Creating a Resource Management Game on iOS

Over the last week I’ve been trying to reverse engineer some of the hit games on iOS like DragonVale, Pocket Planes, Tiny Tower, Simpsons Tap Out and Paradise Cove. These have been historically some of the most profitable games on the App Store. They are complex resource management type games and I want to create one myself.

The first thing that you notice is that unlike most other games on iOS these ones have a loading screen which can actually take a while, and they require an internet connection. I actually made a couple pages of notes just on the loading screen to understand what it needs to do.

One thing that these games seem to have a lot of problems with is the economy. None of them get it quite right. Though I think Tiny Tower is perhaps the best of the bunch. Paradise Cove is frustratingly slow (perhaps intentionally) where the money you make is rarely enough to build the next thing. DragonVale on the other hand makes it easy to get rich and it becomes hard to spend all the money you make fast enough.

Developing a good economy should (at least in theory) be a lot like the real economy. The more money that is created in the economy the more “inflationary” pressure there should be on prices. A game should allow for some interesting modeling of these effects and would make for an interesting platform to test some of those ECON 101 theories.

The technical aspects of creating a big game like this are fairly intense. There are some big server requirements to store the game state for every player who plays and APIs to keep the device in sync with the server. This is required to allow for playing the same environment across multiple devices, allowing the player to view/interact with their friends game, preventing cheating, and it gives me, the developer, the ability to bug fix and support players if problems come up.

The other big thing about these games is that they won’t work if there isn’t some simple side games within them. Many of these games have simple games of chance or other game mechanics other than just the resource management and expansion to play with. DragonVale has the collection of cross-breeds, Paradise Cove has the mermaid and pirate fights, The Simpsons has killing the zombies. These extra game mechanics can make the game significantly more engaging.

So how much work is it to create one of these games – even a very simple one? A lot. Even starting with a base of code from my other games I’m estimating at least 3 months of full time work to finish one. Long enough that there’s a good chance of failure. No risk no reward!