I find myself performing a number of restarts right at the beginning of the game, before even making my first move. What I'm looking for when I do this:
(A) Clients who aren't asking for outrageous things. By "outrageous", I mean stats over 50 on the bronze, 100 on the silver and gold.
(B) Every critter in the shop has a - stat, and it's usually STA. When a stat goes negative or hits zero, they can't seem to do a damn thing.
(C) The clients are looking for a stat or critter that isn't available in the shop on the first day.
To avoid all of these rampant restarts, I propose a few really simple tweaks.
1. Money is nigh-impossible to come by without either wasting a day or three harvesting your critters and selling it off, or actually managing to complete a client's request. I get that client requests are pivotal to gameplay and should be difficult, but I ask for one other way of earning money: change "release into the wild" to some nonsense like "sell to zoo" and get 10% of their value had they been a bronze-level turn-in. At lower levels, this'll only be about 50-70 gil, but it'll be a quick way of cashing in on the 'misfires' that occurred while trying to ramp up those stats the clients. This will take some of the pressure off and lower my standards on all points of why I restart, knowing there's an extra way of making money.
2. "If Stat < 1then Stat = 1". One line of code at the end of the evaluation while modifying a stat, to assure they don't glitch out and become completely useless. This will largely alleviate (B), but not entirely.
3. When randomly generating critters, have a - stat show up a lot more rarely. Instead of making it what appears to be at least 75%, drop it down to about 20%, but then make these critters a savant of some sort, giving them a bigger starting stat pool or an extra + stat or more powerful + stat. The - stat critters are completely unappealing, even with harpy grease, but if they came with a bonus that you have to really look at their stats long and hard to figure out, they might be worth the risk. The savant bit, of course, doesn't apply when breeding, just when generating them for the store: if you breed a stupid critter, you breed a stupid critter. This will entirely alleviate (A).
4. Apply the same logic to critter spawning in the store to what clients want. That is to say, if you don't have an aviary and the store won't populate a harpy, then also stop the a harpy from coming up in a client's desires. This will alleviate a large portion of (C) and a good bit of (A).
5. Keep up the good work. This is the kind of game I'd make if I could make heads or tails of Flash.
