About a year and a half ago, I started a project to create a sci-fantasy sandbox MMORPG. It was called Starborn: Universe. I went through the trouble of getting a HeroEngine/HeroCloud environment and began learning the toolset. Design documents popped up in my Documents folder and on the dev blog I started for the project. Then, I got busy with other things, and Starborn: Universe went dark. Until now. I'm dusting off the design documents, but Starborn: Universe is as much of an experiment as it is a game. See, my theory is that online player-driven games can start with very little and grow over time. The idea of the “Lean Startup” can apply just as much to an MMORPG as it can to an iOS app. The trick is that MMORPGs are hard to produce. They have a lot of moving parts and require a lot of resources on the part of the developer and operator. So how does one or two people accomplish this monumental feat? By starting small, and iterating quickly. If you're curious as to what I have in mind, head over to the Starborn: Universe devlog. That's where I'll be writing about Starborn.