Welcome to a review and a tutorial to Rise of the Pixels. But first of all:
What is Rise of the Pixels?
Rise of the Pixels is a new hive game created by four members of PeakD team. Here is a link to the game website along with an official documentation providing various information about the game called the rulebook. If you haven't seen the information presented there, you might check it out as this post will deal more with information not present in it.
Game website: https://riseofthepixels.com
Game Rulebook: https://rulebook.riseofthepixels.com
What is the game about?
The game is about creating in-game 'games': a player has programmer, designer cards and accessory cards obtained from purchased packs. Creating games costs PXL tokens and releasing them can earn less or more PXL tokens that the game cost to create - the rewarded PXL tokens come from players who create games, spent it in game for training, research or from inflation.
If the PXL tokens came only from players playing the game, there would always be players who would lose PXL and sooner or later quit. However, since the PXL comes also from inflation - this might prevent it from happening if it is sufficiently high for that purpose.
This means that players looking to obtain enough PXL token to keep playing are to improve the ratings their games obtain.
Starter Pools
If one plans to invest little or just try the game out, aim to meet the conditions of starter pools https://rulebook.riseofthepixels.com/economics/game-rewards/reward-pools#starter-pools
This way your games will not compete with the rest of the teams on the game.
Use unique genre/theme combinations
When one creates a game, for example "rpg/fantasy", if the next game were to be another "rpg/fantasy", one would obtain penalty to the game's rating. In order to avoid any penalty, check your last 10 games and create game with unique genre/theme. Or simply keep a list of 11 genre/theme combinations which you can repeat.
Not any genre/theme/platform is easy to obtain good score for
Some genre/themes/platform can be easier to obtain good score for, for example: "rpg/fantasy/pc" or "rpg/fantasy/console". It would easier to create games of higher score with such genre/theme combinations. And how do you find out which combinations are easier or not? One way would be to play the game, however that could take a long time. A quick way is to check what games other players created and see which combinations obtained a high score. This can be done on top-sellers page https://riseofthepixels.com/top-sellers Select sort by rating and show retired games.
On rarity of players
While cards of lower rarity cost less PXL to create a game, they have also lower chance to create a higher quality game. Once again one can check the top sellers page and when one clicks on a game one can find out what rarity of players were used to create such game. If one knows how to play a game, currently it seems a team of epics or two epics and rares is a viable strategy.
There are separate reward pools based on platform
Whether you decide to create a game on PC, console or arcade platform, all there have separate reward pools and competition which can once again be checked in the top sellers page.
On assigning development points.
When creating a small game (3 players), personally I've been using a team of 2 programmers and one designer. I've tried to assign one third of points to task: "Story and Quest", "Dialogues" and "Level And World Design", which designers are good for.
By trying different combinations, it seems that some games require certain number of points in some categories. It is not easy to figure out which as each combination of genre/theme/platform can vary. A safe approach would be to distribute at least some points across all categories and focus a bit more on some other categories. If one records their selection, on next attempt of the same genre/theme/platform they can attempt a different combination to see which would result in a higher score. Or the same could be done instantly if one were to use more than one account.
AI Rating
10% of rating is obtained based on title and description. Whether picture affects this, I do not know. Once again one can check high rated games and see what title and descriptions they use and create a similar game.
Conclusions
Rise of the Pixels is a still a very new game and it remains to be seen in what direction it will go. If you enjoyed this article and feel like giving rise of the pixels a try, feel free to consider using the following referral link which apparently works for licenses only:
https://riseofthepixels.com?ref=mirafun
If you do use it, feel free to comment and I'll send you a worker card along with some accessories.