Some ideas for the genre of my next project, nothing is concrete yet, just want to get some feedback for what other people may want. And I am interested in hearing if any of you have some fun ideas for growth games.
I'll try to keep this brief since I want it to be readable, when I come back I'll have full design docs for the most popular genres. I have split up each genre in different sections:
Overview: brief description of the game and why growth would fit it
Difficulty/Time required: scale of 1-10 on how difficult it would be to implement and the time it would take, for reference I think GrowthRPG would be a 9
Scale of Growth: Size of characters at endgame. This would mainly be for height as that is the one that would cause most issues.
Speed of Growth: How fast/much your character would grow
Impact Growth has on the game: How Growth affects the game
Also small update to GrowthRPG went live, should hopefully fix some issues with crashes for some people.
4x Grand Strategy
Overview: Like Civilization but the more power/influence you hold the bigger you are, work to expand your civilization and yourself. I think this would work pretty well for growth because it would support a very large cap for growth, and the games center around amassing influence and power which would reflect itself in your player character.
You would start with being able walk inside of each tile when you are small but when you get bigger it zooms out more and they become tiles the size of a normal game, and all the interactions would go into a menu to make it easier to manage. Each tile would be its own little instanced level to keep that reference of exactly how big you get.
It would lend itself well to have different sources of growth with each different path of victory having the influence on your characters looks.
There would also be a great deal of focus on the personalities and interactions with the other civilization leaders.
Difficulty/Time required: 4/10 Other than map generation/loading I don’t think anything would be terribly difficult, grand strategy games are more about balance than anything else.
Scale of Growth: Planet. This would probably have the biggest scale of growth out of any proposal, a possible endgoal would be outgrowing the entire world. The downside to this is it would be focused on size more than anything, to keep everyone in the same relative field you would have to get bigger.
Speed of Growth: The length of each game I would aim for around the 5 hour mark. Although with the large disparity between the start and end scale there will be a lot of growth.
Impact Growth has on the game: Growth would be more of a reflection on what type of society you build, like your character would have muscle if they decided to be militaristic.
City Builder
Overview: Similar to Black and White where you would be the avatar of a civilization and the more they prosper the bigger you are. Similar to 4x, however this is a much smaller scale with no verses element, where you would be able to do things like talk to villagers or help gather resources. It would lend itself well to the character system, having all the random villages be submitted characters. This would also include the same tile system as previously mentioned in 4x along with swapping out interactions with menus to make it more manageable at higher levels of size.
Difficulty/Time required: 5/10 I don’t think this would be too terrible, the most difficult aspects would be map generation and AI.
Scale of Growth: Skyscraper
Speed of Growth: long/slow. Citybuilders often have decently long campaigns, most without a concrete ending, so possibly between 5-10 hours a map.
Impact Growth has on the game: Growth would be used to solve various problems and help develop your villages. Getting large enough would help you create new clearing that your villagers could build upon and each attribute would have a resource they make you better at collecting, like muscle for gathering stone and fat for growing food.
Tactics
Overview: Turn based tactics similar to Baldur’s Gate. It would essentially be like if the current active combat for GrowthRPG were turn based. So a lot less happening all at once, which would lend itself for greater amount of complexity, you still have movement, abilities would have certain ranges and accuracy. It would also have a stronger emphasis on companions giving them more diversity in skills to help you.
Difficulty/Time required: 10/10 By far would be the most complicated/time consuming
Scale of Growth: limited by arena size
Speed of Growth: long term growth with short term combat buffs similar to what GrowthRPG has now. Full playthrough being around 10+ hours.
Impact Growth has on the game: Tactics games have a lot of variable for combat anywhere from movement distance, pushback, to anything in between. Teammates could hang back to provide buffs to those in the frontlines, fat oriented characters could act as tanks, preventing enemies from getting past while legs would increase movement speed for flanking. All in all a lot of opportunities for different attributes to affect how the game is played
Slice of life
Overview: Casual game similar to Stardew valley, no combat but there would be minigames similar to what exists in GrowthRPG that would facilitate growth. Along with that there would be some sort of management mechanic like farming which you would use to passively increase stats and gain items. A focus on character interactions and developments such as being able to get married.
Difficulty/Time required: 3/10 This one would be short and easy, the most difficult parts would be coming up with characters and dialog along along with making the minigames fun and engaging enough.
Scale of Growth: Since this would be focused on living in a community with other people the size would be fairly limited, and instead the game would have to be more focused around expansion instead.
Speed of Growth: Slow. Full playthrough would vary with how much you want to do or beeline to the end. Growth having to be very limited at least in terms of size it would be fairly small and slow.
Impact Growth has on the game: Mechanically it would have very little impact, the game would be more sandbox, the mechanics serving growth instead of the other way around.
Action RPG
Overview: Top down RPG similar to Diablo or Path of exile. If people want me to continue the GrowthRPG this is what I would want to change it to. Everything would be on the overworld, no more loading into a fight, you meet enemies and defeat them on the overworld. There would be a bigger emphasis on stacking and maintaining buffs. There would be one central hub world along with randomly generated dungeons. The hub world would contain NPCs who you could do quests for or form relationships with. And dungeons would work similar to what they are now, but with more variety.
Difficulty/Time required: 9/10 It would be very mechanically dense along with requiring a good number of assets. It would only be slightly easier than GrowthRPG is to develop because there is no awkward loading between the overworld and fights, and most of where you do your growing would be in an instanced random gen level.
Scale of Growth: Limited by hub size when out of a dungeon and limited to the entire map of a dungeon when you are in it.
Speed of Growth: small long term and large short term growth. You would level up much like you do now, but as you progress through levels you would earn level long buffs, like say if you defeat an enemy you get more muscle for the duration of the level, or be able to activate buffs making yourself bigger.
Impact Growth has on the game: Similar to how the GrowthRPG works right now but no more sacrifice mechanic, instead a more traditional skill tree.
Roguelike (Subgenre)
Overview: This one is a bit more vague as other game proposals could also be roguelike, but I think its worth mentioning. The genre lends itself well to growth because roguelikes are about stacking as many synergies as you can to increase your numbers as much as possible along with developing your character. The more buffs and synergies you stack the bigger you get. If I were to aim for a specific type it would probably be a bullet heaven like Vampire Survivor
Difficulty/Time required: varied, however in general roguelikes are easier to test and bugfix than regular full scaled games.
Scale of Growth: varied
Speed of Growth: fast short term growth, perhaps slow long term with being able to upgrade your character through repeat playthroughs.
Impact Growth has on the game: Varied, going to depend a lot on the type of game.
Survival (Subgenre)
Overview: Similar to roguelike more of a subgenre, but still I think it fits the Growth theme well. With survival games its about going from just scraping by to thriving. Often this is through progression with either items or character skills, but this would also be with growth.
Difficulty/Time required: varies
Scale of Growth: varies
Speed of Growth: slow. Survival games usually take quite a while for a playthrough, though theres no concrete details it would probably be around 10 hours.
Impact Growth has on the game: Similar to the citybuilder different attributes would help you gather different resources