PlinkIdle
PlinkIdle Game Design Discussion
(By Lauren)
I'd like to open this discussion up to our players, if anyone is interested! If you're not interested, that's totally ok, and we'll try out this design and keep our fingers crossed that it's feeling good. Spoiler: there are 3 feedback requests in here.
A quick intro to our team, and our specialties and also our skill gaps:
- Dave: unicorn dev and technical artist, builds everything ever. Does not self-identify as an idle game player.
- Lauren: UX and content design specialist, good at game feel, horrid at math. loves idle/incremental games but big gaping hole in brain where math should live.
- Pat: part timer, and person who had the initial idea for this game. specializes in rapid prototyping and game systems design. plays incremental games but has never designed a full one
- Jenna: part timer, new to design, avid gamer, hasn't played a lot of idle games (yet) but is good at math and is starting to tackle the numbers!
- Brian: part time engineer, plays idle games, does understand math thankfully, but doesn't self-identify as a designer.
First of all: Your feedback has been amazing, informative, and incredibly helpful. Please keep it coming! We're taking notes and adjusting things accordingly.
We're working on a new version of the game that will hopefully be closer to "the real game" that we're going to put out there on Steam and mobile. As you can see by our team breakdown, we are probably going to be able to make a good-ish game that has good-ish idle/incremental "vibes", but the challenge will be in really making it a long, awesome, balanced experience. The goal is to hit that ceiling at the right time, prestige, and keep playing, but feel better than before.
I think our game will be somewhat similar to Egg, Inc. in that it has stages that can be advanced through.
This is the NEW loop that we're currently developing.
What's different?
- Coins will be available as you advance through the stages (Rainbow -> Winter -> etc)
- Stages will now have TIERS that advance by collecting balls. Take Rainbow:
- 1-1: start
- 1-2: unlock your first upgrade. can now spend coins on it.
- 1-3: unlock the next stage
- 1-4: max. and you have to max out every stage to prestige, i think? (haven't tested this yet)
FEEDBACK REQUEST 1 - MULTI-TIER STAGES:
See above! Would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think of tiered stages with unlocks along the way as you collect balls?
FEEDBACK REQUEST 2 - PRESTIGE:
A lot of you have been asking about Prestige and this has always been on my plan for this game! We still haven't made it or tested it yet, but we want to. I would love feedback on possible global upgrades that we have planned for prestige:
- Earn "offline" or "unfocused level" balls/coins for x amount of time, and can increase that amount of time.
- Make GoldCoins better, stay longer, longer duration of effects
- Start with an extra max bucket
- Start with a larger max on the max bucket
- Unlock new stages that will be needed for next prestige
- Crank up the ball rarity weighting
- Unlock new peg types
FEEDBACK REQUEST 3 - CAPPING BALLS:
So, sad news, I think we need to cap how many balls can be on screen at once. We can't repro that crash when testing in Unity, but we are guessing it's due to ball overload in Space. Probably? Brian is going to investigate when he has time.
POSSIBLE SOLUTION: What do you think of having a max on Auto Drop and Split Peg, but then at some point we start multiplying the worth of a ball. After hitting max, maybe as a prestige reward, balls will start being worth 1.1x, 2x, etc to advance more quickly through the early stages?
Comments
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I noticed the flowchart you posted just shows metacurrency being used on global upgrades. I’d like to encourage expanding on that idea: reset layers in incremental games have an unfortunate habit of replacing really fun and unique gameplay with more generic “buy upgrade, wait til you can afford the next” gameplay. It’d be nice to expand on the core mechanic in ways beyond just “number gets bigger”. Stuff that gets the player really invested in their choices, has significant impact on the gameplay (i.e. not just “the upgrades become affordable faster”), etc. would be really appreciated. One random idea could be a plinko board where each ball costs the metacurrency, and gets you new currenc(y/ies) that go towards a branching upgrade tree to affect the base and meta plinko boards in different ways.
Also, I would try really hard to avoid needing to cap the balls, especially not this early. Unity should absolutely be able to handle this and many more physics objects, even when running in the browser.
Thank you for the thoughtful ideas and feedback!
Having another currency is an interesting idea. We are planning a Prestige currency, which won't be working for the demo, but can be previewed.
This is what's in our current build, so pardon the WIP numbers.
The way it'll work is that you can choose which global upgrades to spend this on. It'll unlock new stages and affect things like GoldCoin or "time away" earnings. On top of the currency, you get the x# coins and balls to speed through the early levels.
This is the current plan! We're going to try it out. I hope this scratches the itch of having meaningful rewards instead of "do it again, but faster." I'm realizing our game is similar to Egg, Inc. in some ways and I don't like the same-ness of every level in that game.
This week we're trying to finish the new demo build that shows off some improvements and changes. You might hate some of them! But your feedback is very welcome, and we'd love to hear it. It's been really helpful to hear from the itch community and we do take it all in and discuss everything!
If the maxed out Auto/Drop/Split feel really bad, I will tweak or remove it. My hope is to have bursts that can vastly exceed the base amount, but I notice that the bursts don't feel meaningful when the screen is at a constant fever pitch already. Definitely let us know if you hate it when the new build is up.
Again, thank you so much for the feedback and for taking the time to read this! We're excited to wrap up the new demo. It'll be shorter this time. Our steam page is up if you want to follow there too: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3684530/PlinkIdle/
Hi, I'm really enjoying the game, grinding deep on lvl 7 I kept getting the crash roughly every 1-2 hours until I turned off "Floating Numbers" I haven't had a crash in about 8 hours of mixed play (idle and active)
Okay just got the crash again without Floating Numbers :)
Oh wow that's a lot of playtime!! I love this. Interesting that the floating numbers seemed to help for a bit, but then it still happened. I hadn't even considered that they might be contributing.
1. Love the tiered idea. While playing I wish there was a reason to keep playing on a stage after the next level was unlocked, I think this helps!
2. Prestige would be amazing, I love Global upgrades. Maybe the early stages on prestige mode could have the full roster of upgrades available? So level 1 in prestige mode would now have the ball rarity upgrade option, the bucket upgrade, etc.
I also keep wanting to go back to the old stages!
I love prestige too. I'm deep into a cookie clicker run and the ascension is so critical to my feeling ok about my life lol.
I'll think about the full upgrade roster for prestige. In the new design, you have to climb through the stages to unlock each upgrade, but once unlocked, you can access them backward and forward in every stage. My preference would be a full wipe (minus achievements and multipliers) for prestige... but if that's a bad vibe because it's too tedious to unlock the upgrades, I will absolutely keep your feedback in mind!
multiplying worth seems like a good workaround
Fingers crossed that this will work and be fast to implement XD