Game idea #3

Aquarium Tycoon

My third idea comes from my personal hobby: Aquariums. This game will be sort of like the good old tycoon games where the player is in control of the whole map in the game. Examples are Rollercoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, Sim City and so on.

The Story

The storyline of this game concerns a newbie hobby aquarium enthusiast. It's up to the player to decide what he wants to achieve in the hobby. He could think big and go for the aquarium empire, opening a public aquarium for everyone to watch or he could just keep it small in a little aquarium of his own. The player is free to develop his aquarium as he wishes to. But an aquarium can only be upgraded if enough experience has been achieved.

The Gameplay

The player will start out with a medium sized aquarium. He gets to choose what kind of aquarium (fresh (easy mode) / salt (hard mode)) it should be and decides which livestock and the 'aquascape' to have in it. While the aquarium is running he has to check if the water conditions are right (PH values for freshwater and a long range of values for saltwater), while remembering to feed the fish and corals (if saltwater). Eventually problems may occur in the aquariums and he has to solve these problems.
Buying livestock and new aquariums comes with experience in the hobby. As the aquarium probably gets bigger, more rare livestock can be added and healthy aquariums gain both prestige and experience in the hobby which can be spend on new cool stuff. It is important that the game is as close to real life aquariums as possible - This is the real challenge of the game.

'Fish Tycoon' with poor graphics

The Technology

Since everything concerns aquariums, the graphics of the game plays a vital role in the user-experience. Therefore the graphics has to be impressive. This is doable in HTML5 which has shown impressive graphics before. While searching for games like this i found that there is actually several small games with somewhat the same concept, but the graphics suck and makes the games unattractive. To the right you can see an example of 'Fish Tycoon' which has very poor graphics (build up on images) and the gameplay itself is not at all like the one i wanted to develop.