Special Design Considerations for CMSs

The following sections discuss some design considerations particular to construction and management simulations.

Simulating Individuals

Many CMSs simulate the behavior of a group of people (or, in the case of SimAnt , ants ) within an environment that the player is managing. If it's a very large number of people, as in the original Sim City , behavior is usually modeled statistically and separate values are not kept for each person. However, you might want to simulate the actions of unique individuals that the player can see moving around and doing whatever it is that they do in your world. This will make your game a good deal more entertaining because there will be more for the player to see and because he can follow particular individuals around to watch what they do. It appeals to a sort of voyeuristic impulse and makes the consequences of the player's decisions seem more personal. It's particularly affecting when the player can actually see people who are unhappy packing up and leaving.

Modeling particular individuals rather than statistical aggregates adds considerably to your design job. You will need to create a behavioral model, usually including a scalar degree of happiness or unhappiness, and a set of needs that the person desires to have fulfilled. Various behaviors or circumstances can fulfill those needs. In some cases, the individual will be able to take an autonomous action that fulfills the need (driving from home to work fulfills the need to get to work); whereas in others, the player will have to provide something to fulfill the need (building a school provides educational opportunities). If a need goes unfulfilled, either through a problem that arises within the simulation (traffic jams prevent the person getting to work) or the player failing to act (no school has been built), there should be a negative consequence of some kind (the simulated person becomes unhappy).

Modeling individuals relieves you of the job of creating a statistical model because the behavior of the individuals collectively provides the statistics. However, balancing it will be a much more intricate job. You will probably discover emergent behaviors, unanticipated consequences of design decisions. Some of these will be fascinating and almost seem like intelligence, but others will clearly be degenerate : people locked in a tight behavioral loop, for example, only ever doing one or two things because your needs mechanism isn't balanced properly.

Behavioral modeling is too big of a subject for us to address comprehensively here, and we suggest that you consult the bibliography at the end of this book for further reading.

Mind Reading

If the individuals you're simulating are visible on the screen and the player can select one with the mouse, you can offer another useful analysis tool: mind reading. To let the player know what's in that individual's mind, pop up an icon or even a whole dialog box showing his internal state: current goal, degree of happiness, or whatever other data might be useful to the player. This lets the player get a quick, rough sense of how the people are feeling without having to turn to a statistical analysis screen.

Case Study: Theme Park , a Disgusting Example of Positive Feedback

In Bullfrog Productions's CMS called Theme Park , the player was supposed to build a single theme park, ride by ride, into an empire of theme parks around the world. In addition to buying the rides, which attracted visitors , the player built shops and restaurants to extract money from them and hired maintenance and cleaning staff to keep the rides working and the park clean.

Each visitor to the park had a number of characteristics: how much money he had, how hungry or thirsty he was, and so on. One of these characteristics was "current degree of nausea." If a visitor became nauseated enough, he would vomit, leaving a mess on the ground that had to be cleaned up. Nausea could be caused by three things. Two of these were riding a particularly violent ride and being near an unclean bathroom. The third cause of nausea was ”you guessed it ”being near someone else's vomit. If the park was crowded and the player hadn't hired enough cleaning staff to keep the bathrooms clean and the vomit cleaned up, the result was chain-reaction vomiting by the visitors. This did nothing for the reputation of the park and tended to hurt future sales, but it did inject a degree of juvenile humor into what was otherwise a fairly straightforward business simulation.

Advisors

Another tool commonly found in CMSs is the advisor : a simulated character who pops up and gives the player advice from time to time (see Figure 14.6). Because problems are often localized in one area of the map, the player might be looking at another area when one occurs and not see it until it has grown severe. An advisor can warn of problem conditions wherever they occur. You should also consider including a screen button or menu item that jumps the screen to the most recently reported problem.

Figure 14.6. Theme Park World . Note the advisor in the lower-right corner.

In addition to warning of emergencies, an advisor can give the player information about the general state of the game. "The people need more food," he can say, or "Prices are too high." This lets the player know of global problems without having to consult the analysis tools.

To design an advisor, define both the local and the global problems that you think are important to let the player know about; then set the threshold levels at which the advisor will pop up. If the advisor is going to interrupt the player or say something aloud , don't set these thresholds too low, or the constant interruptions will become irritating . You should also make it possible for the player to turn off the advisor or to consult it only when wanted. Playing without the advisor adds an extra challenge to the game.

You can also create an advisor that consists only of an indicator that remains constantly on the screen, displaying the most urgent global need at the moment.

Pure Business Simulations

A game like Theme Park World is a business simulation because it's about attracting customers and making profits. It's the building aspect of it that makes it a CMS. But there are also pure business simulations in which you construct only a financial fortune , not a visible world. The game Hollywood Mogul , for example, is about the business of making movies, but it consists only of a series of menu screens about hiring stars and making deals. The player never sees a set or a camera. Mr. Bigshot , shown in Figure 14.7, is a fairly simple stock market simulation.

Figure 14.7. Mr. Bigshot.

Most of the challenges of designing a pure business simulation are the same as for any other management sim: You must devise an economy and mechanisms for manipulating it. The real trick is to find some way of making the subject visually interesting. Spreadsheets and pie charts have limited appeal , so if you're going to do a management simulation without a construction element, you should try to give it some kind of a setting or to find a visual representation of the process that will make it attractive and compelling. Mr. Bigshot accomplishes this with lots of animation, voiceover narration, music, and cartoon characters representing the player's opponents; as the player, you feel rather like a contestant on a TV game show.

By contrast, Capitalism II (see Figure 14.8) is a huge, sprawling business sim covering all kinds of products and industries. In addition to showing pictures of them and all the raw materials that go into them, the game allows players to construct or purchase buildings in cities, so there's an attractive Sim City -like view as well.

Figure 14.8. Capitalism II.

Business simulations will never have the pulse-pounding excitement of a first-person shooter, but they can be highly enjoyable games . As the designer, you'll need to work closely with the art director to make the essentially numeric nature of their gameplay more lively.

Hybrid Games

Civilization , Age of Empires , Dungeon Keeper , and The Settlers are all good examples of hybrid games: crosses between a CMS and a war game. In addition to their economic challenges, they all feature exploration and military challenges, varying somewhat from one game to another. The military aspect of The Settlers is quite simple, as it must be, given that the economic aspect is exceedingly complex. Age of Empires emphasizes warfare and military research more and is more of a real-time strategy game than a CMS, especially because natural resources are limited. Its people can be controlled directly, too. Dungeon Keeper is initially about constructing a dungeon, but in the later stages of each mission, it's actually about recruiting and training a balanced army, and then taking that army into battle. Control is a curious hybrid of direct and indirect: Creatures have a distinct behavior model, but they will obey orders as long as they're happy. (If they're unhappy, they might disobey or even desert.) However, Dungeon Keeper retains its economic challenges throughout: It's one of the very few games in which the soldiers have to be paid, fed, and given a place to sleep.

If you're going to design a hybrid game, we encourage you to design the economic simulation first (unless it's really simple) and then add the other elements afterward. Because the other aspects of the game usually depend on the underlying economy, a mistake in the economic design can easily ruin the rest of the game. For example, a war game that includes an economy for weapons production might lose all its strategic challenge if the player is able to produce weapons too quickly. The player will exploit his economic strength and overwhelm the opposition with sheer numbers rather than strategic skill.

Construction and Management Simulation Worksheet

When beginning the design of a construction and management simulation, consider the following questions:

1. What process is the player going to manage? What actions will the player take in managing that process?

2. What resources exist in this process? For each resource, how is it produced, consumed, stored, transported, and converted into other resources? Is it tangible , intangible, or a hybrid? Is it limited or unlimited? What determines its production and consumption rates?

3. Which resources can the player manipulate and which can she not?

4. Will the process settle into a static or dynamic equilibrium, or will it run down if not tended by the player? Will disasters affect it?

5. What will be player be constructing, and what function does the constructed item have? Will objects be purchased whole or designed and built over time? For each item that the player can construct, what does it cost and how long does it take to build?

6. Can the player demolish or sell things that she builds? Does this cost or earn resources for the player?

7. Will the game have scenarios with victory conditions? What are they like?

8. What is the player's perspective and interaction model with the game? Is there a way to "get inside" the things she builds?

9. What analysis tools are provided to help her understand the workings of the simulation?

10. Is the simulated population modeled as individuals or as a statistical aggregate? If they are individuals, what is their behavior model? Are there multiple types of individuals? Can the player read their minds?

11. Will the game have advisors? What will they advise about?

12. Is this game a pure business simulation? Accounting and finance are often considered rather dull, so what makes this compelling? Does the game have a setting? If not, how can it be made visually interesting?

13. Is the game a hybrid with other sorts of games? What other elements in the game make it a hybrid (strategic problems, action challenges, puzzles, and so on)? How do they affect the way the game is controlled?