PlinkIdle Game Design Discussion

(By Lauren)

I'd like to open this discussion up to our players, if anyone is interested! If you're not interested, that's totally ok, and we'll try out this design and keep our fingers crossed that it's feeling good. Spoiler: there are 3 feedback requests in here.

A quick intro to our team, and our specialties and also our skill gaps:

• Dave: unicorn dev and technical artist, builds everything ever. Does not self-identify as an idle game player.
• Lauren: UX and content design specialist, good at game feel, horrid at math. loves idle/incremental games but big gaping hole in brain where math should live.
• Pat: part timer, and person who had the initial idea for this game. specializes in rapid prototyping and game systems design. plays incremental games but has never designed a full one
• Jenna: part timer, new to design, avid gamer, hasn't played a lot of idle games (yet) but is good at math and is starting to tackle the numbers!
  
• Brian: part time engineer, plays idle games, does understand math thankfully, but doesn't self-identify as a designer.

First of all: Your feedback has been amazing, informative, and incredibly helpful. Please keep it coming! We're taking notes and adjusting things accordingly.

We're working on a new version of the game that will hopefully be closer to "the real game" that we're going to put out there on Steam and mobile. As you can see by our team breakdown, we are probably going to be able to make a good-ish game that has good-ish idle/incremental "vibes", but the challenge will be in really making it a long, awesome, balanced experience. The goal is to hit that ceiling at the right time, prestige, and keep playing, but feel better than before.

I think our game will be somewhat similar to Egg, Inc. in that it has stages that can be advanced through.

This is the NEW loop that we're currently developing.

What's different?

• Coins will be available as you advance through the stages (Rainbow -> Winter -> etc)
• Stages will now have TIERS that advance by collecting balls. Take Rainbow:
  • 1-1: start
  • 1-2: unlock your first upgrade. can now spend coins on it.
  • 1-3: unlock the next stage
  • 1-4: max. and you have to max out every stage to prestige, i think? (haven't tested this yet)

FEEDBACK REQUEST 1 - MULTI-TIER STAGES:

See above! Would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think of tiered stages with unlocks along the way as you collect balls?

FEEDBACK REQUEST 2 - PRESTIGE:

A lot of you have been asking about Prestige and this has always been on my plan for this game! We still haven't made it or tested it yet, but we want to. I would love feedback on possible global upgrades that we have planned for prestige:

• Earn "offline" or "unfocused level" balls/coins for x amount of time, and can increase that amount of time.
• Make GoldCoins better, stay longer, longer duration of effects
• Start with an extra max bucket
• Start with a larger max on the max bucket
• Unlock new stages that will be needed for next prestige
• Crank up the ball rarity weighting
• Unlock new peg types

FEEDBACK REQUEST 3 - CAPPING BALLS:

So, sad news, I think we need to cap how many balls can be on screen at once. We can't repro that crash when testing in Unity, but we are guessing it's due to ball overload in Space. Probably? Brian is going to investigate when he has time.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: What do you think of having a max on Auto Drop and Split Peg, but then at some point we start multiplying the worth of a ball. After hitting max, maybe as a prestige reward, balls will start being worth 1.1x, 2x, etc to advance more quickly through the early stages?