Ask HN: Review our startup - Taxi Mogul, a persistent browser game

Agreed with the design criticisms; disagree strongly about 2 and 3. It sounds like you might not be in the target audience for these sorts of games. I absolutely loved games like Theme Hospital, Sim Tower, Roller Coaster Tycoon - all games which are about rather mundane businesses, certainly not "taking over a galactic empire" or "taking over the world". The idea of a Sim Taxi/Taxi Tycoon game on real streets with google-maps street-level views of my taxi routes tickled me. That enough was a "hook".

Granted, there are probably more gamers like Mystalic than gamers like me, which is one of the reasons why Civ II and Imperium Galactica sold more copies than say Theme Hospital. Which market you go after should depend on your business model.

That said, here's some more criticism (hopefully constructive!) from someone who buys the idea but not the execution (yet):

1. You badly need a strong artist/designer to give the game its own personality and charm. One common thread around these quirky business games like Theme Park or Gazillionaire is that they are funny and amusing to look at, which is important when large parts of the game are spent simply watching your business run.

2. Your interface has far too much clicking. Why do I have to click on "cars" to send my one taxi somewhere? Why can't I see how tired my driver is just by hovering over his cab? Etc,etc.

3. Your tutorial isn't very helpful. Not only does it look like experts-exchange.com instead of a game (see #1), but because it's all in one place instead of some bright AJAX popups showing you around the interface, I don't even learn where my vehicle page is because I click the link in the tutorial. Why there should be a "vehicle page" that isn't clearly marked by a brightly colored icon of a car is another matter, but at the end of the tutorial I still had no idea what I was doing.

4. I don't think what appears to be your core gameplay mechanic of trying to "find the best route" by clicking a bunch of short-distance waypoints to form a route to your passenger and the destination is very fun. The fact that your interface is on top of a Google Maps mashup only reminds me of how a computer could do a better job than me at this.

When I thought "taxi sim", I immediately thought that the game would be about keeping your taxi busy and managing the balance of (a) getting people there fast by avoiding traffic (you are using google maps for a taxi game and don't incorporate traffic?!) in hopes of getting better and more tips and (b) getting people there slowly, choosing the bad routes, and stalling in traffic, just like it seems my cab drivers always do, risking fewer tips but ensuring you're getting a fare for every mile you drive. Or how about choosing what areas of town to patrol to try and snag fares from rival firms, rather than be presented with a plain old list of customers to click on?

I'm not saying that any of the above gameplay suggestions will fix the game or are even necessarily a good idea, but if you're dead-set on trying to make a company based off of one game (as opposed to a site hosting or aggregating games), you'd better spend lots of time brainstorming and refining your core gameplay and making it fun before even worrying about your logo or artwork or front page videos or any of the other stuff suggested by either me or the parent. Spend some more time playing Railroad Tycoon and Sim Golf and how about Crazy Taxi, which you can find for like $10 for your PS2, with a critical eye towards what makes those games fun.

I signed up and it dumped me on a page that looked like a blog. Lots of buttons I could press to do things but no idea what they do. And this page was clearly not fun. Why does it look like a bad blog and why aren't I doing something fun at this point?

So I disable the tutorial because it's the most prominent button on the page (I'm thinking that maybe it gets me into the FUN part faster, although if I need a tutorial it isn't a good casual game). Aha - now I see that activation is required. Genuine wtf moment. I can take a tutorial without confirming my account but nothing else? Honestly, if you are going to insist on email confirmation, do it BEFORE you show people your actual game page. Right now you are making a bad impression and then pushing people away.

Review: I need to give you my email address. Then you want me to LEAVE YOUR SITE and go to a more addictive site. Now I am wondering why you need to verify my email address at all? If you really need it and I gave you a bogus one then give me a way to change it. Have I just signed up for daily spam? Trust meter starts tilting downwards.

If you have a free service it doesn't matter if your users are anonymous. Why harass them? And if you ARE monetizing traffic you STILL shouldn't worry about authenticating email addresses. Not unless you want to send a lot of email, in which case you send the authentication note but don't send anything else until they've confirmed. It's a tinyint field in your database (email_authenticated). If people have fun they will do it.

We run a paid site where authentication actually matters and don't care as much. Every now and then we have a payment come in from someone who is not in our system. It is sort of a problem, so we write the person who pays and say, "which account did you want to upgrade?" Email authentication is a good way to prevent yourself from spamming innocent third parties. That's about it.

All that said, I think this could be a cool service. The concept is fun. I want to like it. But I have no idea what I should be doing after signing up and you are pushing me away from your service and haven't thought through how to get someone INTO actual gameplay. Instead it is WALL, WALL, WALL. So I leave. I've got about 6 tabs open and when you sent me away to Gmail I didn't come back.

lol well i got owned.

but seriously, you need a better looking site that's more appealing to the eye. the key features should be highlighted and easier to read, especially the introductory paragraph.

I think it's a fun idea, with three area that can be improved:

1) Like the others are saying, you need to find a (better) designer

2) Playing the game seems to be a massive time sink. I could never spend that much time on a game, regardless of how good it is. And I don't think it's just me, pretty much nobody with a job could spend a few minutes every half hour to run their taxi company. Which ties into..

3) Too much micro management. This is mostly a personal preference, but I'd get tired of micro managing my cabs pretty soon.

Things that would make it easier for me to play:

a) Make it possible to play in a rewarding and competitive way spending no more than a quarter to half an hour per day.

b) Less micro management, but that should be a requirement to achieve a) anyway.

I can see the Challenge thing as a mini-game, maybe it could make it on its own as a game widget. Maybe make a Wordpress et al widget that doubles as a game and as an ad for the "big" game?

You have an interesting idea, looking forward to see how it evolves!