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premium currency by Max Dimo
you know those free-to-play games that have premium currency you can get to skip time or get cool upgrades, and you can pay for it for real money and/or sometimes within the game? and they're usually something rare, like, rubies, emeralds, diamonds, stardust, gold, that kind of stuff
why's it always valuable stuff or particularly gemstones/minerals? why not make it a joke and have the premium currency be something utterly worthless in our world's standards, like paperclips or grains of salt or tennis balls, something completely nonsensical but then take the extra mile to explain how those things are valuable, like a black market kind of thing or maybe theyre just really rare or archaic. like, think of a futuristic society, maybe they've lost the need for certain things (old school tennis balls?) and hence that stuff is really valuable. or some ridiculous catastrophe occurred where no one can eat salt anymore and it's basically worthless in that world except for collectors.
or what would make it even more interesting, is because not all currency is just uniformly one thing, like one single bar of gold is the only measurement you have, USD has dollars and coins of varying amounts, it's all USD but it's just split into different numbers for ease of counting. if you're going with precious minerals, why not have something like three or four different divisions of gold that you can see, not just a singular number that says "20 gold" or something silly like that but "34 specks of gold, 2 bars, 1 basket" OR have the measurement in weight/quality like they do in real life, because "20 emeralds" wont make much sense, go in detail!!! i dunno. not necessarily practical but maybe they fashion those minerals into coins, and then you dont just have something boring like a chunk of rock as money.
on that train of thought you could add an additional mechanic where you have to do two steps to actually get currency, you find the minerals first and then you have to turn them into actual usable currency like coins to buy stuff with. or you could make it into something pretty like a mini statue or trophy and it would take more minerals but be worth a whole lot more.
i dunno, i was playing clicker heroes and this came to mind.
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Oh, and as for the suggestion at the end: I like it. But as I said, most games like that are cash grabs and the people behind them don't feel like being creative.
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yeah,im aware they do it just for the money more often than not, it just feels like man, such a simple thing to add a little pizzazz to? even small thing like that add a whole lot of quality. even from a business perspective i would think it'd fare better in the long run to put like...10 more seconds of thought into it
but wow, thats really cool that you were in on that process! sad that it shut down, but valuable experience for you nonetheless? sand dollars would be a really cool currency
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Yup! It was a tropical game based after an older game that shut down, which I happened to play (and it was very fun). It seemed very promising, especially the plot- so it was sad to see it shut down. But it was definitely a valuable experience.
If I spot another unique project or a game that already has something similar to those features you mentioned, I'll be sure to let you know :P-
tropical game and plot? i would have played that in a heartbeat, do you remember the name of it?
haha, many thanks
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Isles of Kumani. It was going to be based off of a game called Monkey Quest, similar visuals and mechanics but different storyline and whatnot. It was a small project and it was on discord so you probably would not get anything if you search it. Definitely wasn't professional or anything.
It most likely failed because many of the people who were working on it were inexperienced and turned it into more of a money thing than a passion project, unfortunately. But aside from that the community was very nice. ^ ^
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Tyrenai
Because most free games with premium currency are cash grabs and not much thought goes into them.
I helped develop a game where the premium currency was going to be sand dollars. (Obviously some people do like to collect those but they aren't exactly rare). Said game is, to my knowledge, no longer in development. As in it closed down. So unfortunately I don't have anything to show that exists. But just thought I'd put that out there.