Ultimate Indie - Week 1 day 3 Brainstorming
I aimed to blog every day about the Ultimate Indie course but reality often turns out different!
Day 1 we woke up earlier than we normally do (7am, i know, how awful) to join the live call kickoff. I found myself unsure of which idea to pick - I have a few that I have swirling around in my head and I have the half made Vampire Survivors clone project.
There are pros and cons to each but after Mike encouraged me to ask for advice I went ahead and asked in the Game 1 team channel. I got some great advice from Mike Litton - make a 1-2 day prototype of my top 3 promising ideas and go with the one people seem to like the most. This was not something I would ever think of and I am historically bad at asking for help, so I’m really glad I asked in the end!
This was near the end of the day of me trying to agonise over it myself, and I even have in my notes “Don’t try to figure it out for yourself! Ask for help!” so this is going to be a big exercise in making myself ask for help and feedback more.
Day 2, yesterday had me watching videos recommended by Dale for brainstorming ideas. This was very helpful because I had faint foggy ideas that I wasn’t sure how to turn into a real game, and that made me have a hard time starting to prototype these.
After watching them The action at the end was to write 3 ideas with the following:
- Theme
- Core Mechanics
- Meaningful choices (2-5)
- Risk VS reward
I wrote down 6 and cut them down to three - some of these were ideas I’ve had for a long time and some not very long at all.
1. Boba Tycoon
Theme
You start with a Boba Stand and a dream to make an Empire of Boba!
Core Mechanics
You start by buying stock to sell cups of Boba, starting with 1 flavour and 1 topping. You manually craft the drink, filling ingredients to the right lines. With each day you play you gain profits to buy more stock + ingredients. Eventually you can afford a machine to automate one part of it. And another machine. Eventually you can afford to open a store to hold more machines to automate more. Eventually you can start a factory to automate for the high demand!
Meaningful Choices
- How to price your drink to make profit
- Which upgrades to purchase
- When to expand
- When to purchase new ingredients to attract more customers
Risk VS Reward
- Buying upgrades/stock/expansion with the risk of going bankrupt because of ongoing costs.
- You have a limited amount of time to make the goal [This is a maybe. I think this can work without a time limit]
2. Clawmania
Theme
A roguelike claw machine game where you will have to meet a certain score to beat a machine and progress.
Core Mechanics
Move the claw to the position you want and bring the claw down to retrieve an item.
You can get upgrades and power ups to make it easier to pick up items.
Meaningful Choices
- Where to position the claw
- Which items to aim for for better score
- Which machine to play (some are more difficult than others)
- Whether to spend more coins to stay longer to see if you can get the score you need to win, or save it for the next run
Risk VS Reward
- You can try to pick up more than 1 item but the claw’s grp strength may not be able to hold it
- You need to balance picking up items for score and other items that will help boost your score or give you more goes in this machine
3. GUTZ
Theme
You are death, but you killed the wrong person. You have to keep this person alive so your bosses don’t find out.
Core Mechanics
You need to keep a “life force” meter up by clicking on their heart to add life force that decays over time.Eventually you can spend life force to buy/unlock other organs that give a bigger return per click and decay at different rates. There will be events that deplete life force faster or add/remove life force.
Meaningful Choices
- When to spend life force on an upgrade - you can’t spend it all OR overspend or you kill the person
- Which upgrade to pick - higher return on click or automating life force generation?
- When to address events OR what to do when events come up. Maybe these are like mini “bosses” and “bosses”
- How low to leave the life force. Low life force for a prolonged amount of time has repercussions
Risk VS Reward
- You can overfill the life bare, but it will decay faster
- Which upgrade is a better use of life force? If you choose suboptimally you’ll be clicking longer
- Will you have enough “GUTZ” to survive the event?
Notes: This seems like it could turn into a Roguelike Idle/Clicker game? I know that you can “Prestige” in games like Cookie Clicker, Swarm Simulator and Egg Inc where you trade in all your progress for a faster boost at the start. It seems like people don’t mind trading it all in for a bit of a power boost in the start.
GUTZ has been an idea I’ve had for a very long time (8-9 years) and I had no idea how to tackle it after making a counter go up. Clawmania I came up with for Ludum Dare 58 but had very little time to work on it only having a moving claw that’s stull buggy. These both have a tiny prototype (with a bit of art) I can build upon but Boba Tycoon is a fairly new idea to me.
Meaningful choices were difficult to come up with but actually writing them down is solidifying how this can be a playable game. I wonder if these ideas alone are ready for feedback, and maybe if I ask that it can be presented for feedback.
My next step is to make a 1-2 day prototype of each of these and show them to people to see what they like best!
I’ll be starting with Boba Tycoon.