SeungU Lyu

Senior CS student at Olin College of Engineering with major interest in software engineering

2 minute read

Introduction

Hamster tower is a mobile simulation game where your goal is to create a civilization of hamsters that lives in a single tower. The tower will consist of multiple blocks that will function as an essential element for the hamster society. Each floor will be occupied by a single building block, and the tower will get higher as more blocks are introduced. To run a successful colony, the tower has to be a high building - where it takes a long time for a single hamster to travel. This is the reason why you need a special tool - the hamster tunnel that connects two specific floors of the tower, enabling rapid traveling between them.

Idea Sketch

Goal

The goal of this game is to create a colony of hamsters that are self-sustaining. Once hamsters are assigned to a building, they will try to do what they are assigned to do, just when they are met with enough food, enough rest, and the right temperature. Hamsters have to eat food to function well, and also need a resting place to thrive. If the temperature of the building is too low or the hamster did not get enough rest, the hamster can get sick, eventually, die if they did not get good treatment. The user has to carefully design their tower so that hamsters get what they need to get.

As the colony grows the tower will going to get higher and make it hard for a hamster to travel in between the buildings. Maybe the tower is too high that some hamsters barely have time to go eat and come back to their workplace, making the building almost not functional. To prevent this, the user will have to build a limited number of “Hamster Tunnels” to accelerate the flow of hamsters. It is like building a highway to the road or creating an extra vein for blood to move faster. Users will have to choose the right location to build the tunnels, which will efficiently boost the flow of hamsters around the tower.

The game is meant to be a bit challenging game. When the colony is small, the game will feel like a slow, “grow your pet” style game where you enjoy watching small hamsters roaming around the tower. However, once the colony gets big and the tower gets higher, it will be hard to manage all the buildings in real-time, make every hamster survive, and also defend the tower from harsh conditions such as enemy attacks and the cold winter. I was thinking of survivor games like FrostPunk, where a single bad choice can end the game easily.