Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: game design

Democracy 3 : simulating the private sector

Posted on January 18, 2013

Sooo… One of the drawbacks of Democracy 2‘s model was that it only really accounted for public sector pensions, housing, schools and hospitals. This was unrealistic and I’m fixing it in Democracy 3. In D2, if the state didn’t provide schools, people were illiterate. You don’t need to be Ron Paul to be convinced that it isn’t as clear-cut as that. So how am I planning to fix that?

Democracy 3 has policies (things the player chooses to implement, or not, and adjust) and also ‘simulation values’, just like D2 did. A simulation value is basically a statistic, something that arises out of the simulation and which you have zero control of. Pollution levels are one example. Literacy (a catch-all for general educational level) is another. In Democracy 2, a player couldn’t change the literacy level, but they could implement various state policies that would indirectly affect it, like state schooling.

Democracy 3 has the literacy level stat, and also a private schools stat. By default, private schools are at a certain level (tied to GDP, and therefore the general level of wealth), and they have the same effect (roughly) on literacy as state schools do. However, they have effects public schools don’t, such as a reduction in lower and middle incomes. This is because those values represent ‘disposable’ incomes for those groups, and having to pay for private schools eats into that. The truly wealthy laugh off mere school fees, so it’s not an issue for them. Also, unlike state schools, the private schools don’t reduce inequality, or boost state employees and trade unions, and they keep capitalists, rather than socialists happy.

icons_privateschools icons_stateschools

Now let’s revisit state schools. they work exactly as they used to, except they have an effect on private schools. The more you spend on public schooling, the less private schools there are. In effect, the better the state schools are, the less people are prepared to empty their pockets for private education, which makes sense.

So hopefully, the net result of this is a system where either approach (laissez faire or state intervention) can get you decent schooling, but you have to pick how to handle it. The state schools have to be paid for, which will mean cuts elsewhere or higher taxes. The private schools are paid for by people direct, but they can cause problems of inequality (with knock-on impacts on crime etc), and the people will need more money left in their pockets to pay for it (lower taxes). To further enhance the whole area, I could introduce policies which gave tax-credits for private education, which would allow me to keep private schooling afloat during a recession. Maybe a system of state scholarships could reduce inequality and compensate for private schools as the only option? (technically this is tricky).

Obviously this is a VAST simplification of the real world, but I think it’s far closer to reality than the Democracy 2 system. My plan has pensions, housing and healthcare working the same way.

Thoughts?

Sim City 4 rekindles my inner stats geek

Posted on December 31, 2012

I’ve got totally addicted to Sim City 4. The new version will have to be something very special to make me prefer it to this classic. I enjoyed it thoroughly upon release, but have recently rediscovered it’s charms. Weirdly, it’s performance on my PC is not great. I strongly suspect that this is because it is a game running on an assumption of single-core PC’s, in a single thread, or maybe running on an assumption of low polygon-throughput, given it’s interesting approach to hybrid 3D-2Dness. I would truly love to wade through it’s source code.

simcity

One of the things I find most interesting about SC4 is the extent to which it is sandbox and freeform driven. The player is given a toolkit for city building and left to get on with it. It really is a (pleasant) throwback to ‘make your own fun’ which I find thoroughly refreshing after playing so many modern games, which amount to a checklist of ordered tasks, and a booming voice saying ‘hit this key’ ‘now hit that key’ ‘well done, have 1,000 gold stars for hitting the key we just told you to hit’.

I hate that.

Sim City 4 has no achievements or high scores, or todo lists or much in the way of targets or quests, and I find myself remarkably capable of setting my own. My first city has floundered a bit financially due to my insistence on building an entire metropolis powered by wind turbines. (Annoyingly there are no economies of scale with them :(). My second city is achieving an almost OCD level of sadness with it’s ordered grid system and widespread use of monorails. I didn’t need a ‘wind energy badge’ or a ‘monorail achievement’ to encourage me to play or have fun in this way.

It’s also helping me to understand how some players get REALLY into optimizing their fleets and ship designs in Gratuitous Space Battles. You have no idea how much bulldozing and re-designing I’ve carried out to get the optimum layout for my monorail system :D

Outcasts Update

Posted on November 30, 2012

For those not following closely I am working on a new expansion pack for Gratuitous Space Battles. I was working on something else…but then i got seduced by the idea of more spaceships. I’ll return to the ‘other thing’ soon, I promise!

The new race is called the outcasts, and they are cybernetic types with a chip on their shoulder about biology. Think ‘the founders’ from DS9 but with a hatred of biologicals rather than solids.  In terms of visual design, they like their ships to be saucer shaped, with some exposed pipework and no shortage of engines or big glowy regions:

In terms of race design, I’m giving them a slight tendency towards faster ships (speed bonuses a plenty!) and concentrating on making better frigates for them. Currently my special ‘race-specific’ modules are as follows:

  1. Cruiser Decoy projector (see video here): This is a way that cruisers can project a fake cruiser hologram in front of them to lure enemy weapons away from the real fleet. bwahahahaha.
  2. Frigate 2-stage missiles (see video here): These start off slow, then accelerate (like a javelin missile) to make them hard to shoot down.
  3. Frigate multi-point tractor beam: These puppies can grab up to three different targets (probably fighters) at once. Oh yes.
  4. Frigate Pulse Gun: A new fast-firing laser-salvo gun that acts like a souped up ion cannon.
  5. Frigate Sniper Laser: Super-long-range frigate beam laser that allows them to snipe at the enemy from the safety of the main battle line for the first time.
  6. Solar Power Collector: A special frigate power generator module that beats all the others. Possibly frees up an extra slot for crew./shields/armor.

I may add other stuff, or make a few more radical changes during testing. I’ve also commissioned some awesome new music for the expansion from sean vella. This will make the outcasts the first new race to get their own special music recorded. Plus there are some stunning new nebula backdrops I got an artist to render for the new missions. For some reason, I’m really getting into this expansion pack :D There is no release date yet. I need to test and test and then release a patch to the main game to support them before I even consider releasing them. I can’t tell yet if it will be pre or post-christmas. Join in the discussion on the forums.

In other news, I just spent another fortune (well…£200) on insulation*. It’s COOOOOLLLLDDDDD here, and I’m determined to finish insulating that attic one day. I’ve shivered enough. Actually it’s not a problem if you are a normal person without an obsession with not using the oil-fired radiators like me. I’m a log-fire kind of guy.

*we have to use ‘breathable’ insulation in this old house, which makes the stuff much more expensive than normal.

 

Two-stage rockets for GSB

Posted on November 18, 2012

Here is a video of a little experiment:

The idea is to have missiles that go slowly at first, then suddenly boost towards their target. They deliberately start off at a slight angle too. The benefit is that enemy last-minute defense don’t have much time to shoot them down, but if you have a defensive screen of point-defense frigates, then can pick them off before they start their boost stage. The plan is to have this as a frigate-only outcasts-only weapon for the next expansion. Let me know what you think.