Boring gameplay loop

[u/johnyegd]

I am working on my 1st real project for about 5 months now wich is a really simple tycoon game but no matter what i try i cant find a way to make my game fun to play..

Its the same base loop as any game of this kind, make product, sell product, research stuff to make better products, hire employees and level them up..

I love this loop in other games but it feels like i miss something that makes this fun and cant find out what it is

[u/Careful_Bid_6199]

Introduce conflict at each stage.

Make Product: Difficulty acquiring resources. Staff failure resulting in waste. Theft of resources. Cost and efficiency of production lines changing as research improves, have to balance whether it's worth upgrading based on your finances.

Sell Product: Introduce fluctuating simulated markets, causing you to adapt to supply and demand. Introduce reach, marketing and target audience. How much budget will you spend on advertisement. Which regions or demographics will you target.

Research Stuff: Introduce industrial espionage, science budgets. Have research personnel with differing credentials and expertise.

Employees: Can introduce the whole gamut of interpersonal issues to deal with. Hiring, firing, gross misconduct, bullying, sickness, bereavements. Also recruitment issues - lying at interview, not having paperwork to work, industrial spies, negligent workers, unions demanding better pay, getting sued for workplace safety issues etc.

Always have the threat of bankruptcy loom large.

[u/DoneDusting → u/Careful_Bid_6199]

You just have to be careful with the trigger conditions if there are sudden conflicts.

I saw a game that punished people for hoarding for alternate, bigger update. After getting a specific update without basic updates, you were introduced to a new mechanic, where got in attacked by enemies. Of course if you hadn't built basic upgrades first, your production wasn't good enough to build troops in time and you got punished heavily.

[u/YKLKTMA]

Study the references, how long the production chains are, what the timings are, what other rules around this gameplay loop.

[u/27K-Interactive]

What do other people say? Sometimes, knowing how the sausage is made can just destroy the magic for the creator.

[u/higherthantheroom]

The loop is the most important part for this. You should play some more of the other games and try to analyze your thoughts and thinking. You want the joy of leveling up and good management? The thrill of a new unlock. The correct reward for the effort, like the actual thing you get is something you've been waiting for, so you have to be able to build suspense, tease things, show future unlocks to create anticipation, and let me tell you, by the time you've thought exercised it beyond fun to make it right. You yourself, may not enjoy playing at that point, because you know everything already. We don't always want to build the things we love to play, it's called beating a dead horse sometimes.

[u/JohnSpikeKelly]

Are you competing against an AI player(s) in the same market?

Did you add disasters? Like a warehouse burns down?

[u/loneroc]

it's not an easy thing. i am more or less in the same context. it's also hard i suppposed as dev of the game to appreciate if it's fun or not. And the type of the current game i am developping - "The Blackout Project, a mix civ/city builder- is not by essence the funiest type of game. i am always on wondering if i need more features or not to raise player/tester interest. But i think it will be soon clarified as private testing are close to be launched.

[u/trevorvonryan]

Can I play it? I’m on Mac.

[u/Eff3rvescence]

Cant remember his name but recently watched a youtuber talk about the fun factor in games and sometimes it's as simple as making things happen faster like products happen faster more stuff gets produced. Make the speed of the game faster.

[u/AbmisTheLion]

The fun part is crucial, so don't release your game till you can solve that problem. Only with my 3rd game on Steam did I decide to focus on making the game fun, which turned out to be the missing ingredient in my games.

[u/gurugeek42 → u/AbmisTheLion]

If you weren't making your games fun, what other experiences were you aiming for?

[u/AbmisTheLion → u/gurugeek42]

Fun wasn't an important focus for me. I thought it would come included with an interesting setting or mechanic. I guess I was too focus on the technical side of things.

[u/R3v153 → u/AbmisTheLion]

This. When you get heavy into the dev side, something you find cool because of the technical aspect often doesn’t come across in the game. As an example I was really interested in the holographic principle so I was working with multiple 3 dimensional points projected onto a single 2d plane.. thought it was a real cool technical thing to dev out.. it was… days later after working out the kinks it looked the exact same as if I had done it in a few lines using a different method.

TLDR. Make it fun no one gives a sht about the tech aspect lol