Keeping players motivated in an idle game — variety and rewards through minigames
The last weeks we’ve told you about our latest development updates, learned much about the blockchain constraints for a game, talked about what features we’ll be implementing, how the user interface process is progressing and introduced our story-driven approach for the game.
After a little break for some of the members of the team, we’re back with some insight on another really important aspect of the game we’re creating.
While the core of the game has been well and truly defined at this point, enabling us to being UI design, development, and other areas of production, there are some secondary minigames that we’ve yet to talk about here on the blog. As we’ve explained previously, the game operates on an idle mechanic, meaning the player’s score increments as a factor of time multiplied by the various boosts and bonuses that have been unlocked. Sometimes this means waiting around for enough resources to accumulate to make that next purchase.
We want to sweeten this idle time slightly—and of course keep players inside of the game as long as possible—so we’re also adding some minigames that can provide a boost to your score and keep you occupied. In general we’ve split the minigames into two groups: easy to solve games, that we lovingly call “no-brainer games” and puzzle games, that will be a bit more challenging.
No-Brainer Games
In our no-brainer games, players are able to kill some time and earn bonuses to proceed faster in the game. The games are about bringing objects in the right order, correctly react in a certain moment or changing the state of some elements.
Cakewalk Games
If you need a challenge to keep your brain working, our puzzle games will be the right choice for you. Here you will have to think about fitting tiles, connecting cables, doing the right movement strategy, rotating objects in the right way to not start chain reactions and solve other tricky situations.
The Tip of the Iceberg
Of course we don’t want to spoil too much and so this intro is just a small piece of the whole minigame facet of the game. But we can say this much: We are looking forward to get the best and funniest games out of simple, minimalistic game mechanics.
Many of the games are based on small, but nice to explore and watch CSS animations, so they are also playable on mobile devices. Some references that hooked us and that we used to build interesting games around:
You can look forward to around 12 minigames that we now have concepts for, and that will be unlocked at certain points in the game.
We already tested some of them in an analogue play through. At the moment we are building prototypes to generate levels and moving the test phase into the digital world. We will keep you updated!
Next up, we’ll have some more updates on UI designs! See you then!
