Adventurer Simulator - A Prototype UI-Based Incremental Android App
[ALPHA 1.1]
Hello everyone, I'm back with an update on the last few days of progress. Sorry I'm a little late, I've been having some issues with some other projects and have been behind schedule.
At the current state of the project, it isn't worthwhile playing yet. There isn't enough content added to have enough depth to the gameplay, but testing is appreciated! The bottom of this post will have an APK link to download the app.
Development Process - Finding the Right Engagement
Idle games are a newly popular genre of casual games which focusses on giving the player overseer-like actions. Resulting actions accumulate rewards over time, often as simple as a numbered score, and are used to purchase upgrades to increase the rate at which the score climbs.
There are other games that follow this pattern, most RPG’s, but these require more user engagement. Adventurer Simulator focusses on finding the fun parts of an RPG, and extracting the less fun sections to idle or semi-idle gameplay.
However, not all idle games are enjoyable enough to come back to. If you create an idle game that has no interaction, it is often not engaging enough for many users to come back to.
This raises the perpetual question; "How can the player stay engaged in an idle game, without feeling like they are spending unnecessary time on it?”.
A major decision on this is how idle to make the gameplay, specifically the Adventurer of Adventurer Simulator. I could either have one player that you control most actions, and that becomes a similar grind to an RPG. OR I could make most actions idle, or semi-idle, and find other ways to keep the player wanting to come back. We see these in other apps, reminder notifications, or daily rewards.
Because of this thought process, I took a different approach with this update. I decided to make adventurers at least semi-idle, and allow the player to expand their influence by creating multiple, simultaneous adventurers to command. The intention with this addition is to test the enjoyment of engagement, and to prepare early so that future content doesn't have to be reimplemented.
Added Features
Many features added in this update are focused towards building the basis of a more engaging idle game. I didn’t have a change to add much content as was planned from last update.
Gameplay
- You are now a "overseer" of many "Adventurers", meaning you control multiple characters, and they all share the same storage, or bank in Runescape terms. Each character has their own inventory and skills.
User View: Showing 4 Adventurers and the Users's bank
- No longer click based. First release you spam tapped to cut trees. Events like those are automatic now; they will be adjusted to be semi-auto in early levels, and approaching fully auto at higher levels.
- Central Storage (bank). Each adventurer can deposit and withdraw from this. You will use this for redistributing resources to other adventurers who need them, or for buying miscellaneous things like more adventurers.
User Bank with multiple items. Using subscribers to get live updates.
- The shop is now a sell AND buy. You can buy logs and 3 types of axes. The axes look like logs and do nothing. (Sorry, next update lol).
- Add quick access header. Shows important stats of your player, and WILL show quick access to skills and inventory.
An adventurer's dashboard, showing name and current activity at the top.
Technical:
Subscriber Class. This is a wrapper class for any type of data. It contains methods that wrap the data for setting and getting. Calling the setter triggers events for all external code which has called watch() to listen to the the subscriber. When watch() is called, a callback is passed in, where the data change is passed to on each update. watch() returns a token with a stop() method to stop listening to the subscriber when this code is no longer existent.See Subscriber.js
Continued abstraction from Player. User is a manager class for players. The User class contains methods and storage for the Players. This allows for multiple activities and control across each Player to be executed at once.See User.js
Advancement in support for build dev and production builds. Including readme's and execution scripts to help automate. These are readable on the GitHub's readme.
Known bugs
I try to fix up all bugs for each pull request, but this one isn't easy to trace down so I decided to push it and continue to test the current fix. There is a freeze after a few minutes of running AFTER assigning an activity to an adventurer. I think this goes away after relaunching the app from the crash a few times. There are no errors being logged for this either... It's abrupt, I have no while loops, and I clean up timers and events/listeners.
Planned Features
I skipped adding previous updates planned for this release, but they're next:
Add fishing skill.
Add cooking skill.
Add agility skill.
Add more content to the quick access header.
Add energy. Doing activities will use energy, eating food will replenish your energy. Max energy will be increased with agility skill.
Links for your clicking pleasure:
APK Download, currently pending for Beta on Google Play, but right now: Google Drive Link
GitHub - Come see the progress! GitHub
I will continue to slowly release future features as I release content. Expect 2D graphics for the world of AdventurerSimulator once it gets ported to browser.
Please suggest balancing! I understand the layout and graphics are far from nice, I'll make everything more elegant later.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors