Thinking about this concept more, there's some things I think I could improve at a foundational and conceptual level.
Things I like about my game:
- The dynamic progression of TFs and the descriptions.
- The systems I've designed to allow for partial TFs, parts with multiple stages, and possibility for custom species and chimeras (which aren't fully implemented).
- Mad science theme and UI-based approach. Lack of extensive 2D gfx means I can focus more on the systems and making them work together.
- Design-wise, managing the staff side as well as the subject side and how they could potentially interplay.
Things I don't like about my game:
- I don't particularly like that you make all these animal people and then immediately get rid of them to a contract. If they had some staying power or reason to take care of them after you make them, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. Production morphs are one thing, but that's a very narrow band of species.
- Narrow selection of stats to affect. This would need quite a rework, but I'd want to have more than just the three stats of production, social and combat. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but perhaps a more rimworld-like approach of having MANY stats that can be tweaked by parts is a better play.
- The window idea is fun but gets hard to manage in Godot. If I wanted to expand it further I'd need to fundamentally alter the architecture of how I set up my game, and use scenes and signals far more than I did. I *like* the windows but they don't seem to be very customisable and can be a pain to manage refreshing and updates when there's a lot of things on the screen.
- Some of the systems I made were scraped together and duct-taped to others, and I hard-coded too many things. I didn't store everything in one place, which made managing resources a pain (they also weren't Data-driven). Many of the design decisions I made earlier held me back later and weren't as fluid as I'd hoped - ie they caused a lot of bugs and troubleshooting from unintended behaviour.
- Because of the amount of hardcoding I implemented and some decisions I made with how to assign objects to things, saving and loading would become an absolute nightmare. I need to figure out a better way of doing this and I need to begin implementing it from the START.
This is the largest game I've made in Godot and it feels pretty small still. There's a lot more I could do with it but I'm not sure the core concept is what I want to go with for the future.
However, there is some merit to it and I think there's a version of it that ends up being kind of fun, but maybe not as fun as another way to rework the game from the ground up would be.
I'm thinking something like half sports team manager, half mad science TF game. You'd make your creatures out of former (fictional) sports players, and send them out to fight other chimeras in an underground arena. You need to contain them, prevent breakouts and outbreaks, manage your resources to keep them fed and happy (and paid, if you want to do that). I'll need to plan it out in more detail, but it'd solve a lot of the issues I have with this (and I do want to add some modular portraits too).
I want to focus on GUI design and deep, interconnected systems because I see a LOT of gameplay potential for how to build and deploy chimeras and how best to present this to the player.
I will try to fix as many obvious bugs with MUTALAB as I can, but I think beyond that I might need to evaluate a full redesign from the ground up.
Let me know what you think!