Hey there, first post here after spending hours lurking, I wanted to try to get some ideas for my game.
What do you want to achieve?
I am currently working on a stock market simulation game with a friend of mine, and UI and other parts of the game are going great, but our goal is to make the stocks seem less like randomly crashing and falling coin flips but instead something unpredictable, yet allowing players to strategize and use their minds in some ways and make a profit doing so.
What is the issue?
As mentioned above, my goal is to make the value of stocks not just be randomly created but make it possible for players to strategize.
What solutions have you thought of so far?
Currently my concept for the equation is simple. Let each stock have a starting value and a instability/growth and gain value. Then get a random number from 0-instability/growth and gain value. That will be the change in stock value, then get a number 1-2 and if it is 1 then that will be starting value - instability/growth and gain value. If 2 then it is +. I have also thought of adding the amount of players who currently own the stock into the equation to make it more profitable to get stocks with less owners.
Pardon the bad quality of this post because I was forced to type this in a rush.
You could teach players about some stock market tips and tricks too. That way, your game might end up on the learn and explore page.
You could teach them about growth and value investing, and give a bit more detail as to what they mean. For example, value investing means that you invest in stocks that are low in price(to be put simply).
Tip and tricks. You could teach them some important principles like buy low, sell high.
Teach them about bull and bear markets and how people are affected by recessions. Not only that, you could tell them about the differing opinions people have.
You could give them a history of the stock market. Have a section about history of stocks and talk about some famous crashes and people that have affected the stock market.
Instead of making it go super in-depth, you can add tips on the side of their screen saying stuff like @Jagerzdxx suggested. It could still land you on the Explore & Learn page.
Anyways, I’m pretty sure this is what you said but here is how I was going to do it:
Each stock would have an equal chance of going up, staying the same, or going down. Then the script would decide if it goes up/down a lot, a normal amount, or a little. Having simple checks using math.floor/math.ceil and checking if the stock value is above 0 could perfect this mechanic.
In the long run, you wouldn’t want a stock that can be strategized. It’s not like that in real life (atleast not how you’re saying), and it wouldn’t work really in game because the players would just stick to one stock that they know how to get profit from. Instead, doing a randomized but not chaotic idea like mine could work.
There could also be stock inflations/crashes.
Another thing is don’t set a ‘max/min value’ for stocks. Let them gain/lose value on their own. This would make it so players can’t just easily learn which stocks are at their lowest and highest.
Also this next part isn’t what you asked for but:
If a player has 100 stock of ‘Chaddaking Coins’ lol. and it’s value goes down to 1, they could just rejoin a new server and it could have a much different value.
The only solution I have for players joining new servers to increase value would be to make them sell their stock if they leave the game. Again, not what you’re looking for but I just wanted to share incase you ever wanted an opinion on it.