Since it's been a year let me give a quick recap of the year:
Goals: A factory game you can play on your phone where a session takes 8-15 minutes instead of 8-15 hours, but with physics! (clogged tubes, cluttered chaos, no snapping, ect)
Weekly grind:
- Cool- it works and I like it and it's kinda fun!
- Hmm.. project doesn't seem like it's worth even 5 bucks yet as a product
- Let's add a feature!
- Back to step one
Result after one year:
I took a puzzle game that I enjoyed and, out of wanting to make a game with more depth, slowly turned it into an incremental game where you tactically unlock locations on a world map to increase potential points per minute you get with a finely tuned minting well (earning diamonds to unlock more). Normal puzzles (more unlocked at more map locations) offer simpler gameplay and reward the player too with diamonds which translates to being able to either unlock more of the world map OR upgrade resource producing locations to spit out MORE ORE for MORE points ect...) I could go on forever.
The biggest challenge has been balancing two camps:
- some people (me) don't care for simple puzzles games
- some people (you) enjoy a short challenging puzzle for when you're on the bus or something
-> game tries to provide for both so... we'll see how that goes
