Has to be said, there's not that many shareware games making money these days. Personally I think your onto a good thing with D&C, and expanding on that a bit is your best option. There's a lot you could do, hell rip ideas off Nintendo with it's sandbox style games. D&C should appeal to kids, and kids love to sandbox, own pets, have a little house, insult NPC's. Maybe adding a more freeroam town with an Animal Crossing feel, then have the levels branch off as missions from that. Letting players buy useless items and fish would broaden it's appeal - perhaps abilities like skating and swimming could be skills that need to be practiced (like a swimming pool and skating park in the freeroam town), as well as adding more abilities. Skates and snorkels could be upgradable items. The money the player collects during a level could be spent on items and furniture for their house, I mean you could really go to town with the secret items and mini-games, and that's what keeps people playing, wanting to buy the full game more.
You have to consider what parents are willing to spend on a game, I mean they go to stores like GAME and look for games at about £10, you know those budget games parents seem to be drawn to. Publishing through them might be the best commercial angle, because those games largely suck, D&C would stand out in amongst that lot. Also consider the multiplayer aspect, seriously, when parents and grandparents look for games, they're looking for something that siblings can play together, no fighting, happy families etc.
There's actually a lack of this sort of game, apart from the Sims series, 2-player single PC games are rare enough, but having one that offers that style of sandbox gaming as well would appeal to more people. Online gaming never really took off with DBPro, but maybe it would be possible to host your town, then have people join it, having only 3 or 4 players running around like in Animal Crossing is still a lot of fun. I imagine there's a few youngsters in your family that wouldn't mind playtesting, they can be very honest when it comes to this stuff, I should probably listen to my son more!. You know you can email me anytime if you want to discuss ideas and how to impliment them.
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