I appreciate your desire to make fun games instead of trying to win! That being said, if there was ever a dusty jam game to keep working on, it would be this XD
and I'll be honest, it does stand out compared to the rest of your collection. There's gotta be an emerging market for coupon collector games featuring secret granny societies.
Balatro wasn't made in a month! It took 2.5 years in fact.
Given how polished your game is already, I'd say you'd come close with a roadmap and a few months. Maybe a Kickstarter further down the road? I think it's all worth looking into!
As for how much further it can go, there are plenty of areas to innovate IMO. Maybe you have to fill up your "cart" with products using the same grid logic before using coupons, giving you control over what types of stuff you take. Maybe the store adapts to your meat coupon strat by removing meat (something like the boss effects from balatro that disable suits). Maybe the win condition involves taking X value of products each round to make a larger dent in the company's profit margin (requires putting more stuff in your cart, which risks you not being able to afford it).
These are some good ideas! yeah, idk. Im also a big believer of "not all games need to be massive full release campaigns" which this feels more like it falls into. Scalability wise, without complicating the UI even more I think its at its limit. Haha. E.g. books can only be so big without introducing multiple pages, and its already pushing the limits with the UI at this dimension as far as items are concerned. Im also just not confident I could pull it off Honestly. Im decent at themes, art, music, programming and time management but not very good at the arguably most important part of game dev which is fun and design. Haha. Im getting better, I just gotta keep making games!
Anywho, thanks so much for the encouragement! Definately food for thought! :D
LocalThunk had similar sentiments about his games. Balatro was merely a side project shared amongst friends but he was eventually convinced to turn it into something fully fleshed out on steam. Did it pay off? Absolutely! Am I expecting you'll have the same results? Probably not, but given your game currently sits as the #1 most popular entry in this jam, I'd say you have a decent shot of getting noticed. Considering what currently exists on the market and what publishers are looking for, you would stand out.
I'll leave you with something "financial literacy" related. Opportunity Cost is a term used in investing to describe how much you lose by not pursuing the best option. In your case, it would be the cost of working on this vs a different game. I hope my feedback convinces you to go further with this one!
Haha thanks! I really appreciate the encouragement! We'll see. I think my plan is to release 2 more patches/updates and guage the interest/response and go from there. Thanks for the financial literacy term too!! Very useful to know and think about! :D
BTW I am definitely looking forward to checking out bankroll! Got a list of awesome entries here I plan to work through this week/weekend! :)
