Project: Dark Star
A mobile idle game about resource managent in space
2 Person Project • Hobby Project • 15 Months development - Ongoing
My role:
Solo Programmer, Game Designer
Project: Dark Star was originally a game jam project but we had so much fun making it and thought it had potential so we kept going. The mobile game scene is often looked down upon by other developers but we felt that our idea of combining units into parties and sending them out to planets in real time worked best on mobile since play sessions are short and frequent. While following some troupes of the mobile game market in general, we still wanted to make it fun for ourselves to play as well so the game's main complexety comes from combining different units to build parties fit for each challenge and to manage your limited resources effectively.
Core game loop
In the core game loop the player sends out units to planets to gather resources, uses these resources to buy new units and explore further in the solar system. Everyting happens in real time so sending out units can take between a few minutes at the start of the game to a few hours in later stages. It's meant to be a casual game that you can play on the train, during a lunch break or whenever you have spare time during the day.
Timers
What is an idle game without timers?
Timers are used as a balancing tool by having planets further away contain better loot and having units with more health take longer to heal.
Timers are also used to always give the player something to look forward to, "In 4 minutes the unit I need has finished healing" or "In 27 minutes the party I sent out are coming back with resources I need".
Ultimately, TIME = MONEY. Humans are impatient, paying money to not wait for things is common in mobile games and is also the monetization strategy that we decided to use in Project: Dark Star. It can be frustrating to not get access to content and feel like you have to pay to unlock it which we've done our best to avoid. The players don't miss any content by not paying and for those that choose to pay I hope that the instant gratification of things coming sooner rather than later feels worth it.
Units & Balance
The game has five distinct classes, Scout, Hunt, Carry, Guardian and Search that each have their strength and weaknesses.
Each unit has different stats for how many resources they can hunt / carry and unique abilites that can be upgrades from bronze, to silver, to gold. Units costs resources to purchase and then certain treasures that can be found on planets by search units to assemble.
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All of this made the game a challenge to balance. After we started playtesting we noticed that everything in the game overall was too cheap and where we aimed for 3-4 weeks of semi-regular play to finish the game it could be completed in 1 week. Many iterations later after the balancing tightend up we still noticed some players having very different experiences from others regarding the difficulty of the game. This was mainly due to the random nature of units players got in the shop. The shop only offers 3 units at a time and resets every 12 hours so depending on which units players got offered the first 12 & 24 hours it greatly impacted the speed at which they could continue the rest of the game. To address this we split units into groups of Epic, Rare and Common units, and weighted the randomness of the shop to offer the more cheap and weak common units at the start.
Localization
All text for the game is written in Google Sheets with separate fields for each language and then exported into unity as a .csv. A language manager then parses the .csv file and every request to display text in the game is done by asking the language manager for a specific tag and the manager providing the text corresponding to that tag in the currently selected language.
Player retention
To keep players coming back and thinking about the game long term we added daily rewards and achievements for players to collect. While it's an idle game, we found that some players don't want to minimize the game while waiting for units to return so we added a few minigames they can do to keep busy and earn a few more resources while waiting.
