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Am I putting too much thought into this?
I looked at my game. The whole game world would have 8 continents with 7 regions on average in each continent. Each continent would have on average 7 deities (and wow my math broke down somewhere considering there are only supposed to be 52 deities)
Combine this with making religions, cultures, geography, mythology, tons of creatures for each region (numbering at 56 regions - with an average of, say, 170 creatures, that would be 9520 creatures that would have to be designed, from appearance to attack lists to stat distribution to flavour text, etc.), a whole magic system based on a whole new language I have been working on, I'm wondering:
Am I going overboard with this?
Comments
You can never go overboard with stuff like that, under the assumption that you have a shitload of time and patience.
What kind of game is this - video, board, role-playing? To be honest, it does sound like an awful lot of work to create all this, but as Milos says, it depends on how much spare time you have.
Are the new language and the magic system really necessary? They sound like the most "detachable" bits.
Video game would be the end result (although I am following INUH's suggestion of a table top first)
The magic system is necessary because if one is casting magic, there needs to be some sort of system in place for it to work
The language (the spells use words from it) isn't necessarily needed, but included for flavour
A fleshed out world is a good world. Just don't spend all your time fleshing out to avoid actually making the game!
That's absolutely ridiculous, to the point of stupidity. 170 creatures (assuming by that you mean something like enemy monsters) is a moderately large amount for an entire game, and even games that only have that many different kinds of enemies end up having most of them be mechanically very similar. There is absolutely no way that you could create 9000 different kinds of anything that would impact your game in a positive way, and especially not different kinds of monsters.
Or, basically, I think the problem is that you aren't putting nearly enough though into this. Scale down and prioritize better.
^ The 9000+ was for an end result (notice that Pokemon keeps adding new Pokemon each generation)
I'll try scaling down and concentrating on one region however
If you want to cram in flavour and make it look like a vibrant world, take the Tolkien approach: make a mythology surrounding it without ever having to show all of the lore.
Difference is, Pokemon has 649 after 16 years. There is absolutely no good reason why each of 56 regions needs 170 unique monsters. It's entirely believable that there would be monsters common to many regions, and in any case I don't think the game would even need 170 anyway.
Besides, one shouldn't try and hit an arbitrary monster count. There only need to be as many monsters as provide different gameplay experiences.
It's worth noting that people have been complaining about too many Pokemon since last generation, and some metagamers (not the most favorable of them, granted) have found it annoying that there's so much randomness and diversity in the game with 649.
^Dude, they've been complaining about too many Pokemon since second generation. That's not an argument I would consider.
Regardless, I agree with Alex and say that if you try to make a world too expansive you'll get a TES problem.
^ I haven't seen that, personally, but that's probably just a difference in experiences. Either way, it contributes to the argument that hundreds of monsters is pushing it, let alone thousands.
^At once, yes, it is pushing it. The reason why Pokemon works with so many monsters is that it's had a long time to build upon itself. Similarly The Elder Scrolls series is so expansive because it's had a long time to flesh out its world.
What I'm saying is that Ica is trying to put too much on his plate, and it would do him some good to scale down.
The question should always essentially be "What kind of experience am I trying to provoke?".
Game mechanics, environments and their inhabitants should be based around this. Going to the toilet is pointless in media, right? So we don't show it, and assume it happens off camera. Putting in something that doesn't resonate with the core themes is like putting in a toilet sequence.
If you look at Pokemon, you'll notice how all the mechanics relate to raising, capturing or battling. You take your Pokemon to the daycare, not to give yourself a breather and use the spare time for other necessities, but to level them up while you're off doing other things. You don't feed your Pokemon except when there are items that boost their stats. You never run across lamed Pokemon that are easy to capture and, mercifully, you never encounter Pokemon whilst they're mating.
This is a part of Pokemon's success. It focuses itself so heavily on the aspects of raising, capturing and battling that one's own objective is always clear. In the game, your current goal always relates to one of those three aspects.
When it comes to games, you have to ask, "What's it about?". One answer could be "Vampire hunting in Renaissance Spain", which is generally legitimate, but then you have to focus it. How is it about Vampire hunting in Renaissance Spain? Are you given the information you need and sent off to fight? Or are you a detective that solves evidence puzzles to put together a case? A bit of both? Depending on how you want your game to play, it'll gain more themes. These aren't literary themes, but mechanical themes, and they should inform every option the player has to them.
Even though both potential games here are about Vampire hunting in Renaissance Spain, one is about combat and the other is about investigation. The options you give players are going to vary drastically based on the mechanical themes of the game. The former might give you a full array of special weapons with their own cool moves, while the latter is likely to resemble the Van Helsing sequences from the Dracula novel.