I've been reading into C# for about a week now and I think I'm ready to embark on my first game making adventure! So this thread will be dedicated to this new endeavor of mine.
Just like writers being told to write about things they actually know, I've decided to make a game of something I actually know: running a start-up business and its unique challenges. The game will be based on a technology start-up developing an innovative product/service/IP and will focus on the business development/marketing/customer discovery phase of running a business. While typical business sims have the goal of becoming huge tycoons, the victory condition of The Start-up will be something a lot more modest: making your first sale.
While this might sound too simple or easy to some, the reality of commercializing something new and/or breaking into a new market is rarely so. Ultimately a new enterprise is founded on a set of assumptions about the market needs and the value of the new product in question. A good part of the start-up's time and resources are spent on trying validate those assumptions, trying to find a segment of the market (a specific set of customers) for whom the assumptions hold true. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Most of the time, the original value proposition needs to be reconsidered, updated, refined, or even redesigned from scratch, based on the feedback you get from the market.
So the player of this game will be the Principal of one such start-up, and the gameplay will be a simulation of this validation process. The player will start with a set of assumptions and maybe very basic market intelligence reports (which may not even be 100% correct). Through the game, they will try to reach customers, network their way to decision makers, gather feedback from industry specialists, and try to reflect what they learned on their business and their product, in order to come up with a product that another business will seriously consider buying. In this endeavor they will need to manage their shoestring budgets, hire and manage team members, find angel investors or negotiate with venture capital firms, work on their competitive positioning, etc.
This is the idea in a nutshell. Venues of expansion could include advanced stages where the goal would be to become cash flow positive, or even to have a successful IPO maybe. I will likely start with figuring out the market demand algorithms, and then start building player interactions one by one.
Any thoughts? Any advice?
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Topic: The Start-up - my first game project (Read 1106 times)