Independent Study Module

How can we create and design a mobile game that is marketed as fun but also portrays themes of entrepreneurship and science?

Throughout this module, we will be designing, coding, and building a tycoon clicker based game that educates users on concepts of business and biology whilst maintaining a fun marketing campaign.

First, we will study game design by recreating an arcade game of our choice including code, and UI. The next step will be to continue the development of our game which we created the base concept and plan for in China. A lot of the games algorithm and base code will have to change. We will also be building the wireframe, sound design, and rest of the graphics for the game throughout this module.

Formatives

In order to prepare for completing our final summative (the game), we created 4 formative tasks to complete.

Formative 1: Recoded Arcade Game

To practice creating and finishing a product, we wanted to recode an arcade game. We chose space invaders, and simplified it to its core mechanics. We coded this and drew the visual assets over the process of around 3 days.

Formative 2: Hi-Fi Wireframe

In order to plan our game effectively, we needed to create a wireframe. This helps us to test the UI and how users will move around the game. This began with a Lo-Fi wireframe but developed into our Hi-Fi Wireframe.

Formative 3: Sample of Soundtrack

We looked into the process of creating a video game soundtrack in order to begin designing our own one. We ended up creating a quick sample of a soundtrack for our game.

Formative 4: Marketing Plan

We investigated how to market video games, and the best methods to do so. We also investigated to work out the best target demographic for our game. Eventually we used this research to create a Marketing Plan.

Game Plan

Before beginning the process of designing assets, coding and actually building our actual game.

Here are the main mechanics and rules of our game:

Branding

Color Scheme:

Audience: 9+ Mobile Gamers

*More info in the Marketing Research Section.

Games Studio: Acho Dreams

*You'll hear more about this later.

Games Name: Idle Restaurant Tycoon: Mad Scientist

Game Concept Summary

Our game is an Idle Clicker/Tycoon game. The main concept behind this genre, is that you collect money in order to spend money on making money faster. The genre follows this loop consistently, but we have put our own little twist on it. In the game, the player starts off by getting their own restaurant. In this restaurant the player has to keep upgrading to keep bringing in more customers, selling better food and making more money. This restaurant is a special one that uses Genetically Modified Food (GMOs) to make the restaurant more efficient.

Money Making Method

The customer walks into the restaurant (pops up on screen).

Player taps on them to assign them a table and move to the next step.

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At the table the customer selects a random item from the menu.

The player must wait to collect the money based on the preparation time.

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Each item on the menu has a different cost and preparation time.

When the prep bar is filled, the player must collect the money from each table.

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The player collects the money and is able to spend that money on upgrades.

There are 3 upgrades: Workers, Marketing & Science.

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Core Mechanics

2 Currencies: Cash & Rubies

Cash: The normal currency you earn in the game through the money making method above.

Rubies: A more rare currency used to purchase more rare and unique upgrades.

*Can also be obtained through in-game purchases.

Prestige and Floors: Systems to keep the game interesting.

Floors: When your restaurant reaches a certain level, you can upgrade up to another floor on the restaurant. Moving to this next restaurant will make the users more money, whilst keeping the income from their first restaurant

Prestige: To prestige, the player has to meet certain requirements. When a player prestiges, all of their progress is reset except for purchases made with rubies. The benefit of this for the player is that it applies a boost to certain upgrades. The more money the player had when they prestiged, the more impactful of a boost.

Upgrades

Science Upgrade

This upgrade is another one that is really important. This makes sure that the core mechanic of the game, collecting money from selling to customers, develops and that they can keep making more money. Also, this helps us to show our GMO research, as each upgrade could be a new type of GMO.

Marketing Upgrade

This is important to make sure that the players’ restaurant keeps growing. If they don't get more people to sell to then it won’t grow. Also, I think it will be satisfying if the player goes from buying newspaper ads to buying marketing of something like a blimp in the sky or something.

Workers Upgrade

This upgrade is to ensure that the players have income separate to them simply playing the game. If they upgrade this and put time into this, they can have benefits coming back to the game every day. For initial upgrades, this will produce 1 cash per second, but as they progress it could make them a lot more.

Where are we now?

By the end of our term, we ended up finishing the Alpha version of our game. We have a marketing and development plan for how we're going to move forward with this project. We don't want to give away too much, but if you want to hear about updates in the future, please follow the social medias for the game studio we are releasing the game as. There may not be much there now, but we promise there's lot to come.

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