Shopping Avenue on Steam | Donut Dog Games

Get on Steam: Shopping Avenue

Last year I made Shopping avenue game with Phaser and wrote about the process. Four month ago, I made a demo for itch and steam. Now I want to present the final version of the game.

How is it different?

In the earlier versions of the game, you started with all the buildings unlocked. In the latest version, you start only with 2 building and need to unlock the rest.

To unlock new building, you need stars. You get stars by completing mission/levels.

You can get 3 stars for each level. One star for completing mission, one star for happiness and the last star for mission time. It’s not that hard to get all 3 stars.

Because players unlock different buildings at different times, they might have slightly different experiences while playing the game.

There are skills in the game. In the earlier versions, everything was set in stone for the best balance. Now the balance might be a bit off.

The happiness bonus is one of the best skill to give you strong start in each level. Starting money are nice, but happiness bonus is better.

It might not be intuitive, but the most important skill is bus size. Later levels might be impossible to pass without having a good bus. I would recommend to have more 50 seats in the bus (You start with 20).

There is one new “building“ in other category. It’s flower pot. I thought it was a good idea, but then I made it and started testing… Well it’s a waste of your game money, but I left it anyway, because it’s nice.

The game comes with 40 levels, however not all are available at the beginning. Some levels you need to unlock by getting at least one restaurant and increasing starting money above that restaurant’s price.

How long did it take me to make the game?

From the demo it took me about 2 months. However the total time for the game is about 6 months.

Could I make this game faster now? Maybe. I still need to learn a lot.

Did I made everything I wanted?

Well, no. I wanted to add construction animation. I wanted to have ice cream eating animation and slower walking while eating ice cream. I was also think to add two more skills. I wanted to make steam saves, but I was running out of time.

I wanted to add Turkish translation. I might still add it with update in the future.

What is next?

I like making games with Godot more than with Phaser. I don’t think I am going back to Phaser.

What about steam? Steam is the easiest way to make some money, however steam is a mess. It feels like, when they were designing Steam, they looked for inspiration in Windows 95 and found a lot of it. Steam is very confusing. Some things that should be enabled by default are hidden behind nine layers of menus (hell). You need to already know that these options exist because you will never find them by accident.

I am web gamer at heart, so I want to make web games, but making money with web games so much harder. I tried submitting the demo of this game to CrazyGames and got rejected with a standard rejection message. This means I have no idea what the actual problem was. Maybe I will try submitting another game in the future, but I am not very keen on this idea.

The last thing

I made CV for the game. Check it out. It’s really nice.