Hey there! I am working on my game, a speed simulator type game, and I have a question on how I should do my pets! I am going to add rebirths to my game, and I have 19 pets at the moment. Before adding rebirths, you would buy pets and keep them forever, but now that there will be rebirths, you will lose the pets and start again. So, should I lower and balance the prices of the pets, and add a lot more, like maybe 40, or should I use the pets I have and make the prices higher since there are fewer? I would love to also hear your comments on this!
I would make more just to have more diversity and variety in your game, you can never go wrong with that! One question though, do pets give any advantage in the game? Or are they purely cosmetic?
They all give advantages and perks, I forgot to mention that, if they were all cosmetics then I would just make tons and tons, but since they actually help you, I am a little unsure…
Why do players actually lose pets when rebirthing? It makes more sense to keep pets while rebirthing and making them harder to get; this would make players have a goal (achieve the pet they want).
Ah, well given this I’m not sure if I would make 40 like you were planning. Stat boosts are good, but it seems like some pets would be too similar to others to be really worth going out of your way for. While buying pets is a good solution, I feel you could increase engagement if you added quests, or certain things you need to do to get pets. For me it would feel more rewarding than just clicking a button and buying the pet.
Hmm… Well, I was kinda thinking that you still make it really hard to get let’s say the highest pet, but then if you lose them you would still want to maybe come back and get other stuff, because if you just keep the highest pet the whole time, you kinda just dominate everything… But I don’t know…
Keeping the highest pet all the time definitely doesn’t seem very intuitive like he was suggesting. While I do agree with him that it would be a bit irritating to lose the pet that you worked hard for, I think it’s better than being able to keep the best pet and never having to go through the typical gameplay like you did on your first playthrough.
That being said though, you’ll have to add an incentive to rebirth if there isn’t one already, because without it nobody will rebirth. Many games do this, so I’m sure yours does too, but it can be a fairly simple thing like a coin/xp multiplier to help you advance more efficiently. I think this would keep the rewarding nature of rebirthing even though you don’t keep your pets.
Of course! That’s good, now there’s a base incentive to rebirth.
If it interests you, you could add an exclusive cosmetic for each rebirth, elevating in rarity and complexity the higher you go in your rebirths. Things like particle effects, titles, skins for certain things, misc items etc. I think this will give an added bonus to rebirthing, because players will want to see what they’ll get on their next rebirth, resulting in a fairly satisfying game loop.