Valentine's Massacre - Evil God

This Valentine's pack will be memorable, not for its greatness or new mechanics but for the little fault I committed to the game which taught me new stuff to consider in game design. This expansion pack was designed not only to celebrate Valentines but also to try to fetch some new players with a little startup incentive like Valentine's Companion whose intention was to give that boost, but things got out of my hands very quickly so I caused a mini-crisis with my design. The new units were supposed to add 0.004% of FAITH to every human in play, at first glance it may not seemed much and I believed it will give a nice constant boost for a while and some new players came to the game and happily acquire this seasonal units to give that little boost to their religion, and then... 3 doritos later... I found that one of the newbie players just overwhelmed the leaderboards and placed himself at the top. At first I was thinking "How the hell did this happened? none of the published units are supposed to give you that much faith!"... oh, my dearest and naive me, your lack of long term vision leaded your game to a whole of miss-designedness LOL... so when I realized that, in the context of a clicker game 0.004% of 100 production is decen: +0.04 FAITH every 10 seconds, it grows exponentially if you leave the game open for hour so 1,000,000 faith per second plus the bonus of 0.004% will grant 400 and since the bonus was cumulative for every valentine's companion ingame and with an average of 30 companions you will get 12000 every 10 seconds and if by any mean you decide to leave the game open for over 12 hours LOL... you can image how this got out of control.

So besides it has been a funny mistake I learned something the hard way, if you are into game design you cannot throw happy numbers just by placen incremental amounts in a certain percentage for your game either: damage per second, life, production per click, etc. because you will have a problem just like I did with a poor long term mechanics that will cause your numbers to grow uncontrollably, you must always be really conscient about the progression and how your player is going to acquire more power, life, damage in a controlled environment. It is true that when you are creating a game what motivates you the most is the fact to have it published and receive feedback from your friends or players but you always have to take some time to think things more calmed and taking care of the long term play and retention for your game.

Just wanted to share this experience with you guys and hope it helps other newbies like me in game design. It has been fun though and with this kind of mistakes to learn I'm pretty sure it won't happen again xD.

Thank you and enjoy mi little evil and ugly frankensteined creature Evil God.