Easy Games to develope

[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.