I'm developing a game, of course, where the main game mechanic is trading of products (both big and small, industrial and commercial) But I have to ask, when do I stop, I could go on forever dishing out products at different prices and weights but when do you think its time to stop, 100? No, to small? 1,000? I have no idea. It is of course dependant on art of course, if you don't have the art for the product you can't really have it. Let’s pretend this isn't a problem. How many products do you think is the max I can have in a game devoted to trading? And I'm not talking about special items you can get like "Shakespeare’s lock of hair" I'm talking about stock items, not special, not named. Those special named items of limited availability will be added on top. Thanks in advance for reading and helping me out.

Quote:

Original post by Punk Designer I'm developing a game, of course, where the main game mechanic is trading of products (both big and small, industrial and commercial)

I'd like to offer an amount, but until you outline the mechanics of the game I couldn't really give you any specific answer. :P Is this some sort of simulation game? An RPG? Maybe 1000 is enough?

At the end of the day, the amount of content your team creates depends on the time, money and effort you're all willing to invest in it. FFXII's bestiary was massive, but it's no surprise considering the game's development time, budget and team size.

I mostly agree with what Bravepower has to say. I might add however that the more products you add, the less important individual products may become. I am not sure what the value of each product is to the user, but if a few products end up being the best part of the market hundreds of others could be neglected. This would make all your hard work to make 1000 products a bit of a waste.

To Bravepower's point, based on your gameplay mechanics you may consider having more or less products. You might develop the game to have more or less products based on the number of players or the size of the mission.

So essentially it's based on the Chicago Merc or something, right? Then why not go to the CME Group website or contact someone who works in the Mercantile Exchange and get some ideas from there? I'm sure they could be a pretty good help.

I think you should go with a lower number rather than a higher number to help you as a designer handle balancing better.

If that wasn't a limiting factor (a lot of time to handle balancing, wizardly ability to manipulate algorithms to balance things well), it definitely depends on what you are going for. Showing a player a list of 1000 items at once would turn off 90% of players though, they would need to enter the game not all at once, but piecemeal so that the player can learn what they are and how to handle each one. If you want special items, you will need to have common, uncommon, rare, etc items, and be able to notice when you are seeing something that's rare; so you need to come up with a good amount of product for each category to communicate this well. Whatever numbers make sense for giving the player a sense of "hmm, this is probably worthless" and "wow, never seen this before", and can be balanced well with few junk items (i.e, widget A generally sells for the same price in the same areas as socket B, there is not much reason to have widget A and socket B as separate items), are the numbers you should go with.

I would say, keep adding resources until it makes sense to stop :) You should be able to compare it to the world/gameplay you are going for and get a sense for how much is too much. It also might be something that can really only be determined through playtesting. I would set up a play by email or card game version to test it and see how it works, and continue to modify this as I refined the design.

I don't think art is a huge problem. If you have few artists, you will make only a few icons for the various resource categories, and then the actual name can identify exactly what it is. With more artists, you can subdivide the categories more. If we are talking 1000's of resources, even with a large team it is unlikely to have an individual icon for each and every one. (It helps players too to be able to memorize what the icons mean and identify things quickly)

Quote:

Original post by Punk Designer I'm developing a game, of course, where the main game mechanic is trading of products (both big and small, industrial and commercial) But I have to ask, when do I stop, I could go on forever dishing out products at different prices and weights but when do you think its time to stop, 100? No, to small? 1,000? I have no idea.

If you were to go shopping in-game, what kind of selection would you enjoy choosing from? For me a choice between only two offerings feels sparse. Like answering a multiple-choice question that's just A or B. But picking a single favorite from a hundred possibilities gives me sensory overload. So I play a mini-game of whittling down the choices, until only a few remain to agonize over.

What if we reverse the whittling process, so that we go from a choice between only two items, to a choice between pairs of items to be decided later. It seems to add detail to the choice in the same way an artist adds finer details to a large picture. How many times can that be done, before it ceases to be interesting/entertaining? Maybe just two or three times before burden sets in.

2^1 is the initial choice between two items. 2^2=4 chooses between pairs, 2^3=8 gives a third step of whittling and subdividing, and 2^4=16 possibilities begins to tax my concentration.

And why should all choices be the same level of detail? Maybe there's a large variety in color-dyes to tint armor, but less variety in types of animals that provide leather suitable for armor.

Unless you are going for a realistic simulation of a stock/commodities market, I would recommend going for the smallest number of items that can support your game mechanics. The fewer items, the more the player will be able to associate with them, and the better feel they will get for each item.

I disagree with Punk Designer, simply because that would limit how far a player can go with the game. The detail will seem to basic and then it will feel just like gambling.

What you can do instead is to have some general categories that follow some basic market patterns (agriculture, automotive, furniture, luxury items, &c.), have some default products that have the most general returns, and then have several other products that follow the general trends but with slight differences. Too much extra will be confusing, I agree, but you don't want too few or less it simply will cease being interesting.

Something in the OP confused me, but maybe I am not understanding it right:

Quote:

Original post by Punk Designer I'm talking about stock items, not special, not named.

Each item won't be named? Like, it will just be some made up stock-looking entry, like "FGCO"? I am not really sure why it would matter to the player to have a thousand to choose from if they are meaningless.

I think he intended that each stock item won't be named, but its category will still be named. Think of rice.. you don't name each grain individually, because it makes no sense, but you have the product Rice.