Hobbies And Interests
Things You'll Need
Instructions
Choose your theme. Will players be building a single building, a city, a country or a world? The level of complexity to your design goes up exponentially with each larger geographic unit, unless you want an oversimplified version, e.g., a country that doesn't have to worry about foreign invaders, crime, inflation, unemployment, natural disasters and other factors that real-world national leaders face.
Design the player interface. Will players be able to set prices? Build buildings and roads? Connect utilities? Talk? Once you decide how players will be able to affect your simulation, you also need to lay out the status displays and buttons/menus so they are easy to read and use.
Become familiar with decision trees, because they will now become your friends for the next several months. One of the most time-consuming processes in designing an interactive video game is setting the groundwork for the programmer. You must start with a new player and decide what will happen for every possible status of the game when the player clicks on a button or menu item. A status is the variable states of everything the player can control, and every event your program generates on its own (e.g., natural disasters, population levels, revolts). If you have not planned for every possible player choice in every possible set of variables, your game will crash. Using a spreadsheet or a commercial decision-tree program will make changes much easier to make.
Proof you decision tree. If, for example, your player can affect six variables, make sure you have six outcomes for every possible game status. You may want to get someone else to help you, because even the simplest level of interactions and reactions can generate a decision tree that takes a ream of paper or several megabytes of a spreadsheet. Remember that sometimes a status can be nested in another, so that the same set of variables produce different results at different points in the game.
Write out the rules of the game once your decision tree is complete. It should provide in narrative form the choices and consequences for each player action. If you have not included leveling (how players reach more difficult levels of the simulation), you may want to think about that as you come up with the rules, and then make changes to your player interface and decision tree to add levels of play that will make the game remain interesting over a longer time.
Hire a programmer. If your projected graphics are 2D and mechanics are simple enough, you might be able to get it done in Java or C++. If you have more money and ambition, you might try doing your simulation game in C# or some 3D modeling program.
Hire a graphic artist, if you want art with enough realism to draw your players into the game. Remember that you may be able to reuse portions of the art in different contexts, so try to break your requests for art down to the basic units, and then arrange them on a background yourself. You will need to retain your programmer to integrate the screen images into the program.