where two teams of five players fight for victory. The players have the ability to upgrade their abilities via their gear earned from quests. But make sure to prioritize resurrecting your allies first because once you wipe, it's all over. The game blends some elements of traditional MMORPG dungeons with modern MOBAs.

Design Pillars

Power	Creation	Competition
Players gradually get stronger as they complete quests.	The quests provide upgrade paths that provide customization.	If not by sheer power or a good build, teams have to outperform the opposing team to win by any means.

Audience & Market

The game is designed to be played online. Elements of the no longer popular MMORPG genre are used to give former players a modern game. It is aimed at young adults.

Core Gameplay

The game controls are single unit isometric Real-Time Strategy (RTS) style (point-and-click).

The player can decide the pathing destination via right mouse clicks, combine it with auto-attacking the closest target via left mouse clicks, and cast abilities using the Q, W, and E keys.

Players of the same team collectively deal damage to players of the other team to bring the members' health points to zero. If a team's collective health pool has run out, that team loses.

Quests provide the income of players. Each quest gives the option of changing an ability or cashing out for gold.

Abilities provided by quests can either be a "legendary" (main) ability or a "basic" (minor) ability. A player is limited to one legendary ability per game.

The main ideology behind legendary abilities is the traditional damage, control, support trio.

Gold can be used to resurrect others (in lieu of a specialized ability), and to upgrade ability slots (to scale power).

The game is likely to provide a single level only.

Mechanics for mechanics

The game concept is mainly dictated by MOBAs with the tried and tested systems, however, there are differences:

Abilities replace items to reduce the possible combinations and to ease the learning curve.
Quests replace last-hitting to make income more diverse to enable traditionally low-income roles like position 5 supports to earn equally.
The win condition is changed to team elimination instead of the destruction of the main structure so that the game is more centered around the already celebrated team fights.
Equal, generic ability kits replace heroes (or champions) to eliminate the possibility of a "lost draft" at the hero selection phase.

TBD: What are quests? TBD: How (and if) structures work TBD: Unlike in the Defense Of The Ancients (DOTA), the core structure (the Ancient) is not a win condition but it provides a safe haven until destroyed.

Gameplay Balance & Pacing

As all MOBAs, if balancing is not perfect, players will gravitate towards "metas" to win.

TBD: The pacing is so that it doesn't feel like too much preparation but it isn't dragged out. TBD: The "AFK farming" tactic should be crossed out by giving players incentive to fight.

Possible Issues

Corpse camping: After a successful pick, the enemies would not let the picked player revive.

Long death timers: The player can get bored until they get revived.

Setting & World

TBD: Diagonal lanes or a free-for-all layout?

Narrative

TBD: Gameplay is king, narrative is going to be an afterthought.

Business Model

This is a free-to-play game. Since running servers costs money and the server binary is not public, a subscription model can be introduced to spin up more servers on demand instead of waiting in queue for the free servers.

The cosmetic aspect ("skins" on the player model) is supposed to be responsible for the majority of the income.

Timeline

Prototype with working pathing
Win condition: full team elimination
Basic ability mechanics
Ability upgrades (upgrade trees)
Quest mechanics
Quest type diversification
Retrospective to plan the remainder of the timeline