This week I’ve been plotting away, steeped in the design of our research & upgrade systems. I’ve come to an important conclusion: “Transforming buildings are awesome”. :)

I thought we’d share a design idea we’re probably NOT going to use for a change and point out some of the reasons why not. Here’s one of the ideas for research & upgrades we had:

You can unlock new building blueprints and levels with the money you make from exporting soup. Then choose which buildings you want to level up (also costing money). Seemed simple enough. Each building type (EG: my Generators) has a clear linear progression of power. Each instance of a building carries an internal ‘level’ and with an exchange of currency and labour you can ‘level them up’ by shooting them with a laser.

So here’s the 2 main issues unique to Inc with this popular tower-defense style system:

• It requires a lot of micro, jogging around to each building and ‘leveling it up’. In a pure tower defense game where that’s the ONLY thing you need to do, this might be fine, but you’re far to busy with other fun things in Inc to devote ALL your time to building maintenance and upgrading.
• It’s impersonal. There’s no difference between my Lv2 Generator and yours. I want to tune for my playstyle and customise my base!

So that one probably isn’t the holy grail for research design we were looking for. We’re still testing a few different ideas yet for how research will ultimately play out. The end goal though is still to not have you bogged down in DOING research & upgrades but let you get on with ENJOYING them! :D