I had no idea the import salesman was on a schedule, I just would always keep my collection 1 under max because of him.
I also had no idea games of the same genre got boosts being together. I honestly didn't understand what was going on with the popularity of machines, like if there were certain areas of the arcade that are better/worse, if putting them near same genre/company/recently released cabinets would help, or anything really. Only thing that was documented in the game was that putting sequels next to the other games in the series helps.
Never got why my ratings in that report your assistant shows you every month were like 0-1.5 stars for everything. Yet i still raked in tons of money so I didn't care to try and raise things. But seriously shit made no sense... decorations there are only 1 thing available, I select it and i get 1 star out of like 10?
All of this is valid feedback because it highlights some important stuff.
Basically making a game this complicated with so many mechanics is difficult when it comes to communicating those design goals to the player. This is the number one thing we struggled with. Some players get really upset when they are led around by the nose because they want to experiment. Others get lost when you don't tell them much. Both camps don't like to read text. The only option is then set up circumstances that force you to learn the game, and then you get back into the leading you around problem.
We do tell you pretty much everything you need to know in the text but we find most people don't read it.
The genres thing is explained the moment you buy a game of a different genre than one you already have. Usually it appears on the 2nd or 3rd machine you buy. We set it up that way off the begining.
Genres are simply a way of giving the arcade variety. The more different genres you have, the more variety and therefor the more you cater to a wider crowd. All you need is one of each genre to serve everyone. As well, Pop Machines and Jukeboxes are essentially a genre each. They are service items.
Machines expire however when they reach the end of their effective life cycle and then no longer count for your genre count. So a Alien Landing which is a shooter doesn't count as a shooter 2 years later because it has become irrelevant. However, to stop a player from simply dumping it we turn it into a classic and then classics become valuable to serve the retro crowd.
Now the screen you see pop up at the end of each month IS misleading. The idea isn't to max out all of the stars, it is simply to show you where you are getting your popularity from because no one was understanding the hows and whys of their arcade popularity. If you count up the stars, half stars, quarter stars, etc they will add up to a value. If that value is greater than 5 you have a maxed out arcade. If it is less you can improve through actions and play. We also show you what is negatively effecting the arcade, such as machine position, high prices, high difficulty on games, etc.
That screen was simply the best way we could quickly display this to the player but it does come across like bars to fill, and for that we are sorry.
As far as other mechanics, Lisa explicitly states the layout bonus for machine backs against walls or other machines, draining cash from machines, needing to repair machines, hot squares and how they work, how Bobby Danger works, difficulty and price changes, customization bonuses, etc. It is all in there and all documented. Obviously though this stuff can be useless if no one spends the time to read the dialouge and experiment with it.
I think the biggest failure we made is that the game is too easy, and we made it easy because believe it or not, some people were failing out of the first two years all the time even with the way it is set up now! As crazy as it sounds, our XNA playtest reviews had people upset that they kept going broke in the first few months.
The next issue was that after the loan got paid off we needed another carrot to keep the player engaged. This carrot should be getting 30 machines, having to buy something really grand, or preparing to move to a new location. All of those things are planned for but we could not continue working on the game and not have something generating income for the company so we chose to put it out the way it is to get a boost and hopfully some good press and then circle back to it later with a couple more years of sim and a new location to play it to attain.
I can tell now that the game is released that people are making way more cash than was expected. The 900th person on the leaderboard has something like 300k in gross earnings which is pretty good. It also proves that over half the leaderboard knows how to play the game decently well.
Still, the game was designed to be expandable and iterative. We wanted to keep expanding the material that was there and layering mechanics overtop of it as the months go by to keep it fresh and interesting.
We are still pretty happy with the game and we get loads of emails from people saying how much they love it. Just got one today from a guy who was saying that we would happily pay for more content and updates!
