- Andrew Banks
- Austin Rhodes
- Joshua Byers
- Holland Johnsin
- Dylan Sullenberger
Merchant Sim 1434 is an incremental/idle game that blends classic clicker-style progression with a simulated market. Though plenty of incremental/idle games have been done before, ours has the unique angle of allowing the player to trade their earned rewards in a simulated market that takes inspiration from real world stock trading. Our team collectively has an interest in gaming and a curiosity of game development, and is eager to try our hand at it using the software design process. We’re defining ‘incremental/idle game’ as a genre in which players are presented with passive, simple decisions that incrementally progress the gameplay. In our case, players begin with a small amount of money and earning potential and through passive and simple interactions are able to grow their worth and spend this money to unlock new features. The simulated market serves to multiply the player’s earned capital, allowing the player to invest and speculate, eventually attaining digital exuberance.
The primary customer for Merchant Sim 1434 is the general public (whoever wants to play our game), and our customers seek entertainment. While their underlying problem to be solved is boredom, our customerts also want to experience a fatasy world with quests and invest in a market without any real risks. Our software in the context of the real world market shows that our game stands out from other idle games becuase of its unique market element. From the customer's point-of-view, our solution will solve the customers' boredom and allow customers to invest in the market with no real world monetary liabilites. The customer will also benefit from our proposed solution as they will no longer be bored and will instead be entertained. Additionally, our game provides a unique experience by introducting the player to a stock market in a fantasy setting. We have already tested the idea on at least one person, and they were interested. We could know if customers got the benefits we want to provide by creating a feedback system or asking for reviews of our game. Our customer-centric measures of success are five star reviews.
Our software will allow the user to trade "stocks" through a simulated stock market and gain money through an idle-game-type quest system that they can, in turn, use in the stock market. Mainly, our system will consist of the stock market and the idle quests, as well as the user interface. Currently, the stock market simulation is meant to be weak, we're only planning on adding buying and selling of stocks, no calls, no preferred stocks vs. common stocks or anything too complex, just a number of different stocks for things like stocks, scrolls, etc. We aren't trying to make an accurate stock market simulation. The idle quest system will also be rather simple, with different possibilities of success. The lower the chance of success, the higher the reward. Minimally, we would have just the stock market side of things, with all of the aforemention simplicity, as that would be the more important piece of this. Post-game content, a developed story, world-building events, graphs representing how various stocks have done recently and more types of quests are all possible enhancements we could add that customers would like. For example: The ruler declares war. Now, swords are worth more, which the user may be able to take advantage of. Testing will consist of us playing the game, running the stock market for some time to ensure it functions alright, and letting other people play the game. Our chosen programming/style sheet/markup languages will be HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery.
Nobody on our team has ever made anything similar to this project before. While we have all programmed before, we will be using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS to build the language, which a couple of us may have worked with a little in the past, but not to the extent we will be in this project. In addition, jQuery is brand new to all of us. It will be a good learning experience for us all. Since this is new to all of us, we plan to rotate our roles so that we can each get experience in multiple areas. Our starting roles are listed below.
- Narrative/Design - Holland Johnson
- Interface - Joshua Byers
- Research - Dylan Sullenberger
- Software Design - Austin Rhodes
- Project Management - Andrew Banks
Schedule: We believe that if the team keeps to a tight schedule, completion of the project is feasible. Our basic idea is not very complicated, but we hope to implement more features, time allowing. We will mostly meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays before and after classes on Discord to discuss the project's progress and give eachother updates. We can also communicate on the text section of discord at all hours of the day to ask for help or discuss things.
| Week | Task |
|---|---|
| 1 | Draft the proposal. Research stock market to design a good replicate system. |
| 2 | Revise project proposal. Get the team acclimated to new technologies. |
| 3 | Work on the project. Get basic infrastructure up and running. |
| 4 | Finish first draft of the software. Create a status report. |
| 5 | Implement quest system and touch up stock market system. Improve user interface. |
| 6 | Finish second draft. Create a second status report. |
| 7 | Analyze where we are at in the project and determine what features can be feasibly added. |
| 8 | Finish 3rd draft. Create a third status report. |
| 9 | Continue to add additional features while fine tuning the other systems. Improve user interface. |
| 10 | Finish final draft. Write a project report. |
We will have to look into potential copyright issues with the title of our game and potential patents that exist. We must be clear that our game is in no way like the real stock market and does not offer financial advice. Our game will not run off of real stocks, so the only thing the team needs is a basic understanding of the market. If the full functionality can not be achieved then we will cut out the quest/raid portion of the game and leave it as a basic stock market game. The reduced functionality will operate, but it may be a bit basic/less engaging if the quest system is removed.