A Money Problem

So I had been showing my game to Xen and BadTV and Bubbles and Moxie and I had it to a pretty playable point.  There was a town (which consisted of your room and a store) and cave (which had a couple of wizards).  You could go into the cave and wizards would drop green orbs, which I decided would be the currency of the game.

The only things you could purchase with the orbs at the time were escape ropes and potions.  Escape ropes were obviously very important.  Once you had gone down a level in the cave you couldn't get out without one.  Potions were less important.  They behave like fairies in Zelda games.  They are more useful now, but at the time the wizards in the cave had a hard time killing you.

So at this point everyone was pretty much telling me they didn't feel attached to their money.  One of the money mechanics is that if you die in the cave you lose all your money.  So since they didn't feel attached to their money, they didn't care if they died either.  Severe problem.

It was then the second major mechanic was introduced to the game:  A furniture shop.  The idea came about when I was trying to figure out what your room should look like.  It was empty at the time (save for a bed and piggy bank) which reminded me of Harvest Moon 64.  So I decided instead of pre-populating the room the player should do it manually.  It was then I took a look at a few games:

Animal Crossing
Azure Dream
Dark Cloud

All pretty awesome games in my opinion.  So I had a money problem and a furniture idea.  Animal Crossing is an excellent example of a game where players are attached and rewarded by money.  The two major reasons for this I think are you can choose what to buy, and what you buy has a physical presence.

My game at this point could easily incorporate a furniture store where you buy different furniture that could appear in your room, but I felt the idea wasn't complete.  The idea of the game was to crawl through a dungeon, and try to get farther and farther in while eradicating wizards.  The furniture store would "fix" the money issue, but as is wouldn't fold into the direction of the game.

That is where Azure Dream and Dark Cloud came in.  Both games involve the player trekking in and out of a dungeon, and managing a town on the outside.  These two mechanics meshed really well because they were interlinked.  In Dark Cloud, while in a dungeon you would find buildings that could be placed in town and you wanted to exit the dungeon to do so.  When you got in town and placed the building you might find a new weapon in that building that made you want to dive back into the dungeon.  So I wanted to fold the furniture store and dungeon together, and I decided in the end on the simple idea of having each piece of furniture do something that would help in the dungeon or in the game in general. ( A bed that lets you recover faster, a piggy bank that accrues interest).  The furniture quirkiness has also added a bit more charm to the game as well.