The Brew Inn

This game is money making automation game. Selling beer to the tavern to make money. Using tree fruits and different machines to build the process of making the beer. Each machine and item costs money to build and removing them will sell it. Different biomes sell for higher amounts as they are different type of beer which can only be unlocked after a certain amount is earnt.

Working in a team of 2 designers, 2 artists and 1 programmer. We all played our part in making this game. As a designer, working with the other designer, we designed all the aspects of the game world. The process and machines needed to create the beer. And the different biomes that produce different beer trees and different prices of everything. We chose pixel art as the style as our artists did not know 3D modelling and we were struck with limitations. The artwork didn't get finished by the due date but we were more aiming to get the gameplay finished over everything else as the game would become a playable alpha state. Because of these limitations, I had to fill in and create the machine assets as the artists couldn't keep up. I filled in for them.

The design aspects I needed to think about when it comes to pricing is to make sure it wouldn't be too cheap that the game would become boring. The prices of the machines and profit needed to be enough so that the player could grind a little bit but not grind a lot as this would become draining and boring. The excitement of this game is that saving up money and gaining money to expand on the players work stations and base would become achievable after a certain amount of time.
Another aspect we needed to think about were the different biomes. Thinking about what they would look like, what kind of reward the tree fruits would give the player and how much you would need to earn in order to unlock that area. The reward needed to be significantly more then the previous biome as it needed to be worth unlocking. Otherwise whats the point in using the next biome if the fruit tree on the first biome gives you enough. So thinking about this was an important design choice. I think another good design choice we made was that having a fruit tree that comes from the sand on the outside of the map. This turns into glass and develops into bottled beer and sell it for more. This was a good choice as it makes the game more interesting and gives the player something to invest in.

Us designers came up with a cool wisp mechanic that would carry the fruit from the tree to the machine. We, as a team, didn't have enough time as we only had 1 programmer that could program this. So we had to prioritise more important things like gameplay, artwork and base things that would make the game playable. It was an idea that would be implemented if we had more time.