Hi all!
This is my first message on this board. I came here because of a recommendation of a good friend of mine, since I'm trying to find a programmer to collaborate with.
I'm a professional graphic designer with 4 years of experience working in a big company. I like to think a lot about videogames and how to make them appealing to the general public. I spend plenty of time seeking new topics and ideas to develop, but I've always failed at putting them out there, since I don't have any programming skills or experience (I understand a couple of bits though).
I had a lot of ideas in the past, but for the last months (months because I cannot spend a lot of time working on it since my "real" work is quite time consuming) I've been working on a simple game. It's untitled for now, but you can call it "Beer Tycoon".
"Beer Tycoon" is basically a Brewery Simulator, where you make your own craft beers and you manage the whole company and process since the beginning.
You can find down below some examples of how I'm imagining the menus, GUI, characters... and basically the look & feel of the game. Here are 3 basic menus. The whole game would be bigger of course, but I didn't make more since I normally stop playing with the idea when I comprehend that this is another "Oh I don't have a programmer so... whatever" kind-of-a-game:
When playing normally, it should look like this:
https://i.imgur.com/ncm0cPr.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/15ULjVe.pngProbably you'll understand some bits, but I'm going to make some bullet points just to explain how it works right now. I have most of the game in my head and I still need to think a lot about it, but here we go:
· You create your own brewery and enter PHASE 1. You'll have one Main Assistant who will guide you around and explain the basics.
· You can hire (or sack) more employees since the beginning, and they'll open new possibilities to your company: from buying new ingredients for your craft beers to building upgrades on your headquarters.
· The process is simple. First you check the news, some of them will be informative and some of them will affect you directly (and you'll need to agree, decline, etc... having an effect on the game).
· After that you'll need to buy ingredients for your new beer. There's a island-town full of stores, each of them with different ingredients/materials such as fruits, cereals, bottles, stickers, etc.
· You'll be able to check if there are any improvements for your headquarters. Upgrades will make your production easier, or better, or maybe faster...
· Also, you'll have the possibility of buying perks or upgrades (coffee for your employees, a private tester, a marketing campaign...). These would be things that would improve some details on your next beer.
·Finally, you'll control all your financial decisions in the last tab. How much money you are receiving, or losing with your beers. Also if you want to take any product off the market because people are tired of that kind of beer now, etc.
After doing all the stuff in PHASE ONE, you'll enter PHASE TWO.
· In phase two you'll create your own beer. Think about an equation. It's a combination of different values which lead you to your own unique beer. Things like what kind of cereal, or what kind of ingredients, the quality and the origin of the water, the quantity of all these materials, the temperature of the tanks, the time the ingredients spend on them, or the time you let the beer rest in a barrel. The material of the bottle, the shape of the sticker or the kind of cap you'll use... all that stuff will matter in the final result.
· Maybe you're thinking "How will it be represented?". Think about basic stuff: Sliders, slots where you place the ingredients, fields you'll need to fill with numbers... It would be easy to understand, easy to manage, and hard to master since you'll have a lot of variations.
· Finally, you have created your own beer! But... will it be a tasty beer or a horrible beer? If you have chosen your ingredients with care, it will be great! If you burnt the cereals, or tried to put 90% lemon juice on your beer... it will be probably terrible. At the end, a group of magazines or professional tasters will try your product and of course they'll rate it between 1 and 10.
· After that, the process is over. You'll decide a couple of more things, like how long you'll be selling that kind of beer or maybe the price (I'm not sure about this right now)... but the cycle starts again!
You may think that the game is easy to play, or maybe boring, but the possibilities will expand as you progress. Also you'll find problems and opportunities on the way. Things like the weather, customers' interests, furious letters, words of support, strikes, prizes, companies trying to destroy you...
The purpose of the game is to reach #1 in the world. You'll start at 600th (for example) and you'll find your own way to the top.
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Well... this is it. If any of you want to help me with this... then you're welcome to send me a PM and we'll talk from there. I have a lot of ideas and more stuff to improve the game, but I don't want to bore you to death (since this is a wall text).
Hope you'll find it interesting!
PD: Oh btw! The game is trying to recreate NES graphics. I just scaled the original resolution of the NES to 16:9, just like Shovel Knight for example.