Busy Hell Tycoon
Busy Hell Tycoon is a strategic management game where the player has to balance their earnings and their life to achieve high scores. It was developed in April 2019 for Ludum Dare 44. There’s an online leaderboard that goes along with the game and players can compete for the highest score on the board!
The game was built using the Unity3D engine and written in C#. I worked in a team of four on this, as a gameplay programmer. I was responsible for programming the building system and part of the core currency system.
The game can be found at zarroc.itch.io/busy-hell-tycoon, and here’s a gameplay sample:
Following are some of my thoughts on the overall experience of developing the app. If you prefer to not read the rest of the post, you can go back to the portfolio home by clicking here.
Background
Ludum Dare 44 was coming up, and my friends and I wanted to participate. We had already decided on a team of four for it, with one of us working only part-time. Due to the scale of Ludum Dare, we had been looking forward to it for a long time, but the four of us had never worked on a game together before. Despite that, it went reasonably well!
Development Process
The jam’s theme was “Your life is currency”. We brainstormed ideas individually and decided to go with a management game where the player had to balance their life with currency earned throughout the game.
The game was decided to be a 2D building management one, and the backstory was the player signed a pact to give their life for currency. The development process went pretty smoothly, but I felt the pressure of developing a game for Ludum Dare throughout the days.
I had seen an online leaderboard plugin for Unity a while ago, and we decided to use it. We figured that having an online leaderboard would incentivise some replayability through competition.
Final Thoughts. What did I learn?
I was the only team member who didn’t vote for the building management idea as my favourite, so I wasn’t quite interested in it initially. But as we started the development, I learned to love the product I was making since I simply enjoyed developing games. I also realised that if I didn’t love the games I was making, they wouldn’t be as good since I wouldn’t be invested in the development process so much and wouldn’t give it my all. Overall, it was a good development experience.