Ash_NR

[Release] Piercing the Fourth Dimension

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So the game is done, linkie to Itchio. I am pretty happy with what I have. Got all the features in that I would've liked. But I did get to make enough content for the messages panel that functions as a tutorial/witty remark emitter. But I got to experiment with the new Unity UI which I hadn't tried, and also a Save/Load feature that I had never worked on by myself. I would've liked to try and improve visibility of new messages and workers, I only got around to tinting their icons late into development. But otherwise, I'm really happy with what I have.

 

INITIAL POST: Been working on this since the start and mostly keeping to the hashtag. But I'm far enough along to start posting up my progress so far.
 
So I originally picked Lacks Restraint to work off of. I had an idea for a box packing game, where you played as the person who was packing the box of a recently fired employee and when you lost you'd lose your job and be given a reason for your being fired, one of them being "lacks restraint". Anyway that idea I felt was going to be too art heavy to do on my own. So I randomed onto Piercing the Fourth Dimension, and remembered the great chat Danielle, Sean and Chris had about ethics in journalism (pre GG). I've been playing quite a bit of AdVenture Capitalist, the Cookie Clicker clone. I don't know why, I know that they are devoid of anything but progression, but the idea of trying to optimise my income is strangely tantalising.

So I thought I'd try using the Wizard Jam as a way to build on the formula but try and add something more to the game. Using the main thrust of the episode I've decided to make a news/blogging site themed cookie clicker game. Firstly, I want the game to have a fail state, or even better, a "return to square one" state. Which leads to the resources in the game.
 
The main one is still clicks. Clicks represent hits to your site, and blog posts that you make will create a handful of clicks for you. Reach enough clicks and Bloggers will want to write for you, automating clicks and generating a small amount of money for you (besides an initial cost, you won't need to pay for them, exposure is enough for them). As you progress you'll be able to hire better writers that will allow to build more money and clicks. Clicks also represent the life of your site, they will decay over time and proper worker management will be needed to make sure that your site survives. Falling beneath certain thresholds will see the higher skilled workers leaving the site and you may see your income source plummet. This is the next thing I want to implement.
 
The game allows you to generate clicks & money by selecting from several types of blog posts, accumulate enough of those resources and you can hire workers. What I want to do also is work on creating specialty posts. These are special tasks that require X amount of workers of a minimum level to create a single big post. These posts have cooldowns and can't be spammed all the time. More importantly they grant huge advantages and disadvantages. For instance, a big advertising campaign will provide a huge amount of money but will also increase the rate at which your clicks decay (representing people not returning to your site). Or a feature article that represents lot of time and journalisming :P, will be costly but provide lot of clicks to bump you up to the next tier of worker.
 
Anyway, that is enough text for now. I'd love it if anyone had any criticism or ideas for humourous descriptions or worker types.
 
Edit: Oh and if anyone knows a good place to find license appropriate art for the worker and clicker boxes that would be awesome!

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After playing this to completion (I think, anyway) I remembered that idle games are fun and weird so I played A Dark Room until about 3am (and also simultaneously I think exhausted the tech tree in The Monolith).

 

I felt like the interplay of clicks and money could have been expanded on, and they could have been differentiated more. Maybe increasing clicks should also increase the value of your clicks on the news posts (similar to upgrading weapons in Monolith)? Balancing increasing clicks and money together seemed like it was just doing the arithmetic and keeping values positive across the board; maybe that's sub-optimal but another strategy wasn't apparent to me. Or maybe the different writer types should have an effect on the content they produce? Managing writers might add an interesting extra layer to this.

 

Anyway I'm still not sure what it is that's so appealing to me about these games; I feel like the stuff I like in Candy Box/Dark Room is the weird and unexpected, but Monolith or Cookie Clicker is satisfying on a more pure mathematical level. I thought maybe I'd have more insight into Idle Clickers after playing a couple more but I think I'm still figuring it out. I'd sort of like to make one now.

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A Dark Room is really great at expanding the world and always adding systems that seem to keep that feeling of "I've optimised this, I've mastered it" out of reach. Same with Candy Box, but the tone in that doesn't make you feel oppressed like A Dark Room. I've never tried The Monolith, which I'll try as soon as I finish this.

 

I agree with writer types having an effect. I wanted to have a posts requiring a certain quality/tier of to be automated (or perhaps at optimum speeds). But I was running out of time to 1. Make a neat implementation within the data type and 2. convey that simply to the player. Originally I wanted to have an advertising multiplier that would boost the output of money generating posts but it would come at the cost of a huge decay in clicks (users leaving the site). My thinking there was that you couldn't maintain these ad campaigns consistently so you would use the sporadically to boost cash to get to that next writer purchase. I scrapped it again because conveying that to the player seemed like it would clutter the UI without adding some new functionality like a damage number count display. And also that perhaps that it isn't very fun maintaining a peak and trough cycle of gaining clicks and then gaining money. I was treading water (woof) for a few days trying to come up with an elegant way to deal with that before pulling it all together.

 

But yeah I agree with you. Candy Box and Dark Room are far more interesting experiences than straight Cookie Clicker. And I think it could be done here with this theme. Adding in events to the messages screen perhaps.

 

eg: A new survival game gets released and you need to tailor your posts to a certain type (more Let's Plays) to maximise your output from that event.

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I'm not really a fan of these types of games, but I had to admire how nicely this was put together - and in Unity, no less! Great use of the uGUI. Hmm. I dug Candy Box, for a bit... maybe I should give these games another go in the future...

 

 --Rev

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Thanks Reverend! Yeah I don't necessarily enjoy play these sorts of games, although I do get sucked into them quite a bit. I'm glad you like the presentation, my primary reason for making a clicker game was to get used to the new Unity UI which I hadn't tried before. Turns out it is pretty good :) !

If you are keen to try out some other clicker games I would go with Dinosaursssssss suggestion of A Dark Room. It expands in ways that is completely unexpected and actually in many ways it is not a game you can just sit and leave as your numbers get bigger.

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HOLY SHIT A Dark Room starts really, really well. After a while it's... well, I made it out into the World, but I think my interest had waned by that point. That said, yeah, it makes a really good argument that you can do interesting things with the genre.

 

And, man, uGUI. It's splendid. Worth waiting four years for? Yyyyyyiiiiaaeee... yess. Need to practice with it a bit more, myself - keep losing track of what parts govern adjustable placement across platforms, but it's immeasurably better than the old gui.

 

 --Rev

 

And those goddamn radial image bars nearly made me weep when I saw 'em. So cool.

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