Hello. I’ve had my thoughts on planning out a strategy-based game, and I thought of a very interesting ‘problem.’ The problem is: Are slower-paced games actually worth making?
My thoughts
Personally, I believe that slower-paced games appeal to older audiences, though in order to keep the player occupied, the game needs to move at a semi-reasonable pace. Younger audiences often can be rather impatient.
What are your thoughts? Do you think I should go through with the idea? If so, do you have any ideas how I can keep the game moving at a semi-reasonable pace, or do you think I should keep it a slower-paced game to allow the player to think?
In my eyes, the pace should fit the game.
There is no “right pace”. People play all sorts of game types. Take TDS for example, that even got into the Easter Event 2020.
Like @DarkitalX said, there is truly no right pace for a game, but you don’t want your tycoon doable in under thirty minutes. It has to move along naturally, fitting with the game.
Pace of a game is a factor for the variable interest of the audience. Majority of the slower-paced games are like chess, it is strategy and requires a lot of thinking before proceeding to the next step. Believing in younger players would easily lose their interest to the game due to the attention span is probably a prejudice, you’ll have at least some players on this setting though.
To keep the game’s pace reasonably faster, you can set a timer per turn or whatever to keep the players at toes, like bullet chess, where your timer is extremely short for the entirety of a round. Maybe you can introduce a similar analogy to chess time control? They classify them as “bullet”, “blitz”, “rapid” and “standard”.
I believe you can certainly continue with this idea, knowing that there is not many other games focusing on the strategy than chess. Maybe chess is intimidating when put up with competition about strategy games. To put this in perspective, chess is pretty generic and an all-time classic strategy board game. You can certainly use different concepts to work on a strategy game.
I think you wont get a LARGE playerbase if thats what youre aiming for but you will get a devoted playerbase who will want to see your game grow and appreciate fine details, you also have to take into account how people feel cause some days people want just a no thought required clicking fighting thing and other days people want to be enveloped into a world