| 2 |
General / Development / Re: the monopolistic frachise |
Apr 9th, 2003, 1:27am |
| Started by johnny | Last post by inconspicuous |
I think we all agree that the game has to be fun above all else, and of course that means that it will be different than reality; irl, running your own business can consume so much of your life that it causes untold frustration, destroys your social life, and even ruins marriages, not to mention that most businesses end up failing. I didn't intend to imply that the game should simulate reality to the point where it could be used as a course in economics--that sounds both boring and complicated, the exact opposite of what we're looking for. in fact, I think that when a game responds in an unrealistic fashion that it's often funny, and that it's impossible to create a model that would perfectly resemble reality anyway.
what I meant was that we could highlight certain general qualities about the reality of running a modern business. for example, the fact that prices represent what 'the market will bare' and are only indirectly related to actual costs could be pointed out by quoting the average retail price for a real pizza in real life, detailing how much of that goes towards real cost, and how much is profit. I think the average person would be surprised if they were shown this information. Or you could just give the player some interesting statistics about how many acres of pizza are eaten every hour over the world. another example, I read that in america alone we drink 524,000,000 glasses of Coca-cola each DAY. the point being that we could offer a few interesting notes or comments about the real world so that players have something to take away from the experience besides being entertained. whereas most video games today are leaning towards escapism, I think that we should lean towards caricature. and you don't need a sophisticated economic model to show that people who control business policies irl care more about profit than about people, either customers or employees. an example would be suggesting that the players can increase their profit margin by eliminating health-care coverage for their employees. or you could suggest that players launch an advertising campaign to create a better image without actually changing any policies or products...I think the nature of the game lends itself to allowing people to play as a greedy CEO that seeks only money, or as a compassionate owner who builds his business on treating the workers fairly and on establishing repeat visits from customers. either way, a little social criticism sprinkled throughout couldn't hurt, could it? |
 Reply  Quote  Notify of replies
|
| 4 |
General / Development / Re: should we have seperate levels of difficulty? |
Apr 6th, 2003, 11:19pm |
| Started by Jeff Koerner | Last post by inconspicuous |
| I think we're all on the same page here(pun intended). We agree that there needs to be varying degrees of challenge, but it's not clear how this is going to be presented to the player. I think we should save that question for later, actually. No matter what choices concerning difficulty we leave to the player--and no matter how we offer those choices-- they will all end up as actual numerical values in the game. therefore, first we have to have a feel for how those different numbers play, and in order to do that we need a working model of the game that includes the concepts of unique Cities and of AI opponents. Let's concentrate on how those two aspects of the game should function before we worry ourselves with how to present the variations to the players. |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
| 5 |
General / Development / Re: PB 2.0 Research/Information/Questions |
Apr 4th, 2003, 1:14pm |
| Started by ares32585 | Last post by ares32585 |
As I see it, there are two options for what the city looks like:
- 2D map-type view. That is, all you see is the "blueprint" of the city. This would be the least graphically intense of the two options.
- 3D city view, similar to a simplified SimCity.
The 3D option would look the best and provide the most immersion. However, it provides the most graphical and practical difficulties.
I like the idea of doing a demo of the game; we definitely would want to avoid the franchise-level (i.e. city view) graphical stuff in the demo as it will be difficult I'm sure.
However, doing this demo brings up another question: will the demo be separate code-wise from the actual game? If not, we'll still want to design the technical aspects of the game with the assumption that it would be for the full game. Because otherwise we could run into difficulties where if we only design what we need for the demo, things might not work together well or at all. And the last thing we need on a project this big is to turn the code into a hackneyed mess.
Esentially, what I'm advocating is this (if the demo codebase will be the foundation for the rest of the game): we do the technial design for the entire game, figure out how various objects fit together, etc, but then we decide which objects need to be implemented first to get the demo working.
A (better in my opinion) option is this: create a separate graphical demo for the second version of the game. The first benefit is this: we won't need to create the technial design for the entire game - in effect, this demo would be a concept demo. The second benefit is that since none of us have had much experience with 3d graphics, the demo can serve as a sort of learning "sandbox" for us. We would be able to identify where graphical problems would appear *before* actually working on the actual game. |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
| 6 |
General / General Discussion / Re: Missing implementations for 1.0 |
Apr 2nd, 2003, 5:21pm |
| Started by tsarkon | Last post by ares32585 |
| Well, perhaps the main reason that we haven't added any bitmap graphics to the 1.0 version of the game (and hadn't been planning on it), is that we would really be strecthing the purpose of wxWindows. It is fundamentally an application GUI library, and it's main focus is not use in games. Personally, I'd rather just avoid doing any work on putting such graphics in the 1.0 version of the game. As 1.0 is fundamentally a text-based game, it seems to make sense to me to not worry about graphics with it. |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
| 7 |
General / Development / Game Design Document |
Mar 31st, 2003, 4:33pm |
| Started by ares32585 | Last post by ares32585 |
| Just for those who don't know, the game design document is in html form and it is located in CVS. If you know how to use CVS, you can access it anonymously per the instructions on the sourceforge site for anonymous CVS. |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
| 8 |
General / Development / Re: Crash-proof application philosophy |
Mar 3rd, 2003, 10:32am |
| Started by tsarkon | Last post by ares32585 |
One rule that we seem to pretty much completely break is the rule of having only one "permament" pointer pointing to a certain thing in memory. However, one thing that we could do to try and make our code a little safer is use const pointers when possible, that is, when all we want is information from that object, rather than needing to change something in the object.
On a second note, we should probably just be very, very careful about the deletion of memory being pointed to. |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
| 9 |
General / Development / Re: Additions/Changes to PB1 |
Feb 27th, 2003, 5:14pm |
| Started by johnny | Last post by tsarkon |
I have to agree on what ares is saying. This is what they did in other pizza games, but in some ways they failed, though. For instance, I was not very pleased with how they presented their statistics in Pizza Tycoon, the DOS game. I sometimes got confused when I tried to analyse the stats. Note: The biggest mistake is to take for granted that the player automatically knows what one kind of statistical presentation is or mean. It is of great importance to avoid a messy interface. We should not make the same mistake done in games like Pizza Tycoon, and especially: Fast Food Tycoon (aka, Pizza Syndicate)
I also take the opportunity to officially -suggest- hiscore table support  |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
| 10 |
General / Development / Re: Finishing up the Pizzas dialog |
Feb 17th, 2003, 11:12pm |
| Started by ares32585 | Last post by johnny |
I just finished implementing the saving of the pizza settings to a saved game file.
I'll get right on the addition and removal of customized pizzas interface.
The code is already in existance to expand on that; it was designed for that purpose. In fact, I have many helper functions to make it easy to do just that. |
|
Reply Quote Notify of replies
|
Return to the board index.
|
Home
Help
Search
Members
Login
Register