Well, I'm currently in a bit of a reflection with Jan about the money.
I would like to dump that system altogether while he has a more conservative approach.
But the situation is that we have only a vague idea of how the game is balanced on that end. And frankly I really don't want to keep track of that.
Looking at such a system itself, I don't think it could add much to the gameplay. Of course we could add toys to buy to unlock the different scenes with said toys, that would indeed use the system, but would it be really "adding" something.
It would add more variety of action, not much, but still some. But then why use money ? Just remove the "number" of the amount of money of the equation, then think about it, it could still be required to go buy the toys without needing a money system.
I only see 3 possibilities for the balancing of money :
- The player could always have an oversized amount of money compared to what they are offered to buy. It doesn't need much balancing to achieve that since you only need to set the prices low. But that easily beg the question "why money ?".
- The money can act as a decoy that makes the player believe they earned enough of it to unlock content creating a feeling of achievement. doing that require a very careful crafting of the system while it could be achieved with a sneaky adaptative pricing system that makes everything just out of reach just long enough to fake it (I just thought of that writing that post but I do like that idea). In that case it can add something to the game, not much still but reasonably enough to justify its existence.
- An other possibility would be that the player found themself in front of a wall that will need some grinding to pass. That need a moderate amount of balance as you still need to have a good enough idea of what the player could be expected to have at that point. So while it's not as care intensive as the second possibility it still needs some. That case would of course add to the feeling of grindy-ness while noticeably add to the feeling of achievement for those who went thought the grind. But while people that dislike grinding are very vocal about it, it need to be said that many do enjoy it as proved by the number of players that enjoy playing very grindy titles. So while we are not planning to go for that it is a valid option.
