Im with you on your dream of a sea of fish Ninja, but there's a reason the entire industry of freemium is built around whales Sad as it is.
Yea, as much as players complain thy still keep playing these games and spending money on them. Then there is the fact that these games are truly amazing, true art of making money. If half of the time spend on market research was used to improve the game, it would be something great.
I have thought about how I would make the game, what follows are just the guide lines and still need work. All criticism will be appreciated.
Also this is just idea, so if you like it you can use it.
Target audience: Males fifteen to twenty-eight afterwards interest could/should drop rapidly.
Theme: Post apocalyptic.
Once again the world has ended suddenly, with so many strange new scientific discoveries and so many dangerous old ones who can blame it.
Now a mere hundred years after the unknown event people thrive again, in a large city known as Metropolis. With so many new people being born each day, it up to you the player to scavenge, grow and mine new resources.
We here at Metropolis will provide you with every thing you need to get started and give you credit, for resources you provide. There will also be other groups out there looking; nothing wrong with some healthy competition now is there?
The player starts with a group of three to four people. All of the people different with likes and dislikes and with different skills.
Skills are Building, Farming, Mining, Scavenging, Medical, Fighting. The player will always start with a builder the others are random.
Likes and dislikes are more complex and will consist of kinds of people to any object that exists in the game.
A key feature to this game will be that there are more things the player can buy than can fit on the players map. I hope that with a large variety of object and limited space, players will built bases that differ in the way they play, allowing them to express them self and value there creation more.
Building will all have benefits and side effects, players will interact with the building with the people. Each person has to be kept happy or they will act out of order and even present a threat to the base
Also I think that there should be no building cap, if there is space on the map and the player can deal with the side effects then they can build it. This will result in strange bases, as players attempt to exploit the game. However this could potentially destroy the games economics when the players succeed; player sharing resources will add to obligation but also involve a danger to the economy.
¯\_(?)_/¯ Sorry for the wall
In game resources are Sustenance, Materials and Fuel with each being worth more than the previous one. Credit is the premium currency and can be bought for real live money or earned by selling resources. This however is a survival game and players will often choose between credit or there base, hopefully a straining but entertaining choice, it's here that the most pressure will be placed on there actual wallets.
There will be scavenging mode, the single player campaign that the player can use to slowly harvest resources. A other special feature of the one player mode is that it's where players get artifacts of the past that allow them to produce these strange old devices. These artifacts are things like guns,planes and even old ovens; things that will help the player but they can't build. These artifacts can be bought from the store and shared among players.
A territory mode, that sees players competing for ground under the rules enforced by the Metropolis judge, a kind of PvP mode.
Raids where instead of struggling to find that two hundred fuel you need to get credit you steel it from someone else, this is the same as raiding a players base in Clash of clans.
I want to use a filtering down system, as I call it, where players can share resources and other items with clan members. The reason I call it filtering is because it allows one paying customer to drag along none paying customers, sounds like whales right?
This is where the hard part comes in, I am hunting for dolphins. I want the friends who game together, the older brother who plays the game with his younger brother, the group of colleague who discovered they like the same game and the parent who wants to control the spending of there child.
It's not like it's any thing new, we all have friends who we pay for when we get drinks or buy there snacks when we see the new Hobbit movie. It also helps to lessen the ground between paying and none paying customers.
I know it looks like this could harm the none paying customers but thy will still get treats from just being in a clan, also the nature of these players that drives them to squeeze out as much from a game will earn them allot of treats. With this I will attempt to destroy the rivalry between developer and player, after all if a player uses five accounts to create a supper base maybe he deserves one he is playing five times as much as other players.
This is a heavy ¯\(°_°)/¯ WALL!
Edit: I almost forgot draining, the player will spend resources but with so many options to gain them there needs to be drains. There will be the usual boost and such for high costs, but this game needs more. I am thinking about consumption where players have to feed there people and keep generators running.
I am conflicted by this as it means a player could lose there base if something happens in the real world, if the player is hospitalized it would undo all of what they made.
It could also make the game compulsive buy forcing players to play each day.
There are more details but lets deal with these first.
I know that this is just theories and have to be tested, but we could at least hammer out a few things now. Criticism and opinions please.
Only comment on the parts that interest you, there is no obligation here.
