   Collect 'em all - how many is 'all'?
  Currently I'm making mix-n-match fish graphics for a game where fish can be bred.  Looks like I'm going to get about 400 shapes, with at least 40 color/pattern options per shape.  That's a grand total of 16,000 fish appearances.  Is it totally ridiculous to give players a goal of breeding one of every kind of fish?  There would be lots of subgoals for completing various sets, like one of every tail type, one of every shape regardless of color, 10 unique fish which are solid red, 20 unique fish which are solid blue, etc.   
  How much time does it take to acquire a new fish? How long do you expect people to play? Is this goal really intended to be completed by a less-than-obsessive player or could it simply be an unattainable ideal? What do the players get from completing this goal?That said, 16,000 is an awful lot. To give you an idea, the game Left 4 Dead has an achievement to kill 53,595 zombies. Less than 5% of its player base has this achievement and the zombies come fast and furious in that game.   ;  I think that depends on two parameters:1) how much work does it take to make a breed?2) do players need to make every breed in one play (beginning to end) of the game, or can the extra's they don't make be useful to replay?   ;  What you could do, if you are willing to implement an on-line feature, is that players could submit the number of fish combinations they have collected and their score could be posted on-line where there would be a grand score board. Might give some re-playability as a "show-off" factor.   ;  hrm...what if, using an online feature, a copy of the game only comes with 500 possible combinations, and make 20 separate "box" copies (each containing 500 unique combinations), and reserve the remaining 6000 breeds for add-on releases in the future for content release.Then, when players play online, their fish breeding can interchange with each other, which then adds the new breeds to each other's versions.So you start out with 500 breeds, but as you play online you increase the amount of breeds you have in your library the more you interact with players with other breeds.Kind of a breeding of breeding.   ;  It is intended to be an online game, so people can do a "let me show you my pokemons" thing.  (Fish cannot however be traded, everyone has to breed their own.)  It should be easy to create 10 new fish each day, probably more - I can scale this part during playtesting.  Getting one of every fish should be the equivalent to maxing out a crafting level in an MMO, so it should take weeks, possibly months.   ;  I think this question is something that can only truly be answered during playtesting.  If breeding your fish is really darn fun, then even 16,000 combinations might not be enough.   ;Quote:Original post by sunandshadowIt is intended to be an online game, so people can do a "let me show you my pokemons" thing.  (Fish cannot however be traded, everyone has to breed their own.)  It should be easy to create 10 new fish each day, probably more - I can scale this part during playtesting.  Getting one of every fish should be the equivalent to maxing out a crafting level in an MMO, so it should take weeks, possibly months.I meant more of players breeding with other fish from other players, not so much trading.   ;  You could look at games like FF and Maple story for inspiration.  FF3 has a variety of just over 200 bad guys to kill, whereas maple story is much higher (500?).  Of course, red, green, blue (enemy name) is hardly a variation, but its still different.I'd say stick around the 350 mark.  Make 50 guys 'easy' to get (1/10 shot), 50 guys 'medium difficulty' to get (1/50 shot), 50 'hard' to get (1/200), 50 'super hard' (1/1000), and so on.  Achievements in certain task can either unlock the ability to gain another set of fish, or improve your odds.  Final Thought:  A collectors game isn't much fun without rare collectibles.;  Breeding with other players' fish is not possible.I'm not sure it's really comparable to killing bad guys - you only need to breed one of every fish, while in the average RPG you kill hundreds of every enemy type.  Also, I personally hate random rare acquisition of anything, it destroys the player's ability to strategically pick a goal of acquiring something, work toward that goal, and feel satisfied when they earn it.In this game the fish breeding would move in bursts.  At any given time, you can only breed fish that are combinations of traits found in fish you already own.  So a player could do the fish breeding activity until they had generated all possible combos from their current stock, then they would have to go out and capture at least one fish with one new trait so they would have new material to generate new combos.  The total number of traits is much smaller than the total number of combos - there would be maybe 15 tail types, 10 head types, 5 eye types, 5 body types, a palette of 20 colors, and 20 patterns.I haven't decided exactly how the player gets new genetic stock.  They could be doled out to the player in a linear order, or would exist at various locations in the game such that the player would have to explore the whole game world to find them all, or they might be won in a minigame, or purchased from an NPC with tokens the player earned during gameplay.   