I wrote this game. I’ll still write “feedback” since TBH I did not thorougly analyze the design or balance while developing.
I think the theme worked great! Also accidentally influenced the design in a cool way, turning idle games which are usually continous ($/s) into a discrete thing ($/visitor event). The unpredictability of the event (at low expected rate) and the randomness of what game is borrowed keeps it interesting. You can see what games are currently borrowed out and reactively buy stock. Or you can just have a mental estimate of what games are popular, and buy those, ignoring current borrows. At high frequency, it effectively becomes continuous though. And the randomness averages out, law of large numbers. If you were doing the first strategy, eventually you would end up doing the second strategy, which is less fun but still interesting.
I also like the design between the two resources, but they aren’t balanced well. The design is, when you have too few games, there’s nothing to borrow and no reason to have more visitors, and if you have too much stock, you dont need more and could be letting more people borrow them. I think the time between visitor upgrades should increase, but it feels constant interval with active play. You just accelerate and rocket off into a million dollars, at the cost of RSI as you click as fast as possible on the “buy game” button to match. There should be a buy 5 and maybe a buy 25 button.
I don’t entirely like the donation system. They come periodically in batches, which the idea I do like. Rather than monitoring an idle game or checking in randomly, you check in at fixed intervals, see what you can improve, then put it away again. Like Neko Atsume now that I think about it. This game doesn’t make that work, the interval is too short since I didn’t want to bore the player at the beginning. TBH it only serves to hide the fact that each borrow generates money, which a library does not do, breaking the theme. It could be “blockbuster idle” but that feels less “give and take” and more “bank account go up simulator.”
I like how the game has an “end” unintentionally after about a few hours. This kind of hides the money acceleration at that point, but that issue should still be redesigned. The new game button does do an accidentally cool effect when you do hit the end. The technical explanation of the “freeze” is at 100+ events/frame, the game can’t catch up, not because of a programming limitation, but I just didn’t want to explode people’s computers when catching up due to offline progress.
Speaking of, offline progress is too strong. With a literal fresh game, you can just come back in a few hours and just go sicko mode. On the other hand, the logs crash the game if you let the game go too long. They are never cleared, and every event, at least one message is added to any log. These two issues are related-ish. There isn’t a need for offline progress if the game is short. There is a need to save and reload this short game only because its unstable. Saving is conceptually cool, but design wise, kinda not so valuable, unless I want the game to be much longer.
I could cap money what the current upgrade costs to solve offline progress and resource design and theming. It doesn’t make sense for a library to be profiting.
The logs aren’t really useful. They do contextualize the library, and give the full funny titles to the games. But after that they just crash the game. If you do run out of stock of one game for just a little bit, it will tell you about it. Several times in a row for high visitor rate, but yeah.
It’s easy dopamine (I say, as I make an incremental game), but I have come to appreciate how much is added by having all the game cases flying around. I think I accidentally cooked by making the cards move up linearly, and fall back down exponentially. You can kind of visually filter out the games moving up vs moving down. Which is also mechanically useful, sort of? When I am playing I am mostly looking at the unborrowed stock. I remember a [podcast or something] about Slay The Spire, where the devs did mention a significant part of the appeal was watching cards fly all over, to make up for the manual fun of managing cards in real life.
Thanks for listening to my TED talk. I would revisit this game ngl, its not as TECHNICALLY IMPRESSIVE as my other ideas but who needs impressiveness. Tho, ideally someone else can do the UI, I got a little mad when making it LMAO.