A few months ago, I started working on a J2ME game called MegaTrader, which eventually fell by the wayside as I finished up on my honours work and settled into my new work. Lately, though, I’ve been spending some time again drafting ideas and notes on the game; notes I thought I’d write up here for the sake of commentary and the sake of getting it down in written form.
So, let’s start at the most basic iteration of the game itself, ignoring any details such as interface and representation. As I stated in the original article, the game can be summed up as Dope Wars in space. Thus, the mechanics of the game may be summed up as follows:
- Sell any inventory so as to make a profit.
- Buy more inventory at a low enough price to ensure a profit in the future (the nearer in the future and the higher the profit, the better).
- Travel to a different location, repeating the process from step 1.
This process is repeated until a pre-set time limit is reached, with travelling using one time unit, and inventory actions being “free” actions. The end goal of the game is to amass as much wealth as possible within the time limit, in effect competing with yourself to better a personal best high score.
Each turn, the inventory prices are randomised according to a item’s base value and some measure of variance. The skill involved in the game then relies on the player’s ability to recognise the base values and variances of inventory items, such that they know when a certain item is at a “low” or a “high” price, corresponding to a “buy” or a “sell” on the part of the player.
To add an additional level of randomisation to the game, random events may be introduced that alter the player’s stock or money levels, or drastically alter the variation in prices. This may be implemented using non-uniform random number generation, such that smaller variations are more common than extremely large variations, which may well count for a mere fraction of the random number space, but may potentially yield vast gains for the player.
At this basic level, the game does not invite many opportunities for strategic play, since the game may effectively be “broken” if a player collects enough data about inventory prices, disregarding any random fluctuations/events. The next article in this series will outline some of the ideas I’ve had to expand the gameplay to make the game more interesting and challenging to a player.
Tags: Games, j2me, mobile, programming