This week - Switching hats back

First real week of 2020!

I'll be starting this year putting some of the gameplay I've come up with the last couple weeks into the game. I'm not sure about dynamic pricing anymore - my gameplay designer hat says this is a complicated mechanic from the player point of view that would need explaining to communicate what's happening.

While I really would like to have dynamic pricing - it brings a lot of economic issues that I'm not ready to tackle yet, e.g. balancing inflation, and residents getting priced out of their neighborhoods.

I'll leave this for a more complicated economy pass later on. This falls under the edutainment goals of the game - one of the motivations is that I don't understand currency exchange rates and have a hard time visualizing the process, so I'd like to see it in action. I'm not dead set on it making it into this game though - so dynamic prices/economy is now "we'll see when we get there".

I've been leaving a lot of ideas on the cutting room floor (usually with a mental "I'll add it for the PC game"), which I've found is much easier to do with the designer hat than the implementer hat - when I'm thinking about whether I should do things technically it's usually either "yeah that'd be quick" (easy) or "that'd be pretty fun" (hard). It tends to be hard to cut things for technical reasons and more fun to just bite into it.

F# is really enjoyable - the C# side is definitely getting pretty rough and is littered with TODO's and placeholders. I expect extensive changes to C# and Unity stuff in general during art and performance passes so I'm not too invested in the first pass code that just gets a feature in. I do need to make sure the throwaway code really is easy to throw away.

Last week

I added:

• building construction sites (and usage-specific building state)
• construction time cost for buildings
• cleaned up a little

This week

I'll be adding:

• the construction boat / player avatar
• penalties for out-of-resource
• toggle platform grid connection
• resident happiness, and associated buildings

and if I have time:

• policies
• research/upgrades

I did say I'd do a Simulation -> Gameplay -> UX loop, but I'm bouncing between Simulation (resident happiness) and Gameplay (boat avatar, resource limits) a little this week. The UX is starting to feel really rough, I'll focus on giving it some TLC next week.