Market Research

I have the ideas that I want to develop but before I get ahead of myself I first need to do some research into the selected genres look at similar game to the ideas I had, this way I can get a good feel for what works.




Turn Based Strategy
First of all I looked at some turn based game:

Jagged Alliance series

The Jagged Alliance series have been some of my favourite turn based isometric games for years, still going today with the release of Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. The player controls mercenaries and must complete tasks to get money, then the player can renew a mercs contract or purchase a stronger merc. The player isn't able to control anyone other than the mercenaries and there are no vehicles that the player can use.

Fallout 1 - 2

The fallout series (prior to 3 and New Vegas) were a slash between an RPG and TBS, the combat was TBS and that's what I needed to look at, it played very similar to the Jagged Alliance Series and player were able to pinpoint what body part they'd like to attack, harder areas would have a lower hit chance.

Both Series were good to look at because they gave me a good insight of what sort of combat I could include.

Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command 

I liked this because it shown a visual clear line of where the units' line of sight was and also where they could move, this could be handy when thinking of augmented reality.


Table Football

As far as augmented reality goes there isn't really much on turn based strategy games however I found this. Table Football is a turn based game that will be released free with the PlayStation Vita and uses 6 AR cards to place a football pitch in your living room, then the players take turns passing, shooting and defending while trying to score goals.






Racing
Now I need to look at some racing games that were also similar to my racing concept, such as:


Micro Machines

Micro Machines is a great example of a game that could take advantage out of augmented reality. The player races around with miniture cars in large scale everyday environments avoiding things like giant toasters and traversing over tables. 


Micro Maniacs

Micro Maniacs is very similar to 'Machines' apart from the racers are no longer vehicles but bipedal characters, this is an interesting concept for racing other than vehicles.


I think my idea could work well with augmented reality, repleacing the virtual items in the previous games with real ones placed by the player. There also isn't really anything in the market for racing with augmented reality so this would give the racing idea a pretty unique place.

I have found some racing examples but not really games, more like tests to their tech in action. The sort of things i've found however are quite a few years old too.

Spacecraft Racing

 This shows that racing games using AR could work although I don't like how this is limited by the marker cards. Fortuantly recent devices like the PlayStation Vita do not require them.

Pet Management
Now I need to look into the market for pet management games:

Tamagotchi

The Tamagotchi have been VERY successful pet management games, it is played on a small handheld so players can use it on the go, this is a great feature and personally a reason why it got so big. The player can feed their pet, keep them happy, train them and all the other things you'd expect do be able to do. Tamagotchi is even still going today in Japan which goes to show there is still a market for this.


EyePet

The EyePet is also a pet management game only this one uses augmented reality, this is good as I could see how they use it and also see what doesn't work so well. EyePet is suppost to be based in the player's living room or house and the Pet is styled however the player wants, this is a cool idea however it is restricted to only being able to be played in such a large area and the camera cannot be moved during play. 


Another thing is while the pet can be customised with colour and clothes, there is only one type of pet and the player can't manage multiple pets or even have them interact with their friend's pets. This is something I will take into account when furthing my idea.


Invizimals

While Invizimals is more a fighting game than a pet managements game, it has some really cool features that include augmented reality that I think could work great for a pet management game, the fact the player has to search around for the creature and that they can trade and collect a variation of Invizimals.


After looking at a few of these things I can see that pet management is not only still popular, it can work with augmented reality and there are lots of features that can be combined to still improve upon it. Now I need to go throw a few more ideas down to develop my concepts.