Building a Village

Sketched out a rough idea of how the game could work. How a player wins made a big contribution to this.


The game would start with only a few places to populate with workers: A central hub (village center) which can hold any number of workers in it, and will perform some sort of general action everyone might need to do at some time. I'll need to think on what that might be, probably something to do with excess goods.
There will also be a number of areas in which a player can add raw good cards to his deck.
With enough raw goods, a basic factory could be built corresponding to each raw resources, allowing to pull processed good cards. If a forest produces wood, the sawmill will make planks, ore from mines to steel, etc.

With enough processed goods, the advanced buildings (selected by players before the game began) may be built next. Advanced building will allow to pull cards with various abilities, such as pulling more resources, linking cards together or improving worker abilities.
A player will want to focus on his own buildings, but can use buildings his opponent built to improve his deck. Perhaps I will award the owner of the building.

Once a player builds all his advanced buildings, he will need to focus on building his (or her) totem (or monument, temple, etc.) The first to finish this final building is the winner.

Worker Placement Deckbuilder for Facebook

Still thinking about my solution to the ultimate facebook game, with neurons firing on all cylinders.
From the mechanics of the game, such as how the cards and board will interact with each other, how I'd like an experience that is has more interaction and less "multiplayer solitaire," to whether I want the board game elements hidden under the interface.

I'm also giving a lot of thought to the theme, trying to figure out something outside the usual fantasy or sci-fi, with such things as building a voodoo village, Somali pirates or monsters hidden in plain sight a la Monsters inc.

Thinking about how everything you can buy with real money could be had with enough hard work, and how it needs to be functional but not give a massive advantage.

SimCity Social is Dying

SimCity Social, the facebook game I am currently putting the most time into will go offline June 14th.
One of the first quests I played in said game was connected to the London Olympics, so it's not quite a year.
I had played Restaurant City for much longer, before it went down (another EA/Playfish game) while some other games, such as Pet Society (coming down the same time as SCS) I played because it felt like a waste of time, while others, like Monster Galaxy have become unplayable as facebook and browsers updated.

Is all this trouble an indication of the state of social games? Will more studios be as troubled as Zynga? Will the model of ingame microtransactions change to something else?

Guess I'll be waiting to see how it folds out (including what game I'll be addicted to next) think about new financial models, and keep dreaming I'll find a job in which all-night gaming marathons are an important part of research.