Things To learn from Holiday Island

[JL2579]

Hey everyone,
I recently downloaded Holiday Island again and played a round to relive some old memories and have fun! Since your game is going to be similar, I wanted to give some initial feedback right from the start that I came up with whilst playing Holiday Island.:


-HI only used a signed int for the amount of money, with clever playstyle it is possible to reach the limit of 21 Billion within less than 25 years of gameplay, make sure that you use a long int if you use a similar balancing system ;)

-HI basically only had bigger and more expensive Hotels/Houses over time. In order to give more strategy options, consider that each House/hotel should have strenghs/weaknesses in the following categories: -upfront costs (low/high) -location quality dependency ( needs good location to run well/ is not so dependend on good location) - distribution of wealth of visitors (mostly rich/mostly poor) - amount of visitors (low/high) -Space requirements(huge/small)
So basically, there should be at least around 32 different combinations of these options , of which some get unlocked over the progress of the game, but not just bigger/more expensive.
ALSO: you don't need to explain the balancing system in detail (the players hould try to figure it out by playing), but every building description should at least include a hint on its strenghts/weaknesses.

-I saw that you already implemented that, but one thing that was annoying me a lot with HI was that you could simply place a lonely piece of street somewhere and there was no need to actually have a grid of connected streets. I saw that you improved that already, many thanks!

-make the location quality not only dependend on the nature around a field (amount of green spaces in the vincinity) but, depending on the type of building, on the vincinity of i.e. restaurants/shops etc. Some buildings might also simply run better if there is empty space around them ( like a villa for example).

- in HI there was no real need for sort of "balanced" building, house visitor count was completely unaffected by the number of restaurants for example. In accordance to the previous point, a locations quality should depend on both the distance and the utilization around, i.e. a House will run better if there are nearby restaurants that are not already fully booked, and a restaurants visitor count is not simply the total island visitors evenly distributed towards the restaurants, but more like

sum_over_nearby_buildings(remaining_visitors_per_building*(1-distance/max_distance)*likelyhood_of_visiting(depending on menu_price, visitor_wealth))

where this update is run on each restaurant in a random order each week (and if this gives too much variation, just add a fraction of the visitor count but do the update multiple times to balance out the random order), discounting the number of visitors from a tmp variable that saves the remaining visitors for each hotel/house that haven't been to a restaurant yet.

-similarly, attractions can increase location quality in the vincinity.

-HI becomes easier over time as more money comes in and existing buildings basically continue to print money forever. In general, this is rewarding and awesome, but adding some additional difficulties that might make it necessary to restructure certain buildings would make it more challenging, for example tax raises in the future that lower the profit margins/Increasing cost of renovating buildings

-if you include some general scoring system like HI at the end of a game, make it more clear as to what influences the score of the game. Like for example some mix of Money earned + average visitor happyness* visitor count or so

-Definitly add a way to select and adjust prices of multiple buildings at the same time! The interface and the buildings overview of HI is terrible ^^ ALso make it possible to sort the list according to profit/utilization/type etc.

-Make the map (optionally) a lot bigger, I had to start building hotels on artificial islands after less than 15 years of gameplay in HI

-about the artwork: from the current screenshots, it looks great in general, but make sure the streets have correct shadows depending on their orientation, also please add 4 different sprites for every building depending on the rotation, it was really weird to see the hotels turn with the view in HI.

-I will update this post when I get more ideas. Feel feel to comment/critize my ideas! I am really looking forward to Summer Islands!

JL2579

[Matt]

First of all thank you very much for all your work! The wealth of ideas really made us happy. We have to work through it a bit more. ;)
But we wanted to thank you in advance for your commitment !!!