Thinking of making a Tycoon game, thoughts?

I actually re-thought my strategy, and I think I know what I want to do. I'd like to make game like Shopping Street: Shopping Street

In short, the concept is to have a store instead of a street, with shelves instead of stores. On the shelves you could store "games", which are categorized into genre. The amount of customers that enter the store in a day depends on the amount spent on advertising (e.g. $1 = 1 customer). There is a specific genre they are looking for, and if the store doesn't have it stocked, they don't buy anything.

That's the basic idea. There are other ideas such as featuring a game for more sales, making the shelves more appealing to increase the chances of a customer buying something, and so on.

Where would I start in creating something like this? I would love to hear any suggestions or ideas you may have.

Thanks.

You could do like video game business sim. Similar to Gamedev Story and the Gamebiz games. Thats one of my ideas.

You could do like video game business sim. Similar to Gamedev Story and the Gamebiz games. Thats one of my ideas.

I thought about that, but I'm leaning more towards a social business game, if at all possible. Failing that, I may do a sim where you run your own video game shop. :)

I just don't know how I'd do that. I'm still very new to game dev, I've never made a game before. I know a business sim might not be the best place to start for a newbie, but I have my heart set on that genre.

Hello Joshua

I don't want to sound discouraging here but although social games like Lemonade Tycoon, and Zynga's FarmVille might seem like they would be relatively simple games to make. In reality it took thousands of hours, and teems of developers to create these games not to mention the overall cost. For example the total development cost quoted by Zynga just to bring FarmVille to its beta faze was over $130,000.

But that aside html5, css3, and Construct 2 are all cutting edge technology which means they are all knew, and are being constantly developed, and improved. So you will be constantly learning new things all the time.

You see I also want to create social games. I came here from a web development background, and have been studding, and following html5 game development since early 2009 when the first few html5 game making tutorials started to emerge. Construct 2 is an incredible piece of software that allows you to create games without any coding. But to make a social game like you described you will need to know at least all the basics of html5, css3, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL.

I would suggest starting slow taking baby steps at first. This will keep game development fun and exciting. First follow Ashley's Beginner's guide to Construct 2. I learned so much from his tutorial <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle"> It gave me a whole new perspective on game development I still go back to it to reference things when I'm stuck. Then try to make your own original simple game from what you learned. Just finishing a simple game will give you a great feeling of accomplishment. After that read the other tutorials there is a wealth of accumulating knowledge there. Then move on to making a social game. If you don't know any of the languages I mentioned earlier http://www.w3schools.com/ is a great place to learn the basics. And I would also recommend reading Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript by Mario Andres Pagella. It will give you a good idea of whats all involved in making real-time social games.

Hey Wink, thanks for your response. I'm actually familiar with the resources you mentioned.

Have you seen this? indiegamepod.com/social-game-book.pdf

It's a how-to guide for making a social game in just 3 days (although it assumes you have knowledge of the LAMP stack first).

The makers of the book even included a game engine to go with the book: chromacoders.org/blog

I'm pretty sure both of those resources are outdated however. There was a online program called appainter that enabled users to create facebook games like mafia wars without any coding. The devs haven't worked on it for a very long time though, and it's kinda outdated.

I actually re-thought my strategy, and I think I know what I want to do. I'd like to make game like Shopping Street: freewebarcade.com/game/shopping-street

In short, the concept is to have a store instead of a street, with shelves instead of stores. On the shelves you could store "games", which are categorized into genre. The amount of customers that enter the store in a day depends on the amount spent on advertising (e.g. $1 = 1 customer). There is a specific genre they are looking for, and if the store doesn't have it stocked, they don't buy anything.

That's the basic idea. There are other ideas such as featuring a game for more sales, making the shelves more appealing to increase the chances of a customer buying something, and so on.

Where would I start in creating something like this?

Hmm, a forum where we could refine game design ideas would be awesome.

Thanks again for your responses.

i also like this games,

i would take the shoppingstreet concept and try to completly recreate it

in sense, you can take the graphics as placeholders, and work out what is needed to make it work, the basic workings are a good basic for your store shelf idea, once you got that you can expand on the idea and not get lost in the basic functionality

i would start creating a shop and have sprites spawning and figure out how they will interact with the shop, workout the vars you gonna need per person, and how all this works in c2-events,

good luck!

No actually I haven't seen that guide before. I just scanned through it a little bit it seems to have some good advice but I don't know about that part that says "if you don't know PHP, and C++ don't worry you can pick it up as you go". lol Not in 3 days. PHP is fairly easy to learn but C++ is a whole different story.

Iv been playing that Shopping Street game you linked me to that's a cool little game. <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle">

I like your game concept idea. It looks to me like you already started creating it. Just keep writing down all your ideas for the game. It helps me to make some rough sketches, and write my game ideas on the same piece of paper as I go. Once you got it all on paper then you can start to edit your ideas this will make things go much smoother. Try to keep it simple some of the best games come from the simplest ideas.

After you got a rough game on paper then the fun stuff starts the graphics. <img src="smileys/smiley4.gif" border="0" align="middle"> Some people like to hand draw there sprites then scan them to there computer, and some like to create all there sprite on there computer that is up to you. Either way you will need a good image manipulation program like The Gimp, or Paint.NET either will work, and they are both free. Photoshop is also good but expensive. I wouldn't buy it unless you actually made a living with it.

I would suggest that you take breaks from this, and go follow Ashly's Beginner's guide to Construct 2. It will teach you a lot that you will need to know to put it all together.

Also your game idea will require some PHP scripting, and database work. Notpad++ is a nice free text editor. And I like to use WAMP as a development server. Don't forget if you don't know the basics to those languages I mentioned I left you the links earlier. <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle"> Once you got your databases built, and all your PHP scripts written you can use the AJAX object in Construct 2 to implement them as you are building your game. Ghengis wrote a nice tutorial on the basics of that: AJAX Example with Construct 2.

These are just all suggestions on how I would go about creating a game like yours. There not the only way to though. There are a lot of very smart, creative, and helpful people here so if you get stuck just make a good effort to search the forums for an answer, and if you cant find it just ask for help. But a heads up questions about PHP coding are frowned upon here because it is very advanced, and beyond the scope of these forums.

I hope this helps a little. I will be looking forward to playing your game. Good luck with it <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle">

I want to create a tycoon game i need partners reply me fast.