Game Development Community

Economics (Question) - Casual Games

by Aditya Kulkarni · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 01/13/2011 (11:53 am) · 4 replies

Played through some Time Management games this week. Fundamentally, they have goals (Normal, Expert, Master), and player earnings per customer. What criteria (Time taken to complete level, motivation at regular intervals??) should we look at when deciding how much the player earns through world objects?

More directly, "How do you decide the numbers while designing?"
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Rich H
Default Studio Name
#1
02/09/2011 (4:19 pm)
First you design your game\'s overall concept then work out the game mechanics. While working these aspects out you\'ll begin to see how you can minutely adjust each of the goals. As you adjust each of the goals the outcome affects the other goals. Now you go back over the goals again and again making mor eminute adjustments until the goals generally don\'t affect each other very much and now you have your goal numbers.

Believe me I know how you feel about assigning numberical representations of goal based game, it can get a bit madding at times ;-)


Torque Owner Andy Rollins
ZDay Game
#2
02/09/2011 (11:50 pm)
Keeping any part of the game design easy to tweak is key to getting things just how you want them, then its just a case of refining things like Rich says a little at a time.

Torque Owner Aditya Kulkarni
Loon Games
#3
02/12/2011 (4:42 am)
@Rich: Maddening? More like groping in the dark wearing shades.
@Andy: Modular, modular. Gotcha!

Makes things clearer, thanks guys. Would love to hear more on this.

Torque 3D Owner Ronny Bangsund
Torque Cheerleaders
#4
02/12/2011 (8:33 pm)
A few things I'd ask myself if designing a time management game:
How do you win? Are individual missions separate bits of fun, or does the amount of success carry over? Is it possible to lose the overall game if you don't succeed really well on individual missions? What are the obstacles? Merely gaining enough resources, passive competition (AI players trying to reach the same goals in a multiplayer solitaire sort of way), active competition (competing for resources), aggressive competition (sabotage)? Does quality of products matter? Would it be a function of time spent on it? What sort of upgrades to people, machinery, locations are available?

Make the items, tweak numbers as you play your own test missions. Finishing in different times should result in different ratings, which is a nice carrot to hang in front of the player. If resources carry over from each, that's some real incentive.