Closing the loop and thinking about UX
I worked about two more hours on the game. I closed the basic game loop and made some decisions about it. When I started, it was not clear to me exactly how the loop ends. I started working by copying code snippets from the Taxi game to recreate its core game mechanic:
- People march in from of the taxi or boat and react to the price.
- In the taxi case, if the taxi fare is lower than the fare the person is willing to pay, they take a set.
- In the boat case, if the buy price is higher than the price the person is demanding, they sell their goods.
Coming up with a win condition
The loss condition was already clear to me: if you run out of food you lose. Some would say this is a common theme in my games. But the win condition was not clear to me when I started. I had a vague idea that when the player has enough goods they can decide to set sail. To keep things simple, I added a cap for the boat inventory. Once the boat is full, the player sets sail automatically. In the future, I might use this to allow upgrading the boat to hold more inventory. I added a lose scene with just the text “No food”, and a similar temporary win scene with the text “Sailing”.
You can see the game in action in this video (rendering is a bit jumping due to screen recorder):
Product management aspects
As I noted in the previous post, my goal is to get feedback as soon as possible, on a piece of working software. So now I have a working software, can I get feedback? I think that at this point it is very clear that the game UX is horrible. You can’t understand what’s going on. It is hard even for me. So I guess I don’t need to show this to a user or a player in order to know that improving the UX is the next step.
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