3.7 KiB
Game Design Deep Dive: There's Gold In Them There Hills!
7 June 2019
I've recently changed the gold tick frequency to float on it's own, using a nifty bit of code. Here are the logs curtesy of grep:
log Fri Jun 07 2019 09:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,130.568)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 09:15:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (15,129.988)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 09:30:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (15,129.808)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 09:45:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (15,129.3865)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 10:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (15,129.8805)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 10:15:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (15,130.1753)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 10:30:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,130.6693)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 11:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,131.1633)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 11:30:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,131.6574)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 12:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,132.0278)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 12:30:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,131.9286)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 13:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,131.9012)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 13:30:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,131.878)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 14:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,132.374)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 14:30:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,132.8701)
log Fri Jun 07 2019 15:00:00 GMT+1000: goldTickJob (30,133.3701)
The important part is in the parenthesis at the end - the first number is how many minutes until the next tick, and the second number is the current average of gold per player. You can see that at 130 and above, it takes 30 minutes for the next tick. Below that, it takes 15 minutes. Likewise, if it reaches 140, it'll tick once per 60 minutes, and below 120 it'll tick once every 5 minutes.
The purpose of all this is to ensure that there is enough gold to make the game entertaining and engaging. What I want to know is this: Is this game entertaining and engaging with these levels of rewards?
Each new player begins with 100 gold, but on the whole they spend it immediately on training their first recruit as a soldier. That is the intended route for playing the game; a sort of hidden tutorial (although there are definite exceptions). Next, they are intended to attack high-ranking players to steal a certain amount of gold. At the time of writing, the highest amount of gold is about 500, so the new player has a chance of stealing about 50 gold, or more likely 10 gold from that player. Are these numbers engaging?
I'm not certain. It would take at least 10 minutes of constant attacking (and waiting) to gain enough to replace the gold they just spent. I don't want the gold to reach meaningless numbers (my test database's account has 6008966 gold!), and I know this game isn't for everyone (it's a LOT of waiting if you want to be active), so I wanted to lay these numbers out and ask the community.
I'm planning on building a statistics page today. Basically, it would lay out the diagnostic statistics such as player count and average gold for people to see. I don't think keeping these numbers secret will help the game, so I'd like to make them available (private gameplay habits such as combat and espionage numbers will still be secret). I'd also like the community to help me balance the game, to make it the best that it can possibly be. As always, you can post your opinion in my discord here: https://discordapp.com/invite/FQmz8TN
Finally, we've past 250 players today. Today is also the 1 month anniversary of me beginning to work on this game. Quite an auspicious milestone.
For newbies, remember: today is the last day you can get the alpha tester badge by signing up and logging in. This badge will never be given out again.
Thanks for taking the time to read this lengthier post on some of the boring economics of game design.