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

Category: game design

Cynical Blog Post (Democracy 3)

Posted on April 25, 2013

Ahahaha. See what I did there? I’m blogging about cynicism in Democracy 3. It’s much better than cynicism in democracy 2, or at least the developer claims it is, it probably won’t be…amirite?

Enough sad puns. Anyway, cynicism in democracy 2 worked like this: If the player raised taxes just after being re-elected (or at the game start, which is the same thing) or dropped them just before an election, the level of global cynicism went up, and this was a factor in deciding who to vote for at the next election. Simple.

The trouble is, it was too cynical. if you cut inheritance taxes just before an election, the middle classes and wealthy may well find it cynical, but will people unaffected by the change (the poor etc) really even notice? And there are other policies than tax. If you introduce armed police just before an election shouldn’t patriots and conservatives be a bit cynical about that?

So Democracy 3 introduces 2 radical changes to the way cynicism is calculated. Firstly, it is per-voter group. So you are only made cynical by changes which actually have some effect on your beliefs and situation. As a non parent, you won’t care if child benefit goes up or down or when it happens, you ignore it. Secondly, cynicism now acts on all decisions, not just tax. So laws, government spending…anything that has a noticeable effect on the opinions of a voter group will trigger a rise in cynicism for that group.

That’s the theory. Right now it’s buggy as anything, but I will fix it today. No seriously…I’m sure it will get fixed today.

More Democracy 3 simulation fun and games

Posted on March 13, 2013

The core mechanic of Democracy 3 is going to take a lot of careful explaining in tutorials and tooltips and help windows. Essentially, it’s pretty simple, in that you implement policies, and you can adjust the intensity of a policy using a slider. So with a policy like income tax, the slider adjust the rate of tax from low to high. A series of bars show you the effect this policy has on everything, such as voter happiness, GDP, and so on. Sounds simple so far right? This is where it gets complex because there are three additional factors, which are implementation times, effectiveness and inertia. I’ll explain each one:

Implementation times is the amount of game time it takes to introduce a new policy. For a new tax rate, it’s instant, but for a space program, it might be five years. The policy effect fades in over those five years. So for example, if you set the slider to maximum, and the effect on GDP is +10% at maximum, then one year after introducing the policy, all the effects are still only at 20% of their maximums, and the GDP boost is thus 2%. Implementation rate is also the rate at which you can adjust a policy. Again, with tax rates it’s instant, with big infrastructure projects, you might move the slider from 0.5 to 1.0, but it will gradually make it’s way there over time, and the effects will scale accordingly.

Effectiveness is a general multiplier for all of the effects of a policy, and this is based on the minister in charge of that department. He can be bad, reducing its effectiveness, or good, which boosts it. Over time, all ministers get more experienced, so their effectiveness will go up.

Inertia indicates the extent to which policy effects lag behind implementation. For example free school meals increase total population health, but it’s a very slow effect, over time as school children grow up, and maintain those healthy eating habits. So the effect may have an ‘inertia’ of ten years (Should be longer, but for gameplay reasons…). This means that even though the policy is fully implemented, it’s full effects aren’t being felt yet, and also, when the policy is cancelled, the effects may linger on afterwards, slowly declining.

Combined together (and this is just part of it), it’s uber-complex and subtle. It means that at any one time a single policy may be becoming more effective as it gets more implemented, and more so as it’s minister learns the ropes, whilst at the same time be drifting towards lower values as the effects of a policy change since it was introduced take effect, and at the same time as all this, the various effects it has may all have different rates of ‘inertia’ and thus be shifting in different directions :D

Fortunately I’ve learned a lot of stuff about GUI design from earlier games. I’m sure it will be fine :D

 

Touchscreens and deep strategy games

Posted on March 6, 2013

Don’t panic just yet. Stay calm. But we might…we just might be in trouble.

Apples market share seems to be climbing quite unstoppably. PC sales are sluggish, tablet sales are booming. Whether the future belongs to apple or samsung, it does look like a big chunk of the future may be on tablets. Even my famously non tech-savvy gaming buddy, when told I’d been playing a ‘new’ game (portal 2) asked me immediately if he could play it on his ipad. Not his PC, his ipad.

We might be in trouble.

Ipads are perfectly good for gaming. I’ve wasted a good few hours on fieldrunners. I know some people live and die by their ipads. I think it’s a perfectly good platform. The trouble is, there is an absolutely perfect match between all the downsides of tablets, and all the demands of deep hardcore strategy gaming.

If you had to list tablet downsides as a developer, I reckon they would be small screen size, low memory, no right-click and no mouse hover. For the kind of games I make ALL of these things are a real pain. I *rely* on tooltips. I think they are awesome. I LOVE right-click menus, they are such a handy bit of functionality. And I like deep, complex games with a lot of information on the screen and a big hefty simulation that gobbles a lot of RAM.

Democracy 3, at the start of a new game has 156,000 neural connections in memory. Am I going to fit that on an ipad or an ipad 2? I doubt it. Now I know there are workarounds, some cunning retooling of GUI’s can have alternatives for tooltips and right clicks, but regardless how ‘retina’ the screens get, we aren’t looking at a 20 inch or 24 inch monitor any more, we aren’t able to assume near-pixel perfect mouse selection, and we aren’t about to get 2 gig or 4 gig of RAM in a tablet any time soon.

So that means taking a perfectly good strategy game design, which frankly any modern PC can cope with with one hand tied behind it’s back, and squeezing and compromising and squashing it to fit onto a tablet. Obviously, I don’t want to do that. Obviously, I’m not going to do that. I’m a PC gamer, through-and-through. If I wanted to compromise a PC game design because of a console, I’d go work for EA. Ahahahahahaha….

Anyway… I do worry the more tablet computers get popular. I know I’ll inevitably have to take the idea of tablet ports much more seriously in future, and I can’t help but feel that I may end up looking back at the days of windows dominance as the easy times. Maybe if I simply stick with PC-centric strategy gaming, I can carve out a big gap in an otherwise abandoned niche?