Today we will talk about the core of our game, the offices and announce our pre-alpha test, for which you can sign up right now by following our newsletter through this Link.
Since we are now deep diving into "Crypto: Mine and Trade", we have decided to split the blog into different parts. We begin with a short section talking about our pre-alpha test, followed by an overview on how the offices work within our game. We then head over to a more in-depth discussion about the design of the offices.
Upcoming Pre-Alpha
Let us begin with the exciting announcement that we will start a pre-alpha test next week, which you can register for starting now. We will send out our test build for you guys to play and test so you can see for yourself how exactly "Crypto: Mine and Trade" works and feels. So we invite you to sign up and play the pre-alpha along us. We will also start a discord server along with the alpha test where we can talk you about the pre-alpha as well as how we will move forward going from there.
The Offices
Today's blog is all about the offices, which are a big part of how our game functions and plays out. As we said before you will start with a very basic office, in which you will have to mine a cryptocurrency by tapping it repeatedly. So at lower levels, the income of your office is depended on how fast you are able to tap it. You can change this, however by upgrading your office through spending your earned Satoshi. This will not only increase the amount of cryptocurrency you will receive but also automate the process once an office hits level five. This is when it gets upgraded and your office worker receives a computer which replaces his trusty, albeit old-fashioned typewriter.
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| Your office workers very own computer, a dream come true. |
From now on the office will automatically mine the cryptocurrency at a fixed rate per second. And you might start to think to add a second office to your building. So you can add a new office on top of your first. But it will start at level one again so you might think about if you want to tap again or wait until you have enough Satoshi to instantly upgrade it to level five. This new office also is not just placed higher, but also produces more cryptocurrency then the previous one, which counteracts the higher price you will have to pay for each successive office.
But not only do your offices become more and more effective, they will also become more and more fancy, upon reaching certain milestones. They will progress from the earliest room with just a basic typewriter to fancy high tech offices with neon lights and robotic arms, helping your offices workers. Which also will increase the happiness of the whole office, making your office even more effective at mining cryptocurrencies.
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| Over the course of upgrading each office it will change his look and feel |
The design of the Offices
Since the resource generator is very ingrained in the core of incremental game design, I decided to start the design from them. I started by researching how income was generated in different incremental games over the past and how the different values, like production/second and cost, were calculated. To my surprise, it was incredibly easy to find detailed information on how the games of the past had created and balanced their income generators.
The logic behind the numbers is pretty easy and shows pretty well how incremental games create and control their unique player progression. They do it by increasing the cost of the next level exponentially, while the income that is generated, is increased linearly. This creates a system where the higher the level of a floor is, the less money effective it becomes. (As explained in Math of Idle Games part one, by Kongregate) This is why it takes longer and longer to progress through incremental games, the longer you play them. To prevent it from taking to long and the progression to halt completely incremental games often utilize a prestige system which increases the baseline cost-effectiveness of money generators but resets the players progress. He will now progress through the beginning faster and will reach a later part of the game without having to wait for progress for an absurd amount of time.
So I had the logic and math behind the income generators, but they still had to be anchored into our overall design. The first and arguably most effective change I did was, to reframe the income per second as hashrate, which is a term used to describe the speed at which a mining device operates, so it was the perfect fit to describe the function of the office without breaking the fantasy of having a bitcoin mining organisation.
The other bigger thing was to find a way around the aspect that the early income generators often become unimpactful the longer one has progressed through the games, which we did not like in our play session. The solution I came up with is that on certain levels the offices should increase the happiness of the office. Happiness in our case being a global multiplayer to many aspects of the whole building. It not only makes the early floors more impactful in the later stages of the game but also corresponds well with our progressing visuals of the offices. The more modern the office the happier your company will be.
There were many more challenging and interesting design decisions, like when and how long the player has to manually generate his income, but for today these shall be enough. But of cause feel free to ask about any aspect of the game design and I will make sure to answer your question as fast and as comprehensive as I can.
Final words
We hope you enjoyed this look at our offices and are excited about our upcoming pre-alpha test. If you did make sure to stay tuned for the next development blog and make sure to follow us on social media:
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