Morning bite - mid-week update

I've gotten through the primaries for this week, and I'm starting to look at the secondary items. I'm a little concerned about the complexity of the game - this is something that I really really want to keep, but at the same time maintain a very simple UI and UX as well. I want a deep(ish) simulation game with super simple controls and is very easy to pick up. But I'm already seeing parts where I feel I need to explain how this or that works, and that means a bunch of pop-up dialogs (or a long tutorial :( ) that I'd like to avoid. I gave playing Tropico mobile a shot, and it starts you off in like a 30-minute tutorial. I definitely want to avoid this.

Rent and taxes are in - Rent is paid once a day to the House and Taxes are a percentage of all Resident to Building transactions (which.. includes Rent!). There's no income tax for now, but I'll probably add that as a Policy sooner or later.

Building storage capacity is enforced by a decay system, where when a building goes over capacity all items in storage start decaying at about 10% per second. I may change this to just a flat limit on being able to store an amount, but decay lets me step around the question of what happens when Residents try to put things in an over capacity store. One produces game logic failure states, which I have to handle, and the other produces game play failure states, which the player has to handle ;).

Looking at the secondaries:

I definitely need to decide how to enforce out-of-resources (including water). One thought is to do this by Platform, which gives them a gameplay mechanic as well. The player can switch on/off the Power or Water per platform to do a rolling blackout.

I also need to decide how utilities get paid. I'm probably going with a funding system where the user can decide on an amount of money to transfer into the building on an interval. This would be set categorically as well (e.g. 5.0 wealth per tick will be distributed among Power buildings)

Dynamic pricing, the simple method, should be easy to implement. Supply high - price low. Managers look at supply and decide on a sell price, Residents look at supply (at home) and decide on a buy price. If they meet, then transact at sell price.

I'm going to start measuring the game along a few dimensions. That is, really, just keeping track of my subjective evaluation of it along those lines. Since these are hard to pin down, I'll just say that 2 is better than 1, but 4 may not be twice as good as 2. I just want a record of how each of these are progressing along. The scale is 0 = nothing there, 10 = best available.

These are the aspects for now:

• Art/Sound
• UX
• Gameplay
• Simulation
• Market(ing/ability)

So the first report card:

I'm also going to start switching hats a bit. I don't plan to 'finish' with one measure then move on to the next - and I think we're near a good simulation stopping point for me to move on to gameplay. There may be good combos of hats, like Dota's Invoker, that help to produce good results. Each hat represents a different perspective and value set, which I hope will help unblock decisions.

I'm going try a Simulation -> Gameplay -> UX loop around the basic economy gameplay. A little closer to release (but not too far away), I think an Art -> Market -> Art will help me make decisions and execute on game assets.