A question about Tycoon-like games

[ManuelFLara]

I'm a great fan of this genre and I have some ideas I think could sell well, but I think doing a management/tycoon game, with both heavy GUI and an isometric/3D engine representing the user decisions' results will need a great amount of development time, so I thought about doing only the GUI part. The bad part is that I think some (or a lot?, that's the question) of the potential customers might not be interested in a management game where you can't see your results "graphically", so I'd know what are your thoughts on this, both theorical (ideas, etc) and practical (a game from yours/someone you know that's only-GUI or GUI+visual representation, and how good is it doing). Thanks

[Gilzu]

Our very own cliffski made a great gtycoon style game Starship Tycoon (http://www.positech.co.uk/starshiptycoon/index.shtml), check it out.

[Pixel Gem Games]

You also have Jack Norton's ones :)

I love these kinds of games. I honestly don't care much about seeing the results as long as I know what happened.

A good example of this is perhaps Lemonade Tycoon. You decide what to do for the week, and then that week passes and you see what happens on a basic iso view, but you can choose to bypass that, which I think most people do after watching some static sprites moving around for a bit.

I think there is a market for GUI games like this, but it is a niche market.

[Dan MacDonald]

The general rule of thumb is, If you like a paticular type of game and there just arn't many retail/indie games that fall into that category, go ahead and make the game. Because you love the genere you will likely be able to make something that that other who love the genera will enjoy. Almost every nich game i've seen that has appealed to a specific underserviced audience has done well.

It used to be this was things like araknoid and connect 3 games but now these are pretty well represented. Jack has been doing exceptionally well for a new developer making nich sim games.

[Gilzu]

Ahhhh!!!!

how could I forget Jack Norton's games!!!! sorry, Jack!

here's a link:
http://www.winterwolves.com/main.htm

[Sunshine]

I am still waiting for the Tycoon Tycoon, in which you have to train your own tycoon, who then in turn goes to try to run a business.

:confused: Wait a minute? Did I just have a good idea?

[Jack Norton]

how could I forget Jack Norton's games!!!! sorry, Jack!
Hehe how could you forget about me! :D
The punishment will be testing The Goalkeeper for the whole weekend! ;)

[cliffski]

there is certainly a market, but the games themselves are hideously hard to make (compared to a puzzle game or arcade shooter at least). Partly this is because there are no books on hiow to do them.
Thankfully this aint a problem for me, having worked at elixir and lionhead, I've worked with a lot of people who know how to do this kinda stuff.
They are great games to make, but a terrible choice as a first game to make ;)

[Kai Backman]

They are great games to make, but a terrible choice as a first game to make ;)

And where, I ask you, where were you when I needed that small piece of advice? :D

Seriously, they are definetly nice projects. An easy way to train is to design the game on paper first. It just takes you a few days and if you can make it funny on paper, you can probably make it funny on the computer as well (in a slightly different form).

[cliffski]

Heh, Starlines INC (later starship tycoon) was my second game, and I had no idea what I was doing. I started it in 1998 as I recall...
When I rewrote it as StarshipTycoon 80% of the code was ditched and rewritten.
I could write the whole thing again from scratch in maybe 9 months now.. I learned so much.