Toy Shop: Nintendo DS Game Review

Toy Shop is a shop simulation game, somewhat similar to "the Convini" (a convenient store simulation), except that you're running a toy shop which sells the products you make upstairs.

The game's main engine consists of two parts: in your shop, you can purchase and place furniture (shelves, showcases and cashiers); stock the shelves with toys and set prices; and trace your customers. Upstairs in your workshop, you can schedule your production in a queue. These parts of the game are reasonably well done, although a few very bad flaws remain. The neatest thing in this game is that, when you open your shop and customers walk in, you can (in "trace" mode) click on them and see how wanting they are for the 6 different categories of toys, and how much money they have remaining in their wallets. If a customer really wants a certain type of toys, he will be more eager to spend more money from his wallet on them. The popular categories vary according to the season: water floats and sand buckets sell well in summer, for example. It would have been even better if the data window also shows which toys the customer has purchased, although we can now more or less find out by following what has been picked off the shelves.

This model offers a level of realism and transparency which makes a sim game more fun. Because the results of your actions become more visible and understandable and, hence, predictable, the game feels more interactive. So while the game uses a rather simple model and the game play is in the end somewhat repetitive, one can still feel its addictive pull.

It is perhaps because the game does show some promise in this aspect, that its flaws seem so sore. One flaw is in the workshop: your craftsman has a level of proficiency at making each type of toy. At low levels, he has a low percentage of success, meaning that what he makes has a large chance of being defective, worthless and unfit for sale. Actually, this is not a bad idea: it simulates the R&D cost one has to invest in developing a new product, before it turns into a profit-maker. The problem is in the implementation details in this game software. Some players are suspecting that the percentage figures shown in the game are not true, that there is a bug which implements a differnt set of percentages (which are not in an increasing sequence along the levels) than those shown. Also, the shown percentages (if they are actually implemented) are really too low: what craftsman keeps failing the majority of his works after making 30 copies of the same item? Such low percentages are not contributive to a fun game: they discourage developing new products and encourage the player to keep making the same old stuff all the time, resulting in a repetitive, dull game. And low percentages annoy and frustrate the player. To illustrate my point, please let me quote the in-game percentages against my suggested improvement in the below table:

A more minor flaw is that, at level 20, your craftsman can suddenly make two copies instead of one for the same time and money cost. Such overnight mastery is unrealistic; I suggest using a more gradual scale as indicated above: for each level above 10, he should gain a 5% chance of making an extra copy.

For a more radical suggestion, it may be a good idea to reverse-engineer the success percentages and just factor them into the money and time costs and the level-up requirements. The problem with using luck-based percentages is that it feels frustrating for the player to fail due to nothing of his own fault. For example, instead of a new toy at level 1 costing $15 and 5 seconds to produce with only 20% chance success, why not make it cost $75 and 25 seconds to produce with 100% chance success, and requiring only 2 copies to be made for the next level-up instead of the 7 now. (If the 500% cost cited here seems atrocious, please note that it is not my fault, but that the original maker has put in an even lower success percentage, which is equivalent to 1100% cost for making one item.) At level 20, in accordance with my suggested 150% figure above, the toy would cost $10 and 3.3 seconds to produce with again 100% chance success. This way, we can have the same overall effect, yet with 100% success rate on all occasions, hence doing away with the frustration for unlucky failures. Another advantage of this method is that, explicit cost changes are more easily verifiable than success percentages, so it becomes easier to test and debug the program, allowing the shadow of the suspected bug to be cast away. And it is a realistic model, too: it naturally takes more time and costs for a novice craftsman to figure out how to make an item for the first time.

There is another major flaw, in the way the customers' paths are determined. After visiting a shelf or showcase, the customer will choose his next destination not obviously according to the proximity from his current location, but rather according to the proximity from the entrance through which he entered the shop. This means that, for example, if you place your shelves in two seperate paths leading off in opposite directions away from the entrance, the customer will not go down either one path or the other, but rather will keep zigzagging between the two. This is of course illogical and unrealistic: the customer will get upset for the laborious trek, when in fact such trek is not caused by a fault in the shop's layout, but rather by the customer's own stupidity. This flaw severely limits the way you can design your shop, to a few foolproof layouts.

The game actually has a third part in its engine, but I preferred to consider it not part of the 'main engine' because it is so shabbily done. You can leave your shop and walk around town, but the town environment is graphically mediocre, the interesting interactions so sparse (and mostly less than interesting), the stylus-clicking interface so imprecise, and the walking speed so slow, that I would have much preferred that the makers have spent their efforts in refining and debugging the main engine, instead of wasting them here. If they can't come up with enough events to populate the town, I would prefer that they just build a few simple menus for navigating the town, instead of wasting their resources on building a useless 3D environment which doesn't provide much enjoyment to walk around.

There are a number of minor flaws too, such as some reported minor bugs. The game hasn't missed its chance at giving a not-so-good first impression: if you have played different versions of Tetris, you'd know that there are two kinds of control schemes. In some games, you can't rotate your block if it is up against a wall, while in others, you can rotate your block (which displaces itself to an allowable location) unless it is really squeezed tight on both sides. The former scheme is unnecessarily annoying; this game follows the former scheme when you try to rotate your furniture. It's a small thing; but this game has almost too many of these small and big things.

While I have been ranting about the game's various flaws for quite a while, please let me return to the starting point and restate that the game does show some promise in its concepts. As the game progresses, you can move your shop to a better location, which primarily gives you customers with fatter wallets. At that point, some players feel that they could not keep up their production rate with the customers' purchasing power, but the game does give you ways to handle the situation (besides a mini-game style effort for increasing your production output). You can conveniently close your shop when your shelves are depleted. More profitably, you can raise your prices to milk more money out of the same production output. But perhaps part of the problem actually lies in the suspectedly buggy success rate: when you're making virtually nothing despite a 69% success rate, of course your production cannot keep up.

The toys are arranged in a "technology tree": you start with the ability to make several simple items, and when you achieve a certain level of proficiency for an item, the next item(s) are unlocked. (Although it would require yet a significant investment until the new item can be produced profitably, due to the low percentages.) I feel that the tree is interesting enough, in terms of both playability and theme. Some players may complain that three of the categories cannot be produced initially, but it's not a big problem, because from the start you can produce dolls, which sell well in spring.

Toy Shop is a small game which could have been very good for a small game, but the game is plauged with too many flaws here and there. So while the game is academically interesting for a game reviewer/critic to study, and may even be addicting for a while, whether it is truly enjoyable would depend on how forgiving the player is.

Copyright 16 May 2008 Alan Shiu Ho Kwan

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