Easy Games to develope

[Technotron3]

Since you mentioned the need for a few "Smaller games" to hold you over, I have a few ideas that may be simple to produce.

Management:

Airport Sim - You manage an airport from a manager's perspective. For the most part the game would be text based (nothing like the failed Airport tycoon series) You receive contracts from airlines looking for a slot pair(takeoff and landing) but you as the manager must decide when the plane shall land, takeoff, and at what gate. These contracts may have limitations such as time of day and # of flights per week/day to a specific destination. You would also be approached by businesses who would like to setup shop. What keeps things interesting is the complex yet simple balance. if you expand the airport too quickly, you start paying too much in maintaining the airport. if you expand too slowly, you have trouble fitting airlines into time slots and passenger appeal goes down due to a crowded airport.

Airport mania styled sim- taking a similar gameplay route, but maybe adding in taxiways and specific gate assignments.

Public Transportation - You have a layout of a major city. your job is to provide transportation around the city, depending on where people want to go. You build the bus stops and decide the routes and how many busses per route.(would assist in creation of some coding that could be used in a shipping management game and passenger dynamics that could be used in the Airline sim)

[shadow]

What about a shopping mall managment. Game?
build and manage your own mall or become director of a ai one?

[Frankschtaldt]

If gear city is paying your wages, I would have thought a good interim option would be DLC for it.
There's a few things I think would be sell able that wouldn't require a re-write of a totally new game. Motorcycles or a bigger range of trucks. Hell, you could probably sell a boats and/or train DLC and really expand your potential market!

[shadow]

I like your idea frankschtaldt.
Would be interesting further development of GC.

[Eric.B]

Since you mentioned the need for a few "Smaller games" to hold you over, I have a few ideas that may be simple to produce.

While I did mentioned I was going to make some smaller games, I never said I needed ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen, and I've got a few hundred!

That being said, suggestions on what you guys would like to see is ultimately helpful for me and other would-be programmers that come across it!

Airport Sim

If I were to make an airport sim it would be more like Airport Tycoon, but less crappy. That being said I've never been a fan of "build it" tycoons, so this will probably not happen.

Airport mania styled sim- taking a similar gameplay route, but maybe adding in taxiways and specific gate assignments.

I believe we talked about this on IRC. Games like this are not up my ally, but for any starting out devs out there, this Mini Metro style clone would make good money for little amounts of work.

Public Transportation

OpenTTD is by far the king of this segment. It's free, open source, and very well made. Would be difficult to compete as well as fairly complex work.

What about a shopping mall managment. Game?
build and manage your own mall or become director of a ai one?

Was there ever a mall manager game? Sounds like a pretty good idea. That being said, for me, it's a "build it" tycoon. Also fairly graphical and time consuming to make. But if it hasn't been done before, it could be a good money maker. (Thoughts of games like SimTower/Yoot Tower but isometric 3d come to mind.)

If gear city is paying your wages, I would have thought a good interim option would be DLC for it.
There's a few things I think would be sell able that wouldn't require a re-write of a totally new game. Motorcycles or a bigger range of trucks. Hell, you could probably sell a boats and/or train DLC and really expand your potential market!

While GearCity is paying my wages and hopefully will continue to have decent sales, I am still adamantly opposed to nickle and diming you guys with DLCs. I personally HATE them with a passion. I don't want to do this as it's in my opinion a rip off. If you pay for the full game, you get the full game.

So with that I am still sticking to my "Expansion Pack" plans. If the game is successful after wide release of "Single Player" then I will work on it. I personally believe it's better for you the consumer to get everything that could be DLC'd in one simple "expansion" at a single DLC price. Sure if I did it Paradox's way I could make $100 off the same content by spreading it out over 30 DLCs. But I'd happy with $10-$20 for it all in one. Call it bad business sense, but as a former broke-ass gamer I draw the line in the sand somewhere.

Of course if I don't make said expansion, you'll probably see some of this content in one of two ways. 1) Free mods by the community and me. Remember GC is a game I wanted to play. For the first 3 years or so I was the only person who played it. I will probably never stop working on the game, even if I move away from full time work on it. 2) Steam Workshop. If I am not mistaken, items can be sold there. After I implement mod loading system, I will probably open up Workshop integration. I do get a tiny cut of sales if I am not mistaken, but it would be a good source income for someone like MrX_ua. He already has a system worked out to knock out a vehicle model in 6-10 hours.



So what will I be working on? It's a secret. GC still has too much time till it's finished to make public my other plans. I will say both projects will take less than six-eight months together. One will use a lot of GC's code the other will use the same engine and the new world map code I will be developing when I redo GC's maps. One is management based and may not be made. The other is NOT management base, but still strategy. I can pretty much guarantee that one will be done. For the time being we'll call one MM:GCL and the other EBJ:GoK

Neither will effect AM's development too much beside pushing it back a few more months. It is best for me to milk GC's engine and code as much as I can before I move to completely brand new code for AM. While I can use bit and pieces of GC's code in AM, most of the game will be completely written from scratch.

[Frankschtaldt]

If gear city is paying your wages, I would have thought a good interim option would be DLC for it.
There's a few things I think would be sell able that wouldn't require a re-write of a totally new game. Motorcycles or a bigger range of trucks. Hell, you could probably sell a boats and/or train DLC and really expand your potential market!

While GearCity is paying my wages and hopefully will continue to have decent sales, I am still adamantly opposed to nickle and diming you guys with DLCs. I personally HATE them with a passion. I don't want to do this as it's in my opinion a rip off. If you pay for the full game, you get the full game.

So with that I am still sticking to my "Expansion Pack" plans. If the game is successful after wide release of "Single Player" then I will work on it. I personally believe it's better for you the consumer to get everything that could be DLC'd in one simple "expansion" at a single DLC price. Sure if I did it Paradox's way I could make $100 off the same content by spreading it out over 30 DLCs. But I'd happy with $10-$20 for it all in one. Call it bad business sense, but as a former broke-ass gamer I draw the line in the sand somewhere.

Semantics, I sure as hell didn't mean for you to put out dozzends of small DLC's for $50 each.
TBH, I didn't realise there was a distinction between "DLC" and "Expansion Pack".

[Eric.B]

Semantics, I sure as hell didn't mean for you to put out dozzends of small DLC's for $50 each.
TBH, I didn't realise there was a distinction between "DLC" and "Expansion Pack".

There is actually a big difference: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/question...le-content

DLC is normally considered to be small individual content updates. For example in Crusader Kings 2, Mongolians are in the game, but you have to pay $5 to make the character portraits look Mongolian instead of Arab. If you want the armor to look more Mongolian, well you have to pay $2 for an Armor texture. And if you want to play Mongolians you have to buy another DLC for $15....

This is the kind of DLC I am against. In GearCity this would be equivalent to car packs. In something like Automation it's entire segments of the industry such as diesel engines! Content that alone should be in the game because it's not difficult to add or is core to the game. Yet people in the industry have no problem charging money for it.

These days Expansion Packs are rare. Large DLCs or DLC bundles could be considered expansion packs. But if you have the ability to buy pieces then personally I don't consider them to be so.


So what is an Expansion Pack? To me an Expansion Pack is a single sku, priced at or below the base content, that expands upon the game play AND provides as much or a lot more additional content. For us this means an additional 10-15 vehicle types, ability to drive cars, multiplayer game play, among a few other things. It will have to be enough stuff that I would feel comfortable enough boxing it up and selling it stand-alone in a retail store. And to me that's the difference.

Not really semantics.

[JPK]

Well honestly I have such a fun time playing the R&D section of GearCity making cars of all unique possibilities and getting instant data on costs and exact specifications. I would pay to have mini-games using the same sliding type of controls.

I honestly would like to see a military industrial complex type of extension where I could make military aircraft, tanks, missiles, rockets, and small arms.

At a minimal standpoint a simple R&D only game where you could select a year, price out a project and then have plenty of technical specifications would be fun. I like to create a products with GearCity then make some fan fiction around it.

Think about how one could develop turbines, cannons, missiles and an air frame then make a fighter jet in certain periods of history.

[Eric.B]

Well honestly I have such a fun time playing the R&D section of GearCity making cars of all unique possibilities and getting instant data on costs and exact specifications. I would pay to have mini-games using the same sliding type of controls.

Since our engine should theoretically support mobile OS's (iOS, Android) I did in the past consider a mini game such as this for mobiles. However I was waiting on the artwork to finish, and I lost touch with the people who were going to do the port. (I personally won't touch mobile platforms, I don't even own a cellphone!) So it probably won't happen.

I honestly would like to see a military industrial complex type of extension where I could make military aircraft, tanks, missiles, rockets, and small arms.

Larger military vehicles such as tanks, apcs, etc may make it into the game via the Multiplayer Expansion. However in the likely event that we can't make the expansion, these should all be doable by the modding community. It would just require some artwork and some playing with the upcoming mod tools!

[ANiChowy]

I am big fan of expansion packs and have a lot of distaste for DLCs, so it is good to hear that you feel the same way and will respect that with integrity as a developer, even though the far more lucrative way would be to nickel and dime everyone.

Well. There are hidden costs to bombarding people with DLCs. Ones that may or may not be realized with any impact ... depends on what market you are in. Children care far less about such things than adults.

[Eric.B]

I am big fan of expansion packs and have a lot of distaste for DLCs, so it is good to hear that you feel the same way and will respect that with integrity as a developer, even though the far more lucrative way would be to nickel and dime everyone.

Well. There are hidden costs to bombarding people with DLCs. Ones that may or may not be realized with any impact ... depends on what market you are in. Children care far less about such things than adults.

Whoa, talk about bringing back an old post (7 years old).

Technically I will be distributing the Feature Bounty System as DLCs. Free DLCs, but DLCs. And you could make the argument that the FBS is sort of a nickel and dime. But I truly believe a crowd-sourced development as a service is the best way to go to 1) Allow folks who want to contribute the ability to do so, 2) Add more stuff to the game that the contributors want. And 3) Reduces the capital risk for me to make additional features and content for the game.

While I would have loved the game to continue to be as successful as the first year, and bankroll an entire expansion myself. It wasn't to be. Without the FBS, there is no game expansion. Although, I did extend the development five major builds than what I planned. So that was a little mini expansion in itself.

Anyway, there will be no $10 DLC car packs here. If the community can help me cover the costs for me to pay someone to make that car pack, everyone will get the car pack for free.