Until you realize your goal as a player is not only vague, but completely undefined. What are you working towards? Fighting your way through likely 1000's of impossible to defeat robots for the chance to shoot at a computer hopefully making it blow up?
You don't want to do that? Well that's you. Not me. :P
Really? You'll pay a quarter every time you die. And there's no reward. And in Scryms original pitch, as they said almost verbatim, "Then the game ends. Maybe we restart it. MAYBE."
Yeah, I grew up on Nintendo and when arcades still sort of existed.
I think there is a critical flaw in your plan, Scott: the notion that you could design a game that nobody would consider "fun."
I know a guy who lights his dick on fire because it's "fun."
Just sayin'.
Yes, of course there will be people who will like it. The point is that the game will be designed to make you feel like you are in a horrible post-apocalyptic world where everything sucks. Some people will like being in that kind of world, most won't.
Also, I note that this particular manifestation of the "vision" was designed to be impossible to monetize as-is specifically so that the point that any model of monetization changes said vision could be made readily.
The reward for playing a persistent causal game is inherent, it's having something make a permanent change. Even if it's that your corpse was heaped upon the pile of other corpses. The reward for playing a high difficulty persistent causal game is that it's really hard to do something significant, so when you do have a more noticeable impact, it's going to show as much.
If anything, the game shouldn't be turned off or reset if you win. It should be left in place as a monument to what was done. Every body still laying there where it fell.
That said, if it were actually terminator themed, and you didn't beat the last level in the absolutely perfect way on a single attempt, it would not be unexpected for a sudden "the game has been reset, the terminators have learned from their mistakes and sent one of their own back in time to correct the problem" and force the players to have to try to get back to that same point just to try the "final boss" for a second time, based on what they learned from round 1 but with changes.
That's why it was used as an example in our Money Making Game panel. What if someone used this business model that has never been used before with a game that doesn't align itself neatly into any existing genre?
For the record, games like Triple Town do something similar. You get X number of turns an hour, which accumulate and cap at some number. After you use up your turns (which seems to always happen RIGHT in the middle of the game), you pay money to buy more or you're SOL. Nobody has used the model in an action game (usually it's something turn based so you can easily calculate how many moves one has used), but it is somewhat similar to the coin operated premise.
Oh, and despite the F2P bullshit, Triple Town is a half-decent puzzle game. Not the greatest puzzler by any sense, but worth a try (especially so you could add it to the presentation).
Comments
I know a guy who lights his dick on fire because it's "fun."
Just sayin'.
I was working on an analogy to the Hostel movies but couldn't make it float.
If anything, the game shouldn't be turned off or reset if you win. It should be left in place as a monument to what was done. Every body still laying there where it fell.
That said, if it were actually terminator themed, and you didn't beat the last level in the absolutely perfect way on a single attempt, it would not be unexpected for a sudden "the game has been reset, the terminators have learned from their mistakes and sent one of their own back in time to correct the problem" and force the players to have to try to get back to that same point just to try the "final boss" for a second time, based on what they learned from round 1 but with changes.
Oh, and despite the F2P bullshit, Triple Town is a half-decent puzzle game. Not the greatest puzzler by any sense, but worth a try (especially so you could add it to the presentation).