Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Money and Production Runs

In last week’s sprint report, I started adding an economy to Toy Factory Fixer. Toys can only be crafted if you have the required toy parts, and the game tracks how many Good Toys and Bad Toys you ship. Next up was adding money to the game.

Sprint 12: create an economy

Completed:

• Create cost to hire worker
• Create reward for shipping Good Toy

Not completed:

• Create dispenser queue

I didn’t spend as much time on game development this last week as I would have liked. I did less than 5 hours, which is below my average for a week.

That said, I was able to add money to the game. Now workers cost money, so you can’t hire an infinite amount, and shipping Good Toys also gives you money.

The starting amount of money, the cost of hiring workers, and the money you can earn each time a toy ships are all numbers I need to play around with to see if I have something that can be challenging and enjoyable rather than either impossible or inevitable.

While I didn’t get the dispenser completely done, I did manage to change the way toy dispensers work. I just didn’t get around to adding the UI elements that would let the player know what they are doing.

Originally, dispensers would be provided with a bunch of toys, and each turn a new toy would get dispensed onto the conveyor belt.

Now, dispensers have multiple production runs. Each production run has a collection of toys and a turn countdown. So a dispenser will wait the specified number of turns before starting to put toys on the belt, then once all the toys for that run are dispensed, it will start counting down the turns until the next run starts.

I think this change will help to control the flow of toys so that it won’t overwhelm the player.

Coming up next

The next time I change the dispenser, I want to add ways to make it more overwhelming, such as being able to put multiple toys on the same conveyor belt space. So I can slow down the flow or I can increase it, requiring the player to figure out a better way to address it through their hiring strategy.

One of the issues threatening the enjoyment of the game is that the player could just sit back and wait for workers to get all of the toy parts possible, then start crafting only at the end. I think it sounds like it would be a bit boring, so I think adding a shipping deadline would help. You would then need to craft Good Toys while also separating Bad Toys because otherwise you will not ship all of the Good Toys by the turn deadline. And since workers can’t craft and separate toys at the same time, there will need to be decisions about when to do one or the other.

And of course, I’d like to make sure the UI is intuitive and is readable.

Thanks for reading!

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