Hi everyone!
So, this week, I've created a simple game in unity where the player is presented with a 5X5 grid of 8 possible colors that are randomly picked. The player must then select the grid square that matches the color that the program randomly selects.
One of the games that inspired me was diamond dash since the player has exact,y one minut to get the highest score possible.
I also thought it would be nice to have a theme (unity preset colors were a bit of an eye sore)
, so I chose a farm theme and plan to replace the colors with images.
This all sounds great, but I'm wondering if this is just too simple. It's a mobile game and I
M thinking about making it competitive on facebook but is that enough? How can I expand on this basic mechanic?
Expanding on Basic Ideas
Farm theme seems right, "picking things" and "farm" go together well.
Here are four possible elaborations of increasing complexity:
- Picking a commodity also picks all neighboring commodities of the same type. So you can go for the first thing you see, or look around for a few fractions of a second more in hopes of finding a larger patch.
- Each kind of commodity goes on its own kind of truck at the top of the screen, waiting to go to market. When the truck is full (say, 5 items), it starts up (makes an ignition noise and idles), you have to tap the truck to send it to market, and that gets you money (score). You're not specifically penalized for picking something that already has a full truck, but neither are you rewarded (because it didn't go on the truck and didn't get to market).
- The program gives you a choice of what to pick. (Say it's your spouse, calling out commodities in a speech bubble, and you can choose any of them.) So if you have neighbor-collection, it's another thing to weigh (which of these two things lets me harvest the most?); if you have trucks, it's another reason to keep an eye on the trucks (you want to choose the option that isn't already full).
- Money can purchase upgrades (bigger trucks, faster trucks, better branding that makes commodities worth more, better harvesters that harvest neighboring commodities, etc.) If each 8 commodity has its own upgrades, there's the possibility of an upgrade progression that keeps the player busy for quite a while.
Author
@valrus: thank you for the great suggestions! That all seem interesting! I'll just have to figure out how they'll work on the programming side. :)
I would suggest to get rid of the time limit, and add 'quests,' or 'special orders' of sorts. Every once in a while a 'special customer' would ask for X ammount of Y commodity. When the player completes the quest, they could be rewarded with a random upgrade, or money. Some 'quests' would have time limits, but better rewards.
If you wanted a little Risk vs. Reward, you could make it so any commodity put towards the quest does not get sold at the market, thus meaning if player fail the quest, they actually lose profit that they would otherwise get.
Author
@JangoBunBun: that's also an interesting idea that I could explore in the future (maybe the time,I it idea could be a 'mode' the player can choose to play). Unfortunately, this is my first (trying to be) 'commercial' game and I've heared that it's important to get something out there as soon as possible. But ideally, games with quests are the types i want to be making.
Where did you read that it's important to get something out ASAP? Unless you have a marketing team, and people who've already preordered your game; I don't think that is necessarily always true.
the player is presented with a 5X5 grid of 8 possible colors that are randomly picked. The player must then select the grid square that matches the color that the program randomly selects.
a basic guessing game: what color (out of 8) am i thinking of? the fact that 25 tiles ( of 8 random colors) are displayed seems to be irrelevant. and then it adds: how many correct guesses can you make in one minute.
This all sounds great, but I'm wondering if this is just too simple.
it depends on your target audience.
if you're targeting folks who want a quick simple casual game to kill some time with, its fine.
if you're targeting a more hard core gamer such as myself, who plays stuff like total war, skyrim, sub simulators, flight sims, wargames, etc. you got a long way to go.
FYI: my very first game was "guess the number" written for the olivetti underwood 101, a programmable adding machine / calculator with a built in random number generator, about 3 foot by 3 foot by 9 inches in size, with a paper tape roll printout and one line LCD display. this would have been 8th grade... so the year would have been 1977.
my second game was a text based D&D clone. never finished, never released. it just kept getting more features. i was starting on drawing 3d vector graphics of the scene when i abandoned the project.
my third game was "flying saucer shooter" somewhat akin to "missile command". written in BASIC, running on an 8088 PC overclocked to 10Mhz! very basic and stupid, but it was a game! never showed it to anyone as i recall.
my fourth game was SIMTrek, the world's first starship flight sim. it became a top 10 DL on AOL, and that was the end of my day job.
Author
Where did you read that it's important to get something out ASAP? Unless you have a marketing team, and people who've already preordered your game; I don't think that is necessarily always true.
I was watching a YouTube video where it basically explained that as a starter it's important to get something out there. It's not worth spending 6 months on a game that you think is awesome but it doesn't sell because you have no experience in the industry.
if you're targeting folks who want a quick simple casual game to kill some time with, its fine.
Thanks a lot :) That's really encouraging!!! I was seriously afraid that my idea was just too simple for anyone to take interest in. Now that I've added somme of the ideas that Valrus suggested, I'm sure it'll do fine once I get the graphics done! :)
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
