Sim/Tycoon games. Likes and dislikes,..

I am working on a sim themepark style game and was wondering what others thought about what they like or dislike most about them.

I used to love them as a kid. And the new slew of Mobile games, like idle park, hospital tycoon,..etc,..are cool. But not as involved as I'd like. And some of them really lean on the cash shop for progression.

Granted they call them "idle" for a reason, but I was looking to develop an in-between sort of complexity.

For mine I want to focus on the people. Whether it be the workers you hire or the patrons who do things and get into mischief. Keeping people happy and spending.


(screenie, w/mocked up stuff placeholders)


So what aspects of the genre do you like the most? managing money? watching the peeps interact? Building roads and laying out houses? Any games, AAA or indie that you like? Or mechanics from them that you like or wish they used differently?

cheers

 

I like being surprised by unexpected emergent behavior.

 

I like the min/max aspect. Like in old Sim City, I have built out a big city and then I want to maximize population to get those bigger buildings built, improve the roads, get better fire/police coverage, etc. Then in the end I want to light it all on fire and see if I can pull off a save.

It is a different game genre, but for the complex people management side, spend some time with Crusader Kings II.

 

thanks for the reference! I am on youtube now checking it out. Thanks!

 

completing milestones and getting rewards

 

What often appeals to me in those games is the risk/reward ratio based on time. E.g. in Theme Hospital you have to decide how many doctors you want to hire to train them. It takes time and costs money, but in the end you will have very fast and efficient workers. Hire too many too soon = you go broke, but hire too few too late = you can't run your hospital in the later stages.
While this is a principle in almost all strategy games, I think it works particularly well with people. When there is an experience system in place, early investments increase in value over time, challenging the player to estimate how well their investment will pay off, and often they have control over the progress.
I think easier strategy games tend to just use the principle of "you build it when you can afford it, then you earn more money". Idle games are of course the bare essence of that system.

 

In my experience the smaller your workforce, the more I care about them. In the original XCOM, all soldiers were expendable dudes and dudettes. You might have given them a custom name, but in essence they are a resource with a statline you throw at an alien invasion. Their deaths are a statistic.

The new Firaxis XCOM games turn that upside down. Your team is smaller, people have voices and nationalities. While randomly generated, the bald and bearded Canadian becomes a hero character in your campaign. He gets a profession, a nickname and a silly hat. It makes the moment that Moose gets liquified by alien plasma all the more engaging.

 

That sounds awesome, Thanks!

The 'poor-man's RPG' in me loves the idea. I will keep the pool of Staff workers low per profession. With the intention of building them up. I've always intended them to level up,.but it sounds like a sort of mini-Hero collector too, which is fine by me.

One conflicting thought though is that I like the idea of screwing with their wages, maybe to keep costs low. Getting fired or quit. Even having them 'die' in mishaps of an unsafe park. That would suck to have all that investment taken from the player. The old 'how to handle death/punishment" dilemma. ;p

I never played X-com, how do they handle death? Do they just sit a few rounds out?

 

Are you familiar with the term Ironman? It means that you always accept the outcome of a mission. Modern XCOM title have it as a "feature" which basicly disables manual saving. Autosaves ONLY. That means permadeath for your soldiers.

Yet I get the vibe you are leaning more towards Theme Park / Theme Hospital levels of employee mismanagement, instead of hardcore squad-based decisions. Perhaps if you made workplace deaths are rare thing that can only happen to people that do dangerous jobs.

I had some success with JSON as a format to store data to randomize at runtime (like employee names). Perhaps something simple like firstname, lastname, gender and a simple trait system (where Clumsy employees are more likely to get themselves killed then Accurate ones) would go a long way in making subjection to workplace dangers more of an optimalisation strategy then the difference between losing or winning the game.

 

I think your focus on the people is interesting. I wish more sim/tycoon games gave more importance to the individual members of your community/city, or zoo, or theme park, etc. By implementing things that approximate personalities, relationships between NPCs, tastes, as well as elements from the world you don't see in the game, you can have interesting situations come up that aren't completely predictable. I also like the idea of a growing history of your city/community, theme park, zoo, or whatever. For example, your city would start out as a small community, but you could have game mechanics that allowed for creating particular holiday or festival, or create a historic district in which you would actually create unhappiness if you changed it too much in an effort to optimize traffic or commerce, etc. You could even have an area of the city affected by a fire or other disaster that drives some ongoing community event in remembrance. Basically, you have both design decisions you can make and random events that you and your population respond to that give your community a personality that isn't easy to replicate through other playthroughs, and gives the player a sense of some organic creation they are playing with that keeps them interested.