Tycoon/Economic Simulation (Another one)

Hi Guys,

I've been trawling the web for months trying to find a good free tutorial for creating Tycoon/Economic Simulation/Resource Management games. I've come across so many forums/discussions/tutorials that advise people on what to do before starting - i.e. "Look at this website for C# coding" or "Oh that's a great idea - what about if you do this, and this too in the game!" "It's a lot of work - start with something smaller." "Break down development into chunks, and look up tutorials for each bit."

All in all - those contain great feedback and useful resources however, I'm finding it nearly impossible to come by any actual tutorials that are free, complete, or relevant. But the internet is vast and swamped with (un)useful information.

I've done the Unity tutorials and what-not, as well as some other ones like Stormtek RTS Tutorial. Except none of them are actually providing useful resources into creating an Virtual Economy. I'm currently searching for some documentation on creating a monetary system using simple click-based GUI interaction to influence users money/resources. I can do some C# coding and 3D/2D design with mesh/materials etc and can implement them in Unity - which is pretty irrelevant just now - because I can't create a basic system to implement them to!

So what am I looking for? Essentially a tutorial/documentation that provides information on how to do the following:

Press Button - Produce Money - Store Money - Press Button - Upgrade/Buy - Produce More and so on.
Something similar to Adventure Capitalist but with more depth, something that isn't a Clicker/Idle game but will require more depth to thought.

E.g. (A good example might be Hotel Tycoon, Gear City, maybe Software Inc?)
Buy Hotel = Base income
Hotel needs repairs = Loss of income, maintenance cost = increase income
Hire maintenance guy = Negative income
Hire Room Service = More reputation, positive income.

I'm looking to create a game based around that style, again using Unity and only as a simple GUI/Clicker until I can spend time developing the needed assets to make it to a 3D game. Again, the documentation/tutorials I'm looking for should be free, since the *Udemy etc* tutorials that are paid don't really cover what I need so it'd be a waste of money - especially since some of the stuff would be code I already know and could implement.

 

This sounds like more of a Getting Started question than a game design question.

I don't know of a specific tutorial like what you're looking for (but then, I don't really follow them much; there may well be one). But what specifically are you having trouble with? If you've done all the Unity tutorials, surely you know by now how to declare a field to keep track of money, and update the value thereof in the Update event or in response to button clicks? What exactly are you stuck on?

 

I did a game (very unpolished) where you had to manage a cookie shop, and control how much income to invest, montly gains, credit, products on inventory, double-entry bookkeeping, and other stuff and balancing that was one the last things to do on the list. Follow the advice that you already know and worry about the details latter.

 

Here we go:

Code (CSharp):

1. float number;
2.  
3. void Update (){
4.     if (Input.GetMouseDown(0)){
5.         number++;
6.     }
7. }

 

All good advice! Also it shows you've done some good research already. Demonstrating your ability to find these things and recognize them as important bits of information basically shows you can make a game, without following a tutorial explicitly telling you how to proceed, on each step along the way, imho...

It is quite likely, that there just are no tutorials for this. Making a complex game takes hundreds to thousands of hours. Making tutorials on anything, takes a multiple of the time it takes to make the thing in the first place. Someone with the skill to make a complex game, just will make the game, there is no incentive to make a 5000 hour tutorial series that no one will watch to the end anyway.
You could check if quill18 has something relevant for you in his base building game tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/user/quill18creates

Apart from that I recommend to keep your search terms broader and research more "basic" topics. Learning how to handle GUIs doesn't need anything specifically related to tycoon style games in my opinion. Money is just data, read up on manipulating and storing data. Maybe even avoid "tutorial" in your search queries, because they usually imply entry-level topics and usecases. There fewer resources on advanced topics, that still call themselves "tutorials".

For learning about the gamedesign aspects, play games! Read wikis on good games in the genre and see how they explain the mechanics of the ingame economies.

Research general "good gamedesign" topics, very much will be relevant to you, even if it isn't explicitly mentioning tycoon/economy simulation games. Feedback, flow, rewards are just as important in such games as in others.

 

Besides basic tutorials, I found just going through the unity page and looking at all the functions and snippets very helpful.

Stuff like arrays and lists.
Math functions.

I can discover those individual functions and piece together what I need. Oh, that does that? I can use that, etc..

For your game, technically you should be able to paper prototype it out pretty easily.

Heck even an excel sheet would work. With formulas.

Browsing fundamental c# videos help too. They usually will use some real world game metric in their example that you can reverse engineer.

I watch this guy alot.

jason weisman