How should I make a good game play loop? I’m making a silk road based game.
We need more info than that…
What genre?
Is it multiplayer?
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It is multiplayer and is adventure genre
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Start with understanding the player-type of your audience:
It sounds like your audience would be explorers (those who favour interacting with the world). For an audience of explorers, your map is everything. You should try to make the world around the player feel like it directly impacts the core loop - not like it’s just a box for them to complete the core-loop within. (I’ll come back to this point).
Then identify which elements of gameplay fill your core loop:
A typical core loop contains 3 stages:
- Objective
- Challenge
- Reward
Within your game, you need to choose actions which you want the player to complete, to fulfill these 3 “roles” within the game loop. Here’s a basic example:
Objective - Acquire goods/resources.
Challenge - Move the good/resources across the in-game world to a “sell location”.
Reward - Sell the goods for profit - use money to “level-up”
Objective
You could have 5-10 different resources which players can collect, “leveled-up” players might be able to collect different resources that newer players can’t - adding to a progression system.
Challenge
Playing into the audience understanding (previously spoken about), you could have routes to different PILs and SILs (check the “Map design” section at the end if you don’t know what these terms mean) be more difficult than others, and have selling prices there be more. This could be by adding bandits or something similar to attack the player as they try to pass through.
Reward
The reward would be a currency given to the player for selling. You could also have weather events affect the selling prices of commodities and resources. Droughts could make water worth more at a selling point near the drought. Rainfall could make water worth very little, but make it easy to collect. Crops might die in a massive area of farmland, making the price of them skyrocket in nearby areas. Water may be needed to help replenish the soil - how will they transport the water to the farmland? Maybe things like trucks, horses, wagons could be added (depending on the game’s time setting) and they could be part of the progression system “leveling-up”. Progression or “leveling-up” could come from upgrading transport, unlocking new routes, or even forming alliances with other traders.
To add a rewarding feeling to the game, you could give players different choices of difficulty - rewarding higher difficulty with higher amounts of currency for sale. Taking a safer route or selling a commodity which is easy to collect might mean lower profits. Whereas a more dangerous path with harder-to-collect commodities (maybe metals, ores, etc.) could lead to bigger payouts.
Multiplayer
As a multiplayer game, competition and cooperation could add some depth to the gameplay.
LiveOps / Updates
To avoid repetition, LiveOps should be catered towards adding new world events, side quests, or even political shifts in the game-world! Whatever you do, if you focus on engaging the players, they’ll keep coming back.
Map Design
Sorry - this part of the powerpoint I’ve been showing isn’t done yet because it’s still a design methodology I’m creating so it’s a messy “drawing-board” style slide at the moment - not as pretty as the others. Also, you won’t be able to look up resources to assist with this methodology because I’m creating it and haven’t published anything about it formally. I thought I’d share nonetheless because it might be useful for you and it’s had nearly a hundred hours of research poured into it.
Here’s a key for some of the shorthand terms I’ve used that aren’t explained on this slide:
- PIL = Primary Interaction Location
- ZOI = Zone of Influence / LOS
- LOS = Line of Sight
- SIL = Secondary/Small Interaction Location
- POI = Point of Interest
Footnote
This took me a while to write up so hopefully it’s somewhat helpful for you. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask - I’ll be more than happy to help!
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This is really good thank you!