animal crossing pocket camp maintenance time

#Animal crossing pocket camp maintenance time series
#Animal crossing pocket camp maintenance time simulator

If you go to your contact book, it shows you which ones you are ready to invite, which ones you haven’t visited yet and which ones are ready to be spoken to. The map shows you which characters are where, and puts a tick next to them if you have completed their next task to help you progress. If there is one thing that the mobile version has done an especially good job on, it’s the addition of convenience features to reduce this friction for you. One criticism of the console games is that this can over time start to become quite daunting and frustrating to manage. If you boiled down Animal Crossing to its core, it’s a management game which involves the player dealing with an ever increasing inventory and list of tasks and contacts to manage. So it seems like this is a gameplay style that is fading away and it will be interesting to see if Nintendo can be the one to return it to it’s former glories. In fact, at the time of writing only Hay Day (Supercell) Township (Playrix) and The Sims: FreePlay (Electronic Arts) are in the top 100 grossing games and that could be considered as part of the genre. However, these days casual hit titles have become puzzle orientated, with management style games evolving into deeper mid-core style games. “Invest and Express” games as they are sometimes known as were some of the biggest hits on mobile as free-to-play took off with titles such as The Smurfs Village, Dragonvale and Tap Paradise Cove being early successes leading to The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Hay Day in more recent times. So the fascination in playing the mobile version of Animal Crossing is to see if the old master can teach us any new tricks? You could play for very short periods of time if you wanted to, and you were incentivised to help other players and vice versa. The game rewarded you for coming back many times a day rather than playing a longer session. What Nintendo had not predicted was that the game mechanics introduced in this game were a perfect fit for casual web and mobile games of the future. Again perfect for families who had one machine between them but who would use it at different times of the day. This meant you were incentivized to visit nearby towns to trade items and leave messages, and you might often have a father switch on the game to find out his daughter had visited his town and left him some items. Multiple Town instances could be stored on one cart, meaning that multiple family members could maintain their own town on a single machine.

#Animal crossing pocket camp maintenance time series

The series also introduced the concept of social mechanics years before they found home in web, Facebook and eventually mobile games. The game even had a currency called Bells which functioned in a sense as a soft currency for the game. And this was in an era where micro-transactions did not exist, so you would have to come back later if you wanted more items, there was no shortcut around it! So in this sense, Animal Crossing was one of the first games that encouraged you to play a couple of times every day rather than playing for one huge session, making it more appealing to families, which is Nintendo’s key demographic. after knocking down some fruit from a tree, you’d have to wait a couple of hours before it grew back again. The game also rationed out some items and content by forcing you to wait a certain amount of time. You would have to play the game at specific times of the day to attend activities such as fishing tournaments and early-morning fitness classes, which occurred on a regular schedule.

But more importantly than that, Animal Crossing was the first mainstream game to introduce us to timer mechanics in games. This meant that there often tasks or goals that showed up at the same time as real-life events and holidays such as Independence Day, Halloween, the Harvest Festival (Thanksgiving), and Toy Day (Christmas). Also unique for the game at the time was that the game utilised the console’s internal clock to observe days, weeks, months and years. You move your character around a 3D world, but can do whatever you want, be it exploring, talking to the town's residents, catch fish or hunt bugs. The “aim” of the game, if there really is one, is to fulfill various tasks and goals, trying to make the town flourish and it’s residents happy. The game is open-ended, with players assuming the role of a new mayor in the town of Animal Crossing.

#Animal crossing pocket camp maintenance time simulator

It has been described as a social simulator and even as a “communication game' by Nintendo themselves. For it’s time, the Animal Crossing franchise was unique and introduced a previously unseen style of game on home consoles.