New capitalism-inspired game: Your thoughts and suggestions?

[woubuc]

Hi there

I'm new to this forum, but I'm definitely not new to Capitalism. For years it's been one of my favourite games, and ever since I found Capitalism Lab I'm even more addicted to it. Being such a huge fan of the game I do feel like a modern implementation of this kind of business management simulation game is missing. Especially with the internet nowadays to support a truly living city that actually develops in real time around your business, this could create an incredibly rich new experience in the genre.

That's why I decided to try and create a new game, heavily inspired by Capitalism 2 and by games such as SimCity (4 and earlier, not the new ones) and even Rollercoaster Tycoon (again, the classic ones).

Some of the features:
(Copied from the Indiegogo campaign that I'm currently setting up)

A large collection of different buildings: Don't just choose between a "small office building" and a "large office building" - Each building will have a different ratio of storage space, office space, and will have a number of other unique factors that will influence things like running costs, employee happiness and pollution. It's no longer only about the number of buildings you own.

Lots of different resources and products: Build mines to produce the "classic" metals copper, iron and gold, but also silicon, aluminium and many more. Smelt the ores to create metal alloys and transport them to your factories to make everything from watches and lamps to microchips and entire supercomputers. Pump oil to make fuel and plastic, or build woodcutters and produce furniture or even paper, or maybe you'd rather just buy the highest quality wood and metal alloys to build the best electric guitars in the world? Everything is possible.

Design your own factories: Once you have built one of the many buildings available, you buy the machines you need and place them in your factory to produce the products you want. Each factory can accommodate a certain number of machines, so think wisely before you build, because expanding your machine capacity can get very expensive very quickly.

Supply & Demand: Profit isn't achieved by merely producing as many products as possible (this may seem obvious, but I've seen a lot of so-called 'business simulations' make this mistake), or by making the highest quality products on the market. There is a certain demand, determined by the number of citizens, the number of houses and the housing quality (pollution, public service access, ...) and each citizen class has their own budget and quality requirements. Expensive diamond jewellery will not be demanded by the lower class, while high class citizens won't enjoy eating cheap low-quality canned food. The offered products have a direct impact on the number of citizens in the city.

Contracts: Apart from the market demand, you can also cater to your fellow CEO's needs in a business-to-business or wholesale context. Maybe someone has opened up a supermarket in the middle of the neighbouring town, and your factory has room for some extra production of milk cartons? Offer them a contract to deliver a certain amount of milk cartons to their supermarket each week, and see the profits roll in while you can stop worrying about finding buyers for your products.

Multiple cities & shipping: If your factory is located in one city, that doesn't mean only citizens in that city can get their hands on your great products. If you have a buyer, a retail store or a warehouse in another city you can transport your goods there to expand your market. Be aware though, because shipping goods can get quite expensive if you don't keep an eye on your logistics at all times. This of course opens the way to independent logistics companies, who do nothing but transport goods from A to B.

Persistent online world: The game will be situated in a series of huge online maps ("countries"), each spanning a number of cities and empty areas with resources that vary from country to country. You'll be able to directly see and interact with the other player's buildings and every action you or another player does will have effect on the worldwide markets and economy.

There are much more features to it but since this is still just a concept I don't really have a manual or anything to follow, I'm just writing down what I can think of at this moment. I'm trying to set this up and create a whole concept that works, but for that I need your input. One the one hand, what do you guys think of this idea, are there things you'd want to see differently or that you'd improve upon? And on the other hand, are there features I hadn't thought of at all but that you'd love to see?

I'm still looking for developers (so if anyone out there happens to be a game developer I wouldn't mind you saying hi) but I do have someone for the graphics part, and I want to (again) create an isometric pixel art look, similar to Capitalism 2 with influences from SimCity 2K and 3K. So no fancy 3D graphics or anything, because this game really doesn't need 'em and it would needlessly complicate things. I would however improve the interface drastically, because let's be honest, the screens in Capitalism 2 can be a bit of a mess.

I've been working on this idea for a few weeks, and I'm convinced the idea is viable as a game, and could potentially become something great with the support of the Capitalism 2 fanbase. Now I want to hear your thoughts, ideas, comments and suggestions - the good ánd the bad, so that we can make the concept (and eventually the game) even better

[counting]

Can you share the indiegogo campaign link? Or do you have concept drawings for better demonstration of the core concept?

[woubuc]

I don't have a campaign to show yet. I'm still looking for developers to get quotes for an accurate price estimation, so before I have that I can't finish the campaign.

I'm currently writing down all the ideas I have, and creating concept documentation. It will be put online as soon as it's finished (which will be in a couple of weeks).

[counting]

So in the mean time, you will need to come up with a proposal not only to appeal investors (in the case of indiegogo potential players mostly), but also for developer assessment. It will be a tough sell without some form of media presentation to impressive them.

I saw you mentioned working with graphical designer(s), maybe they can let you a hand and create some demonstration art. At least you need a logo for indiegogo page. And pictures or mostly powerpoints for presentation are worth more than a thousand words.

[counting]

As for suggestion to the game concept itself, if you are aiming for online cooperation MMO-style, it generally not works well for city-building type. Most simulation-based games support just few online co-operators. However web-page based type "builder" games could work, but they are usually slow paced, and with some limitation to what can be achieved.

This might be the first crucial question to address - What kind of interface are you proposing if it meant to be online co-op, and in what form? There are mass differences at programming skill to different types.

BTW, most of your ideas I have seems them been implemented before. I even participated one project using old time Mudlib to create a business simulation MUD game a decade ago, basically accomplish most what you described : design customize buildings, purchasing machinery, hire NPC gathering resource to produce products, supply&demand for NPC scripts, sells contract, with many more features like auction houses, currencies and exchange, player government system, etc, etc. Each player is just a character like in RPG game to build up his/her own corporation(s). The only thing lack is probably real graphic since it predates modern graphic cards (MUD has ASCII graphics, dwarf fortress style), but we do eventually convert grids into png format, so players can see 45 degree aerial city views periodically via website. The real trouble we faced is the lack of new players who only like real time 3D graphics as MMORPG became popular, and the need to write MUD scripts performing tasks during offline hours in order to stay competitive is difficult for casual players (Also the eventual died down of MUD community since , quite sad actually)

[woubuc]

So in the mean time, you will need to come up with a proposal not only to appeal investors (in the case of indiegogo potential players mostly), but also for developer assessment. It will be a tough sell without some form of media presentation to impressive them.

The first step I want to finish is completing the list of features and outlining the general gameplay. Development and anything else can only start after that's done. It will take me a couple of weeks, but I wanted to get some opinions on the idea to see if you'd be happy with it or if basically no one would be interested.

As for suggestion to the game concept itself, if you are aiming for online cooperation MMO-style, it generally not works well for city-building type. Most simulation-based games support just few online co-operators. However web-page based type "builder" games could work, but they are usually slow paced, and with some limitation to what can be achieved.

The idea is to actually have everyone play in one giant online world (kind of like an MMO). People would interact, work together or work against each other as they would against AI, with the exception that it's the same game that keeps going on and they can learn the economy inside and out to make decisions on what to do next.

There will of course be loads of things to do, to accomodate the lack of a high-speed fast forward button and also to make the game richer and livelier. And I'm planning to have the simulation run at a rather high speed. I definitely don't want to make something like a "facebook game", where you do two things and then have to wait a day before you can do anything else. I'm aiming for gameplay sessions of at least an hour or two each day, with multiple possibilities to keep busy with different things, and after a few hours the player's companies will have made enough profit to expand a factory, build a new office building, etc...

This might be the first crucial question to address - What kind of interface are you proposing if it meant to be online co-op, and in what form?

What do you mean by interface? If you mean like the client, I'm aiming for a native C++ desktop client for Windows, ported to Mac later on. So it definitely won't be a browsergame. No farmville or cityville or anything, just a game you start like any other game (just like Capitalism), the only difference will be that it connects to a server instead of loading a game from your hard drive. If you were talking about the user interface in the game, I am currently looking into hiring a UI expert to help design an optimised and beautiful UI.

most of your ideas I have seems them been implemented before. I even participated one project using old time Mudlib to create a business simulation MUD game a decade ago, basically accomplish most what you described : design customize buildings, purchasing machinery, hire NPC gathering resource to produce products, supply&demand for NPC scripts, sells contract, with many more features like auction houses, currencies and exchange, player government system, etc, etc.

Well this is the basic idea of this game, but with an isometric world overview like Capitalism and with a modern UI. Also, apart from the complex economy systems like currencies and stock market, I want to tackle common-day businesses like transport of goods (using an in-house truck fleet or outsourcing to logistics firms) and people (public transportation) supported by a variety of fuel types going from cheap-but-dirty steam trains to a fleet of electric vehicles, environment & pollution (government bonuses for ecologic businesses), different types of employeers (office workers, factory workers, managers, drivers, etc...), malls and public places for citizens to improve their happiness - which brings me to the next point, worker happiness (and in turn also unhappiness, which can cause riots), and I hadn't actually thought about a player government but that would be a great addition. I'm definitely aiming to create the most complete game in the genre, drawing upon all the great ideas of the community. There are a lot more features and ideas that I've got in my head, but I'll need some time to write them all down and work out how everything will work together.

[counting]

Well, native and local console program would be quite a challenge for compatibility issue with different OS, but generally developers have more control over data stream, which might be a problem with co-op, so maybe it's a good approach, but synchronization will still be a major issue for fast pace game-play.

Generally, for a starting game, fewer is sometimes better. A more "centralize" theme and focus on bringing one piece at a time is the best way to go when you are not a multimillion game design house. From what I gathered from your reply, you seem to aim toward "transportation tycoon" style of business simulation. They are cool and I like those games, but if you wish to bring "serious" manufacturing and financial aspect (like what we had in Capitalism series) into it, you might need to weight on how exactly are you going to mix them. Try to implement all, get you nowhere fast.

Take Factorio for example, only focuses on an assembly line theme and put it in a futuristic background, a unique combo was born. The intersection of "transport logistic" with "worker pool" as you described may work, but still lack a "bright spot" that can surprise players nowadays.

[counting]

As for game-concept "design". I can share what our MUD was originally planned to where we landed in the end.

At the beginning, our goal is quite simple, some veteran MUD players and wizards gathered around and thought what if we bring the medieval theme of MUD in modern time. Since we already had a basic system with resource gathering and farming in mud library, all we needed to do next was to write manufacturing libraries and new building scripts so players can work with in-depth products. Thus we designed many products from cars to shoes for players to "generate", instead of dropping "goods" from mobs like in most MUD and RPG games, or sold on NPC stores.

After we implemented basic goods and quickly got a prototype, next we tried to let players "generating" their own "rooms" of 3 basic types : residences to sleep/log off and store goods, commercial shops to sell goods, and industries to manufacture goods (draw inspiration from SimCity), and wizards only have to allocate landscape (memory). Players loved the interactive user-generated world, until it felt "artificial" and manufacturing task became tedious. Hence next, we added NPCs scripts, instead of a player with a character, we let players to have "player owned NPCs" adapted from "charmed NPC libaray", and at that point we realized that its actually a "corporation prototype", where players are the CEO and NPCs are workers and customers. So finally this change of direction lead us to implement more libraries and scripts to fill the gap between existing "manufacture sector" with "NPC city simulation", and truly trying to implement a "economy simulation MUD" (A fair warning it was a hell of a headache implementing supply & demand codes)

Most our features were built one step at a time with player feedback from forums and in-game gathering/board system, and some are just accidental. Like the player controlled local government, came from one day a wizard who played the game himself, lent his character to a friend, and his friend with MBA background did a much better job kept city running using wizard clearance, thus we realized with correct authorization and planning we can let players govern themselves, even setup rules for others to follow.

Hopefully these experience can help.

[woubuc]

Well, native and local console program would be quite a challenge for compatibility issue with different OS, but generally developers have more control over data stream, which might be a problem with co-op, so maybe it's a good approach, but synchronization will still be a major issue for fast pace game-play.

I know that the online concept brings some technical difficulties with it, but I'll be discussing the possibilities and the limitations with the programmers to see how we can approach this.

Generally, for a starting game, fewer is sometimes better.

you seem to aim toward "transportation tycoon" style of business simulation

True and largely true. The game is still in a concept stage, where I'm brainstorming with people to get the most ideas for the game. After that, we'll see how it will all work together, and then implement it one by one. But the end goal is definitely to have a game that incorporates all the various features.

As for the transport tycoon remark, it does draw inspiration from (open)TTD and Transport & Industry Giant (the old Jowood games) but also from SimCity and (obviously) Capitalism, with the main focus on running a corporation and producing stuff by managing the (end to end) production chain. But yes, I want to create a crossover between the various games and subgenres, I don't want to create a 'flat' game that only does one thing, because however brilliant that one thing may be, in the end I personally always feel like "now I want to expand on this and do something more with it" - but I can't.

Factorio is a great game, I personally love it a lot, but every time after I've played it for a couple of hours I'm like "now I'm producing all this stuff.. But what for? How can I profit from everything I do?" because everything's just 'there'. And while it's fun to create all these intricate assembly lines and learning how to optimise them I always feel sort of 'left out', if you understand what I mean.

So the bottomline is that I want to get a bigger picture going, where you don't just operate a firm but you do so within an entire world around you to interact with, and I want to do all that without losing the sense of detail and the micromanaging/finetuning possibilities in the individual components of the game.

I'm currently setting up a website at pixelworldgame.com where I'll be detailing the features I envision for the game. I just set it up yesterday though, so it's still very much a work in progress (I'm still trying to install and configure a decent wiki system)

Also, thanks for the information about your game. Your game originated from an entirely different point of view, but there are of course similarities in the core concept. I actually envisioned something more RPG-like from the start (basically managing the corporation from one player's perspective instead of a more godlike overview), but changed around that concept to focus more on the actual business management and finetuning of the production chain, as opposed to e.g. running around the office to manage various aspects of your corporation.

[counting]

If writing agent-based simulation taught me anything, is that you can't simulate every detail, at some point abstract concept and boundaries need to be set, otherwise planning will never stop. You need to start at certain level, a detailed simulation level where players can put all the effort on, the main "battle ground" so to speak.

What we do in the past with mudlib, was started from the actions and action scripts for players, sort of working from bottom up in "city simulation" perspective, and let the macro-level interaction "emerge" out of the micro-level procedures. But even with dozens of workstation servers, and just ascii art, it's still resource heavy. The max players we were able to afford at top was hundreds, and about hundred thousands NPCs. It was a resource managing nightmare, and luckily we had some free resource using academic environment to host them.

Still if you're trying to work the other way around from the top-level down, I've known some developers from simtropolis community and they are also trying these types of top-down approach. Most of them described that routing and traffic modules are big problems designing them when multiplayers were involved, also the economic simulation with many AI agents prove to be too resource heavy for local client to handle, and most opt to use statistical model for generating "background activities", and "spice it up" with some heuristic random generator, so players can not perceive the "artificial" pattern easily (even with Capitalism, it's still just dealing with dozens of AI scripts, all the "citizens" are just aggregated statistical models, not "real" thousands and millions agents). Although, pure agent-based approach can still be done at the server-side I suppose, but you'll have to handle the huge data-stream and bandwidth problem first, with major server-side cloud management.

I sense you really want to simulate at worker/labor level actions, but for player's "main focus" is reside at city-management level, it's a huge gap you need to cover. Linking this gap will be the major issue you need to properly consider. Emerging property is not something easily done by itself.