Dino Tycoon

Rocky Media

Overview:

Dino Tycoon is a tycoon style game where players build a base and rapidly grow their in game currency. Players unlock dinosaurs that they can transform into to battle other players and enemy npc's.

Role: Game & Level Designer

Team size: 3

Project Duration: 1 month

Tools: UEFN, Figma, Google Docs

Released: July 2025

Contributions:

Game Design of Dinosaur combat
Player base building progression
Level Design of Lobby, Base, and Battle Arena

Design Goals

Design a tycoon game with dinosaur aesthetics
Create a progression system that keeps players playing for 45 minutes
Include a Dinosaur fighting mechanic somewhere in the mix

Tycoon Gameplay Crash Course

A tycoon game is one where players aim to earn a lot of wealth. Wealth comes in the form of in-game currency. Players gain in game currency typically through a manual form of interaction and use that currency to upgrade currency gaining abilities. The addicting game-loop is seeing the number of currency go up faster and seeing owned currency go higher and higher.

Designing Player Progression

45 Minute Playtime Goal

Reward the player early kept them invested in building their base for when progression becomes harder

Including different currencies that progress at different rates helps pace certain milestones

Side activities such as dinosaur free roam help keep players engaged in-between difficult milestones

The design is to make early upgrades cheap so the player can feel a high sense of progression and reward for little work.

I made the wireframe above to outline the player progression starting from left to right. Yellow circles, Orange Stars, and Red Triangles represent different currencies needed to purchase unlockables. As the player levels up their base more branching paths open up for upgrading; and the more expensive things start to become.

This wireframe helped in planning out player progression and significantly helped in-engine implementation.

Player Base Interior with all upgrade triggers shown

Level Layout

The level is broken into three main parts:

Lobby Area: circular design to create a sense of community

Player Base: Three story building that the player will be upgrading

Dino Arena: PVP/ PVE battle arena

Lobby Area with fully built bases & Dino pit in the middle

Lobby Area

Dino Arena Sketch

Player Base

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Dino Arena & Combat

A gameplay mechanic not typical to tycoons is combat. As players upgrade their base they unlock a total of four different dinosaurs that they can unlock and transform into.

Once players unlock a dinosaur they can roam around the lobby area as a Dino or they can teleport to the combat arena where they can fight other players and npc raptors.

This was a huge motivator for the players as they were able to see other players walk around as different dinosaurs. When players claim a base they get a free dinosaur. This design was intentional and works with the idea of rewarding the player early and showing them a unique mechanic not found in other tycoon maps.

Dino Arena

Closing Remarks

Designing experiences for UGC (user generated content) platforms can often feel like chasing trends. Tycoons are popular on and off the platform and have rich economy design baked within them. Learning about these different design philosophies and player motivations were a lot of fun and super insightful as a designer. I'm super happy with how the map came out, at it's peak it was able to get above 600 CCU (concurrent users) and was able to hit #1 on the New and Updated category. These are no small feat on a hyper competitive platform such as Fortnite Creative.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse