Movie Tycoon Dev Blog #1 : What is Movie Tycoon?

This is the first development blog for Movie Tycoon, and the first time anyone but me will know about it. This project has been in the works by me for that past few months, and I feel like it's getting just finished enough that I can start to show it off.

The "New Script" function is pretty much finished!

First off, what is Movie Tycoon?

Movie Tycoon plans to be a multiplayer, turnbased movie business simulation! Hiring Actors, Directors, Actresses and deciding on budgets are all key to having your movie succeed and turn a profit.

Basically, you are the movie industry.

You start off with $10,000,000, and from there work your way up. I'm looking for ways to legitimately increase the expansion of the game in ways that will keep successful players interested.

A little look at the movie information pages. They're all decked out with charts and everything!

Everyone's Hero is a terrible movie BTW.

The game is actually already very functional, and for the most part playable, but I'm working hard on adding new features and rounding out the play experience as best as I can.

A little preview of the actor selection screen, with some nice pixel art done by the fantastic Geozermer.

The game is being developed with PHP, SQL Databases and bits of Javascript and jQuery to round out the rough edges.

Currently this is a web based game, that I plan on being free to play. Nothing functional to the actual game will ever cost anything!

I like to think of this game as being the Football Manager of the movie business. My biggest challenge at this point in time gameplay wise will be to figure out when and how turn changes happen. This will be very complicated to figure out in keeping the pacing of a game. Since it's real time and multiplayer, all players must be kept on the same week, so no one individual can advance time-and yet the progression has to be fast enough so that people don't get bored in waiting. Over the coming months I hope that I can round this out.

Overall, things are running well. Movie rating generation is finished, and I'm currently working on the marketing feature which will take a little while, but hopefully not too long.

Currently I am planning the game to be released in late 2015!