I saw The Space Tree and really liked its main idea about not having upgrades. Besides the general rule that restricting what you can use leading to more creative games, I think not using upgrades may end up with a more interesting game, with more interesting features. You won’t end up with the linear “wait for upgrade, buy, repeat” loop so many games fall into. You’re nest of things affecting each other should be much smaller without upgrades, and relatedly you won’t need to worry about things like seeing an effect reference another effect by name and you need to scour through a grid of upgrades finding the one it affects.
That is to say, I’m pretty interested in this project and how it goes, and if it might serve as an example to not overly rely on upgrades in general. I’m already loving the idea of points being used for both space energy or making space buildings. Giving currency multiple purposes always pleases me.
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I think it can be cool, but a game without upgrades will still need milestones or something else to change things up. Having to reset and click every single building to assign them isn’t too tedious when you only have like 50 space, but when there’s 2500 space by the late game, there’s no way anyone would want to add buildings manually one by one. There’s gonna need to be some QoL later on (like an option to write how many buildings you want to assign, a max assign button, a remove one button, maybe autoassign) and it might still be good to have some other boosts (like Primary Building takes 0.5 space each/takes 0.1 space each/takes no space).
Point is: No upgrades? Maybe. No upgrades or milestones? Definitely not.
I’ve made my stance on automation clear, and how I don’t like when the gameplay is outright replaced by a new layer, so I’d rather see things like a button to buy 10 buildings at a time or something, and to have future mechanics keep building on the base. We’ll see where @randomtuba takes it though. (also pinging him since we’re discussing his game)
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that game needs a little more touch-ups before it’s good
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Yeah, I have planned for using literally anything else. I am using milestones, buyables, challenges, and more.
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