Yonatan Shaham
Taxi + Trader Roguelike = New Game
I did not write about game development for a while, because I did not really do anything about it. But in the recent days, I started to toy with the idea of connecting two games I’ve developed previously to a demo level: the trader roguelike on which I wrote here many times, and the Taxi Tycoon game.
Both games originate from my interest in doing some other type of business game, and therefore they have a lot in common. At least in the way I perceive them.
How should I combine the two games?
My idea is to take the Taxi mechanics of waiting for passengers to flow and adjust prices, and replace it with the village scene from the trader roguelike and locate it on a pier with a boat instead of a taxi, and marching traders instead of passengers. From the trader roguelike to take the food consumption on the way, the exploration of new places, and the price differences.
I’ve made a very high-level sketch of the UI of both scenes.
Core game mechanics: nested game loops
I plan to have two main game loops, nested into one another. The inner loop would be the pier scene, and would work very much like the current Taxi game:
- Wait for new traders to come
- Trade with those who can accept your prices
- Adjust prices
- With time, consume food
- Replenish food stocks
The outer loop would express the economic effects of the trade:
- Make deals in a town
- With time, people get richer
- The prices they are willing to trade will increase, both for selling and for buying
- Food costs will increase as well
In such a structure, the outer loop balances the inner loop.
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