Heya! Interesting idea you have, and I think it could indeed be quite fun. As to original though I’m a bit uncertain as it rings similar to a few games - innovative might be a better word to fit your project.
Potential Progression Problem
A few things popped out at me, the first is addressing the inevitable on-boarding problem your progression system will lead to. At first I thought the game might be going in a strategic direction, but while I wrote this I realized it really was just regular progression - and that’s perfectly fine. The main difference is when strategy is part of the game, every added benefit to a strategy comes with an equal added risk, and balancing both of them is where the fun comes in. However your proposed weapon customization is simply progression, as when you give yourself more damage or silent killing you don’t really lose anything (spending money would only really count as a risk if your perks and money started at 0 at the beginning of each round).
Your progression leads to player upgrades which can be quite fun, especially to players motivated by a desire to dominate opponents. However in the current state it has a flip side, unprogressed players who enter the game will be dominated. This can make getting into the game very difficult, as the new players who are motivated by your core progression (domination) are experiencing the opposite for the starting experience. This might make it difficult to grow your audience past a certain point.
So there are two major strategies for fixing this, the first is the overwatch method, the second is the fortnite method. Both of these methods are used in both games, but I feel each has gotten more of a spotlight in one due to their differing degrees of application and competitiveness.
In the overwatch method you make progression unrelated to abilities, using only skins and emotes. Dedicated players still feel superior (a core part of domination) due to their nice cosmetics - however this won’t be nearly as effective as allowing for power-ups, but it will make it easier for new users to join.
In the fortnite method you stagger your create matches with player skill levels in mind, leading to more powerful players to fight more powerful players. This has a drawback though as it kind of ruins the joy of being superior due to other players being on equal grounds as you, so if you do this you should try to force some diversity in skill levels as to make sure everyone gets a mixture of feeling superior vs inferior. This won’t ever be as fun though as the wolf among sheep experience an unregulated random sorted server has.
This is a difficult thing to balance, both methods make progression less compelling for the sake of new players.
Monetization
Monetization is the complicated world of raising your ARPU (average revenue per user), and is often at the front of the minds of many developers trying to make their game financially viable. In my own experience however I’ve found that monetization is actually quite easy to do well enough, but very difficult to perfect. And that focusing on monetization before the game succeeds might actually kill the game entirely.
Tell me, what makes more money, a game with an ARPU of $0.10, and a DAU (daily active users) of 1000? Or a game with an ARPU of $0.001 and a DAU of 10,000,000? Technically the first game earns more per player, but the second one earns almost 10x as much overall. That’s not even including the built in revenue you get from visits of premium players.
The lesson here is that a poorly monetized game that is played by many because it’s fun will outperform a more monetized game with less players. If you look at the top earning games on Roblox, all of them have thousands of players concurrently, which means a DAU count of hundreds of thousands. Between them of course, you’ll see games with less players who earn more due to superior monetization, but those games still have an audience of hundreds of thousands of players a day.
It is very difficult to make a fun game, one played by people day after day after day. That is something that requires testing and testing and testing and sometimes still walking away empty handed. I have seen many games have solid monetization schemes and nobody plays them, earning nothing. But I have yet to see a Roblox game with a DAU of 100k fail to earn any money at all.
So don’t worry about monetization, by all means add it, but do so carefully. My game Super Hero Life III (SHL3) earns about 6x as much per user than its predecessor Super Hero Life II (SHL2), but because it is played by substantially less people for the last few months it has earned less. The reason less people play it is because I foolishly monetized a core game mechanic, making it difficult to enjoy without money. When you mess up the core of a game it is difficult to go back and undo it, so don’t make that same mistake.
Monetize your game, but do so in a way which won’t hurt it. You can make riskier decisions once its successful to boost that ARPU, but due to a roblox’s premium payouts, your ARPU will be at minimum around $0.001 already, which may not sound like much but if you get your game to the front page with 50k concurrents and a DAU of 1mil users, you’re making $1000 a day off of just premium payouts.
So don’t make your game not fun due to monetization, for now you can fully focus on making it the most fun game ever and be fine.
Community Feedback
Testing a game is vitally important at every stage. And when you receive feedback by all means listen to the community, however listen to their complaints more than their ideas, because when people are happy with a game as is they come up with ideas. When they didn’t enjoy it they complain, or worse - they say nothing.
Complaints are very important because if a part of your core loop is boring or overly dissatisfying, people will be angry, because some flaw is messing up their chance at a good time. If the entire experience is uncompelling though, they’ll say nothing. You can try to fix it, shock its heart back to life, but often this situation is how a project dies. If people are complaining though, use those complaints to improve the product until the majority of feedback is fans brainstorming about where the game could go next.
You can use those brainstorms, or not - there is no one correct way to evolve a game. There are incorrect ways though, and complaints help you avoid them.
Conclusion
Based on what you’ve said so far here are my three summarized pieces of advice:
- Figure out how to address your progression system hurting new players so your game can grow unimpeded
- Don’t hurt the core game with monetization, as there isn’t much a reason to worry about it right now at all.
- Listen to complaints to get your core loop running.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your game!
