Idea: Theme Art Gallery

The other week, while I was on holiday in London, I had a look round the National Gallery. And as I wandered around, I found myself paying less attention to the art, and more attention to plotting out game mechanics for an art gallery construction/simulation game. Funny how that happens…

The plan is, you start off with a small room with one painting, a steady stream of people wandering in off the street, and a big ol’ government grant of lots of money. You have to buy priceless paintings and sculptures at auction, carefully picking which ones will get you more visitors. Having a gallery of entirely Impressionist paintings will keep the Impressionist-lovers coming back, but won’t pull in as many new people for future expansion…

And if I were feeling DLC-minded, I could point out all the opportunities for adding extra styles of art at later dates (a DeviantArt dlc, maybe?)

I reckon this could work quite nicely as a tablet game as well. Maybe I’ll end up using this idea later on in OneGameAMonth. Anyone know any good Android game libraries?

(People in that mockup image from Danc’s Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Tiles, used under a CC-BY license.)