Bglamb

Suggestions:
Add more "popular" drugs (weed, shrooms, meth, cocaine, etc.)
Make it so you're able to produce/grow your own drugs as well (for meth, acid or heroin you'd need a fully functional lab, which isn't cheap)
What about the cops? If you don't keep a low profile, cops could be a problem, so I think you should consider adding this risk, as well a way to avoid getting caught.
Improve the second half of the game, but I guess you already have that in mind.

I know this is a very early build, as you already stated, but a lot of work must be put into it. Who knows, if you're creative enough, you could make a fun game out of this.

Well thanks to you both for your understanding!

Good idea with the cops thing. This is something I'd thought about a while back but had fallen off of my radar. Things like the range of drugs fall in to the category of 'flavour', which will be the things that I give consideration to last, along with things like graphics, as this is still primarily a mechanical lesson for myself and these things present little or no difficulty to program. So far it's just been an effort to get the customers to queue sensibly!

Something like the 'lab' I might implement, but more just as 'flavour' for the top tier of the 'contacts' upgrade (which upgrades the availability of drugs). I'd like to tie in more events that key off of your actual status, so starting a drug lab would mean you open yourself to more serious raids, etc.

Another idea I had earlier is maybe making the sales screen include a lot more people, and have you adjust a slider to adjust how much trade you are soliciting. So a lot of people would just be passing by, and you would be balancing profit against danger by being more overt. This opens up the  possibility of some people on the street potentially being cops or thieves and maybe bringing a bit more interaction to this area of the game.

Anyway, thanks again to you both for more feedback. I'll hopefully be adding more updates over the following days, so watch this space!

Drug abuse kills millions of people every year and seriously causes a lot of pain in so many peoples' lives. You want to make this into your game's objective? Does the game encourage drug use? Not overtly. Will it offend some people? Probably.

Yeah, I did stop and think about this for a while. More from the angle of whether it would make it more difficult to find hosting/advertising/distribution. But then I figured that the same could be said about guns/violence, and that never seemed to be much of a problem for anyone, so I figured i was just overreacting. Thanks for the input though.

The lack of interaction during the second screen is a potential issue, you're right. I believe that it can work, conceptually, so it's more about finding ways to mitigate boredom, rather than changing the game mechanically. I feel that graphics/animation/sound will go a long way to doing this, but maybe I should shorten that part at the start, when not much is happening.

The events should be there every day (from the menu) at 75% probability. The replay comes in part from those, and in part from the forecast (not yet implemented), as well as from the random distribution of customers and stock, obviously.

Thanks for your feedback.

PS. A little about where I am coming from:

Mechanically this game is inspired by (ie: ripped off from) a BigFishGames game that I have played many times and loved, but have not played anything similar to since. I'm a massive gamer and play a lot of everything. Console, PC, triple-A FPS to MMOs to indie puzzlers. I don't really know anyone else who played this particular game, and when I tell them about it, they tend to laugh. They also look bemused when I try and explain it mechanically. However it still remains one of my favorite games to this day! The game is Fairy Godmother Tycoon, and you can find the demo on the BigFishGames website if you're interested (I recommend it). It's obviously a far superior game to mine in all areas so far, but the fact that I loved it and it was still unknown made me want to try my hand at it's style. I don't expect to ever release my version, but it's still something to work towards.

Flavour-wise, the original inspiration for the piece was actually The Wire (an absoulely fantastic series on drug dealers and the cops who try to catch them). I was intrigued by the possibility of creating a video where the player played two sides of a story that appeared to be in direct competition, but were actually fighting against the rules of the system. The game I am making now would be a prototype for one half of that game, and will probably end with you buying your way out of your situation. I live in a very drug-filled community, so I see the effects that they have on people, but don't think that makes the subject matter particularly inappropriate. Like guns, they will always be seen as harmful, but like guns, they will also always be seen as cool and fun.

If people don't want to play it because they think it trivialises something important then, well, there will be a lot of games they don't play. But I'm not willing to censor myself because of that. I consider myself very anti-war, but barely a day goes by that I don't play a war-sim of one sort or another. Why? Because they are fun. And I would hate it if people stopped making them.

Piemanaic, I don't want you to think I'm having a go at you, or your feedback, because I'm not. I genuinely value it and thank you for it. I just thought it important to say a little more about where I stand.

I understand where you're coming from. Thanks a lot for the input!  As for the down key, they way I see it, is this game is made to be brutally difficult.  It's made so the player is going to need to restart, it's about timing, accuracy, skill, and at the same time, patience.  With the down key, it thrusts you downward.  When you are taking up too much velocity from bouncing, you can hit the down key before you propel up even farther to contrast your upward thrust.  Here is a video to show you this concept:

Ahh, ok. Well you probably want to make sure the player understands that before they play!

As for the bounces getting higher, that's due to simple physics.  It's not a bug, really, but it can be changed.  If you think about it, using the down arrow key to thrust downward to calibrate your trajectory would be even more difficult.

Well it just seemed strange. If there is no way to get slower, only faster, then every level ends up with you moving at terminal velocity. On level one, after about 10 bounces you just lose the game due to bouncing too high. On level 2, if you don't press anything for about 10 seconds, you just start bouncing off the ceiling so fast that you break the walls. It's like every level is on a timer of 10 bounces before you just auto-lose. Not sure why you'd make it like that.

I don't really understand what you're saying about using the down key. One way to make it more manageable would be to have one button that you hold down to make your bounces slowly higher, and when the button is not pressed, your bounces slowly decrease back to minimum. That way you could bounce high when needed, but when you're just waiting to judge a jump or whatever, you don't suddenly bounce into orbit.

There seems to be a bug (I assume) wherein your bounces get higher automatically.

Also clicking 'no' to a restart seemed to have the same effect as 'yes'.