This is going to be a shorter blog post to cover a small number of things, including collaboration, future plans for the game I Really Need This Job and preparing for the Synergy exhibition at the end of the Trimester.
Last week on Wednesday, we were able to have a discussion with some Studio 2 Designers pitching what we are working on and seeing if they wanted to contribute work with us on improving the art for the game. After a short discussion about I Really Need This Job and a quick demonstration of the game on our phones, we are now working together with Finn to help us with the art for our games. We had another meeting later on in the day to detail out the other aspects of what we needed and the art style that we wanted for the game, this was all documented in the designer handover document. The main changes that Finn is working on are to improve the Title Screen and the buttons that are displayed on the screen, additionally, updating the in game UI and Hot-o-meter. Talking to a designer forced Nick and me to consider what we wanted our menu to look like and what we wanted the final buttons and the UI to be. To do this we looked at current popular Android games with similar styles as to our game and how we can capture a similar feel and aesthetic, but themed more to our game.
The current state of I Really Need This Job is that it is currently released on Itch.io with a technically completed version, but Nick and I still want to continue to work on it and create a releasable version into the Android store. With GCAP just around the corner at 24-25th October, I wanted to be able to show off our game to other developers or potential employers during the event. This creates a deadline for us to develop and release our game on the Google Play Store by the latest 16th of October, which gives us a development time of 2 months. Considering releasing a game onto the Play Store meant that we needed to consider how monetization would work for our game. There are a few business models that we could follow that would work for our game:
- Free to Play – Publishing the game as free and having ads to generate revenue for us, this is already a part of the Unity development system through Unity Ads.
- Purchase – Having a price on the game is another option to consider, selling it at a low price in the Android market and selling it as a full game without ads. However, this method is extremely overshadowed by all of the free games that populate the Play Store.
- In Game Purchase – This involves having the initial game be free and being able to unlock in extra in game content with money.
After much discussion, we concluded that the best model for us was having in game purchases as our monetization option. This way the game being free does not disadvantage the game in the Play Store and there are no ads to dissuade players from continuing to play our game further. The way that the game is currently set up with levels means that creating the additional content for the game is definitely possible for the game.
However, the next thing to consider was what the player should unlock after purchasing more levels for our game. We are able to churn out a multitude of different levels for our current game, but continuing to do so would be repetitive and possibly boring for the players. Therefore we came to the solution to create different settings for the levels, this would be represented by the player moving jobs to a different employee. We currently have ideas for a job at the Zoo and the Aquarium which could have a brand new level layout and a brand new set of traps to play around with.
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