Oregon Trail - American Settler
Oregon Trail - American Settler is a management simulation game, like “Farmville”, initially released in 2011 on mobile (iOS, Android, Java, Blackberry).
As part of the Oregon Trail licence, this game takes place during the american pioneers’ Oregon Trail period (no $#!+ Sherlock) and starts where the original game from 1971 ended (the pioneers family arrived in Oregon, and now has to manage her land).
The Guadalajara studio was already in charge of the game updates (or Game Evolution) for several months when I started to work on it.
So, for more than a year then, with an objective of one update per month, our little team add to provide new content for the game, as:
- At least 2 Time Limited Events every month (exclusive quests for the player matching holidays or time of the year, including creation of new items, quests and dialogues)
- Integration of a shooting mini-game (similar to the NES classic game Duck Hunt) to offer variety in the game experience
- A complete reorganisation of the quest from the original game (delete obsolete quests, implement new ones) to rebalance the game difficulty as the game was already 3 years old at that time
- Various bug fixing and gameplay changes following player’s comments
But the most important task we had was the design and implementation of an all new system in parallel of the original experience: the exploration of a map and collection of previously unseen resources.
Again, the objective here was to refresh / renew the experience for the long time players that might get bored of the original one.
Once the player reached Level 20 in the game, a new character (the Cartographer) and a new mandatory quest are unlocked. Using a new building on the land, players can go explore the surrounding of their land.
This way, without forgetting the main experience (managing his land), the player can send a wagon collecting resources useful for his town (food, wood, medications), and also find gold mines. Using the gold collected on those rare locations, the player can “boost” the productions from his town.
The objective was to improve, extend the overall experience of the game, without diminishing the main one.
When this update came out, a partnership with the american TV show Gold Rush on Discovery Channel was set up:
- “Gold Rush” name placed on the new exploration building (as it was a gold mine, was perfectly matching tho)
- Integration of the show characters as NPCs on player’s land (quest givers)
