u/chainyboi

I’d like to tell you an interesting story about the trading system I made for my colony builder game, which players unexpectedly turned into one of the game’s main features.

It started off with an annoyance I often felt when playing strategic city/colony builder games. Have you ever played a city builder and realized you are short on some resource needed to construct that particular building? At the same time, you may have a big surplus of some basic resource that you do not really need at this stage in the game. Instead of patiently waiting for your production to catch up, which isn’t particularly fun nor ideal in a game where time itself is a precious resource, I decided to create an engaging trading system where individual resources can be bought or sold by the player through trade.

Different kingdoms offer different resources, and prices and quantities vary each day depending on the kingdom and general market conditions. Because of this, you can sell resources that you have too much of to buy other resources that you need. This trading system became a mini-game that’s part of your daily routine of otherwise building and upgrading your towns, industries, farmlands, and defenses, etc. Some players in my playtests really enjoyed this system and spent a lot of time checking the available trades every single day. They compared offers between kingdoms, looked for profitable opportunities and optimized their entire economy around the market. Many players actually spent the majority of their run trading, which surprised me. Over time, this system scales and you unlock more merchants and resources to trade with, which engaged these players even more.

While this rather simple system has a surprising amount of strategic depth as is, I decided to develop it a bit further. I coded a simple supply/demand system that dynamically adapts prices and quantities depending on world events that shift the price equilibrium. For example, a large iron mine may collapse in a kingdom, which greatly reduces the quantity available for trade and temporarily spikes the price of iron. This incentivizes you to try and increase your own iron production to take home some heavy profits that you can reinvest in your growing Kingdom. This is a feature I’m experimenting with and would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Sounds fun? You can read more about Kingdom Isles on Steam here. Demo comes out soon. Thanks for reading.

TL;DR: Kingdom Isles is a survival colony builder where trading resources with other kingdoms became an unexpectedly deep part of the game after play testers loved it. Prices and availability change daily based on the kingdom and world events, creating opportunities to trade smart, adapt your economy, and profit. This turned the trading mechanic into a game within the game. 

I'm working on a cute little survival colony builder, where trading resources with merchant ships is part of the daily routine. You gotta think strategically about what to build next and where to place it, and carefully balance your economic output, citizen satisfaction, and defensive capability. Enemy invaders not only destroy your buildings, they also destroy your land so you have to manage a growing kingdom on decreasing space if your defenses fail.

You can watch the first trailer on YouTube here.

There are multiple difficulty settings, story events, and character selection to give each run a bit of spice. Maybe some people here would be interested. If you have any feedback or ideas for the game that is also highly welcome.

The game is called Kingdom Isles and will be part of Steam Next Fest in September. Steam page is here if anyone want to check it out.

Work in progress, game is called Kingdom Isles.