Currently, my game only saves player kills, deaths, and in-game rank.
My game currently gets around 30-40k players a day, and I’d estimate (based on badge numbers) that 25-33% of that are fresh players. Average play time sits a little under 15 minutes, with concurrent player count sitting at an average of 300-500 at a time.
I’ve noticed a lot of bigger, more successful tycoons are implementing saving and loading of the their entire builds for players to continue later on. I’ve thought about doing this, but my tycoon is two player so A) that would look weird and B) there’s only about 30-40 things both players can purchase on their own. I’m also worried that game revenue would go down, and it wouldn’t do much to attract new players/raise average play time, which I want to increase to 20-30 minutes.
Should I make bases save/load for players? I’d also make it so that there would be “rebirths” where you’d reset your base and get new perks, of course. I’m just worried how much I’d have to change monetization, prices for base parts, and overall gameplay to accomplish this and be successful.
How should I restructure monetization? In that past month I was able to get an over 1:1 robux to player ratio, but now it’s starting to fall a bit. I believe that if I did the saving thing and didn’t change the monetization/prices scheme at all, it would fall even more.
i used to play tycoons song much when they were popular and most of them never saved and it really got boring after a while i would recommend it saving
For 1 player tycoons, saving player progress is as important as the actual tycoon. No one wants to spend 30+ minutes on a tycoon, disconnect, and then find out that they lost all of their progress. Most tycoon players are younger, meaning most would get upset and leave.
For 2 player tycoons, assuming that the audience is still younger people, someone might join with their brother/sister interested in making the best military base and fight other people, and then leave once completed. If they were to rejoin a week or month later and find out that they still have their old progress, it would defeat the purpose of wanting to play again.
Alongside that, most 2 player tycoons have someone who builds and someone who creates weapons/something else that is vital to the game mechanics. If this were to save, you would either have walls holding nothing or random weapon pads over the tycoon. Were the fighter to join, they’d have no way to get the actual weapons without someone else on their team.
TLDR: I do not think you should save progress for a 2 player tycoon. If you do, you should prompt a UI asking if they want to load previous data/start over.
We already have that issue when people join and leave. It’s not super bad, but it can be awkward, so it wouldn’t change a whole lot, lol.
This is actually not a bad idea. I was also thinking of giving players the option to finish the tycoon in one go, “rebirth,” and they could do the tycoon over again with some benefits, either at that moment or later down the line. Still wouldn’t save the entire base.
I can tell you right now there is a decently sized community around the game that does replay pretty often
How so? I feel the game passes right now are suffice. And I’m more worried about developer products, since they are the bulk of my game’s (and most game’s) revenue.
Yeah, I definitely think you should. People will have continued motivation to play. Even if you wanted too you could possibly make the save feature a gamepass getting more revenue and more recurring players.
That right there is not a good idea. This would infuriate the players that can’t pay that rich people get to not have their progress erased.
As someone who has played your game before, I personally would advocate for saving, it’s just you’d need to be sure that you add a lot more the tycoons. In return for the ability to save make sure they have to spend a lot to build up their tycoon, making their efforts feel ever-more worth it when they finally reach the finish line.
As I said before, there’s already 30-40 items that builders and engineers buy. Most other tycoons I’ve seen that save have about that number, maybe a little more (usually around 50).
I think a lot of people, myself included, underestimate how long it takes to buy stuff in the game, due to how fast and easy it is to earn (and buy) cash in the game. I think changing the cash earning system alone would be enough to shift the balance.
How about just giving them an option to save their build? Then next time they play, they can choose whether to load a previous build or start a new one from scratch.
If this was a one player tycoon, this would work perfectly. Because this is a two player tycoon, it may or not work depending what the tycoon is like. The only way this would function is if both players on the tycoon buy the same things. However, if it’s a tycoon where red could buy the walls for example and blue would buy stairs then this wouldn’t work as they purchased different objects.
You should implement this. However, I see that other tycoons with save systems are getting very boring when your progress in the tycoon goes on. You should make something that prevents players from getting bored.
Why not make the game nearly endless (but the player has a lot of cash and for example if they go to the 2nd floor the cash giver that the stuff was placed on would help a lot), but will also save player progress, So, this is highly recommended. or, you can add a teleportation part to the ground floor of your tycoon on other floors if the player doesnt want to waste their time walking so much just to get their money.