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Topic Summary
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Mar 7th, 2003, 5:00pm
I think that it would be very beneficial to examine some games in similar genres, in order to determine what elements of such a game make it fun to play.  Such lessons could be employed in the design of Pizza Business.  For that reason, I will be analyzing what I think it is that makes SimCity successful as an open-ended tycoon-ish game.
 
Perhaps the most basic element of SimCity’s gameplay is the ability to create.  It is this element and the freedom that the game provides the player in the process of creation that form the basis for the gameplay of SimCity.  Obviously, in the designing of Pizza Business’ gameplay we want to be sure to cultivate this creation aspect of the game by allowing the player to have as much freedom as possible in building restaurants and his overall franchise.
 
SimCity 4 is especially remarkable in its graphical detail.  A player’s city is incredibly detailed:  there are cars, houses, office buildings, skyscrapers, high-rises, trees, pools, traffic lights, stop signs, streetlights, little people walking on the sidewalk.  All these details do not directly affect the gameplay; however, they provide direct visual feedback on the condition of a player’s city.  This is an important aspect that will be essential to Pizza Business.  Whereas in previous versions where all feedback was abstract and removed – in the form of charts, tables, and graphs -, I think it is essential that the main form of feedback be visual.  Yes, there should still be graphs, charts, and tables, but the player should be able to tell how well his pizza restaurant(s) is(are) doing just by looking at them.  A player tires more easily by looking at “boring” graphs and tables rather than looking at colorful and detailed graphics.
 
Another interesting aspect of SimCity 4 that I found especially noteworthy was the user interface.  What set this interface apart from many other games is the fact that the interface could be expanded/collapsed.  You could have lots of info on the screen and have the interface take up about a quarter of the screen.  Alternatively, if you didn’t need any info present on the screen, you could collapse the menus down into a single box shaped area in the lower left corner of the screen, allowing you to see more of your city without any obstructions.  The SimCity 4 interface would probably be worthwhile to study when designing the interface for our game.  On a related note, Fast Food Tycoon’s interface should be studied so that we know what to avoid in designing the interface.  
   
What other aspects of SimCity do you guys think might prove useful in the next version of Pizza Business?
Posted by: johnny Posted on: Mar 9th, 2003, 10:15pm
Excellent. I think you hit on something there. Visual feedback seems to be one of the most critical aspects in game development. For instance, a player in Sim City knows it is time to lower the residental taxes when he sees his houses turn from a pretty green to a dirty brown color. Same goes for the management of schools, police depts., fire depts., and highway maitance. Not that those turn brown, but a visual is delivered to the player graphically: riots, fires, and missing road tiles.
 
In addition, the customization is by far the greatest thing. Players get addicted to customizing the visual appearance of the city. You can customize the land, the water, and the landscaping. You can build bridges, subways, and water pipes to suit the player's liking.
 
The game is endless, and no individual simcity game session is the same. Thus, the time it takes for the player to lose interest in the game is much longer than those that have a style of repetition.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Mar 10th, 2003, 1:54pm
Another aspect of SimCity that I think makes it so popular is that it provides numerous ways to succeed in the game.  The game wasn't designed so that there's only one way to succeed, and that once you find that way it's only a matter of sticking to that formula.  Especially in SimCity 4 (I think I read this in one of the articles on the SimCity 4 website), they designed the game so that the player could "succeed" in various ways.  For example, instead of defining success as building a huge metropolis, they designed the game so that it was just as viable to build a small farming town as it was to build a huge metropolis.  
 
The most important decision they made, I think, was that whenever possible they let the player decide.  They never forced the player whether directly or subtly to build their city in a speficic way.  If the player wanted to build a small town with no highrises, no commerical office buildings, the playe could make decisions that would allow him to do such a thing.   If the player wanted to create a wholly industrial town and not the usually metropolis, he could.  
 
This, I think, will be the most important aspect of the game:  letting the player make all the choices.  We want to make sure that we don't artificially restrict what the player can do, simply because we don't think anyone would actually do such a thing.  We must let the player - not us - make the decisions.
Posted by: Jeff Koerner Posted on: Mar 29th, 2003, 5:45pm
well if we compare this to sim city, the first thing that comes to my mind is that we are simulating a single business, not an entire city. The city is kind of behind the scenes in pizza-business in the same sense that the country is in the background of sim city: it's a mystical place that produces citizens and all that other stuff, but it's not something that we directly observe. I think building an entire graphical city is beyond the scope of this project, so we should apply the principles of simulation on a smaller scale and focus on the restaurant, right?
 
instead of choosing what type of buildings to make, we choose what kind of toppings to put on a pizza. In sim city the buildings are detailed, so shouldn't our toppings be too? What's the point of making a custom pizza if you can't look at your creation? this means we'll need artwork for every topping seperately, and alpha-channel support for layering those graphics if you want your custom pizza to look like the real thing. For visual feedback you could have a sloppy-looking pizza to show that whichever employee was working at that time was doing a poor job, and then your customer may possibly complain. So in order to increase sales you'd have to look at your pizzas every once in awhile and maybe fire somebody. at any rate, I think that the restaurant itself should be customizeable in every possible way, including things that are there only for appearance: for example, allowing the player to import image files to put up in the restaurant(like paintings or drawings or whatnot). Also, I think that the advertisements should actually be made instead of just described. that will obviously take awhile, but it would be infinitely better than a simple textual description.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Mar 29th, 2003, 6:17pm
Yes, I agree that the city should only be in the background of the game.  I just chose SimCity as the subject of my study because it seemed to do so many things right:  I figured that we would be able to gather some important tips concerning game design from it.
 
Quote:
For visual feedback you could have a sloppy-looking pizza to show that whichever employee was working at that time was doing a poor job, and then your customer may possibly complain. So in order to increase sales you'd have to look at your pizzas every once in awhile and maybe fire somebody.

I don't know how useful putting that much detail into the pizzas would necessarily be.  I always envisioned the game as being seen from about this zoom level:  http://www.pcgameworld.com/screenshot.php/game/1065/page/6/The_Sims/
 
or from a little further up like this: ww.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/dec00/fastfood02.html
Posted by: Jeff Koerner Posted on: Mar 30th, 2003, 4:23pm
well, we don't necessarily need detail to communicate that an employee has screwed up: we could have a pizza turn dark black if it gets burned and that's something you should be able to spot from any distance. I'm just suggesting ways to display the competency of different employees, otherwise, how do you know who to fire? I'm assuming that we're going to be able to look around and watch what people are doing right? we can watch the employees go to the ingredients section and then put something resembling a pizza into the oven, have it come out and put into a box and handed to the customer.
 
if you want to maximize the customization feel of the game, then you do need drawings for each individual topping. again, these don't have to be detailed, but you should be able to tell them apart from eachother: at minimum you could show a tile of red circles for where the pepperonis are stored, green squiggles for bell peppers, yellow arc-segments for onions, etc.
 
alternatively, we could simply have some objects that look like ingredients in the spot where people make the pizzas and have them stand there and move their arms around. that would work too, as long as the end-product displays the customization: the finished pizza should reflect what kind it is...otherwise you're telling the player that all the time they spend picking toppings out doesn't matter and that the only noticeable effect of choosing one or the other is if your number of sales goes up or down, and this kind of textual/numerical feedback gets old real quick.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Mar 31st, 2003, 4:31pm
I agree with most of the suggestions you bring up regarding the ingredients.  In fact, I think we should always provide visual elements so that the player could tell how well his restaurant is doing just by looking at graphical elements in the game itself.
Posted by: Jeff Koerner Posted on: Mar 31st, 2003, 9:31pm
well, it's just that if you're going to spend hours in one place, you need to have interesting details to look at. this is best illustrated by trying to play an old version of simcity where all the commercial buildings look alike if they're at the same level of devellopment, all the houses look alike, all the factories...it gets tiresome after an hour or more of that without variation.
 
I think that the restaurant itself should be something interesting to the player, not just a container for the business. make it something she likes to look at and decorate.
 
you should let the player make all the interesting choices, but that means automating some things in order to control the situation so that the boring stuff is taken care of for them. the interesting thing about simulations is that they try to offer a broad range of actions that may or may not lead directly to a specific goal: sometimes you build things just to watch them, not because they're the best way to beat the game. they become their own rewards. let's try and make the game like that.
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Apr 1st, 2003, 1:53pm
Quote:
well, it's just that if you're going to spend hours in one place, you need to have interesting details to look at. this is best illustrated by trying to play an old version of simcity where all the commercial buildings look alike if they're at the same level of devellopment, all the houses look alike, all the factories...it gets tiresome after an hour or more of that without variation.  
 
I think that the restaurant itself should be something interesting to the player, not just a container for the business. make it something she likes to look at and decorate.  
 
you should let the player make all the interesting choices, but that means automating some things in order to control the situation so that the boring stuff is taken care of for them. the interesting thing about simulations is that they try to offer a broad range of actions that may or may not lead directly to a specific goal: sometimes you build things just to watch them, not because they're the best way to beat the game. they become their own rewards. let's try and make the game like that.

 
I agree completely.  That's the reason I chose to use SimCity 4 as a case study.  It, out of all the simcity games, does the best job of providing interesting visual elements about the city.  I also agree with the idea that the restaurant should be fully customizeable, down to the paint, wallpaper, lighting, furniture, etc.
Posted by: johnny Posted on: Apr 3rd, 2003, 11:22am
At this time, the individual details are not necessarily important. We need to focus on the broader aspects of the game like where is the fun in the game and what general features are a must.
 
Simcity is by far the best realtime management simulation to date (my opinion of course), and I think our game will be a cross between Simcity and The Sims.
 
The Sims appears to excell in beautiful graphics, basic character interaction, and expandiblity/customization.
 
On the other hand, Simcity hits the mark on balance between simple and complex city management.
Posted by: inconspicuous Posted on: Apr 7th, 2003, 12:50am
Personally, I think that interaction between the customers and employees is going to be the most fun, but maybe that's just because as an artist I'm more interested in things that have faces than with the abstractions of wealth or power. Whereas some people might play the game to conquer the entire pizza industry in the city, I'd be more satisfied with running only one or two restaurants and focusing on the situations/conflicts that come up in the course of running a business. In other words, what I want to contribute to the game is creating interesting character behavior and an aesthetically interesting environment. oh, and I've looked at crystal space already, and now I'm checking out ogre--hadn't heard of that one before. do you have any preference as to either?
Posted by: ares32585 Posted on: Apr 7th, 2003, 1:36pm
We've pretty much decided to use Ogre as our graphics engine.
Posted by: inconspicuous Posted on: Apr 8th, 2003, 10:48pm
ok, OGRE it is. my first impression is that it has a lot of support available including a very large, active community of people using it. sounds good to me.

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