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I've been playing with making an economy simulator. People in the economy get jobs, rent apartments, have free time, can start businesses, etc. Prices change ba

I've been playing with making an economy simulator. People in the economy get jobs, rent apartments, have free time, can start businesses, etc. Prices change based on supply and demand. Cool. But it's not clear to me what the player should be doing because buildings are placed by the NPCs and then they make their own decisions according to self interest. What is the player doing except watching? Setting laws maybe, but it doesn't feel very fun to play yet.

Jarwain 5y ago
My first thoughts are: Add some sort of story or goals. Encourage business starting, innovation trying to get more futuristic or get to space or something? But to Achieve these goals, the player has to pass the right laws, manage their economy, ensure sufficient funding & taxes, etc. The core game loop being passing laws and seeing how it impacts behavior, then repeat to achieve a goal Could be an interesting colony sim or something
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Thank you, perhaps setting laws or policies and then seeing what happens isn't a bad game loop. Goals could work too. I will hack on it a bit today and see what comes out :)
swilliamsio 5y ago
A game of study for comparison might be Victoria 2. It's a grand strategy set in the Victorian period and has a decent economic simulator that the player can influence in a fair few different ways. A few different ways a player can effect their nation's economy include: unlocking technologies, conquering territory for resources, expanding a nations sphere of influence for resources and markets, electing parties with different economic policies (planned economy vs laissez faire), playing with taxes/tariffs, encouraging certain industries, etc. The economic simulation isn't super deep, but it is deep enough to be engaging and fulfilling to a player who likes these sorts of spreadsheet simulator games.
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Thank you, that sounds like a cool game and excellent research opportunity, I will check it out.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I haven't played as much Victoria 2 as I have EU4, but I recall some of the economics related screens being wildly complex, so much that many of the Steam guides I read noted that few players actually understand it and that it's best to let the automation run.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Looks like you are basing things on Austrian Economics. A friend of mine who’s a strong advocate of this philosophy said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real world (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics) is that it gives politicians something to do. It’s worth thinking about what economic philosophy your game is following or is biased towards (I always felt that the older civilization games were biased toward “research is good” and against democracy as the senate made it too difficult to go to war. Last one could be argued to pro democracy if you try to bring the lesson out of the game and into the real world. ) But zoning, setting taxes, building infrastructure, police and military are things that no one has really managed to leave to the market forces. I believe sim city added disasters because they felt players didn’t really have anything to do...
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Yes, good point. One of the key things I'm trying to explore is the effect of automating jobs (through researched technologies which business owners then apply) and how this leads to income disparity. Basic income schemes will also come into play. So automated socialism I guess, haha.
  - subw00f 5y ago
    Interest rates are also important, if your game has a banking system with a central bank that makes monetary policy. If agents can start businesses, or take mortgages to buy a house or a car, that would be very cool to see the impacts of that in the simulation. Also, heritage has a very important role on wealth accumulation, if there's a way to make wealth and return on capital part of the system. This whole thing is too interesting.
  - shagie 5y ago
    Game bit... look at the game Democracy (in any of its variations) by Positech Games. You can dabble in what happens by enacting and funding laws policies. For an economics simulator, score the simulated economy on say... a dozen things. Make that into a radar plot and the overall score is the area of the plot. Now the player can do things by enacting rules that cause changes in how the AI plays the game in an attempt to maximize their score.
msg 5y ago
Good on you. Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company. Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre. Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous. They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  "Trouble is fun" is not something I'd heard before but makes a lot of sense. Need to think about that, what sort of trouble the economy can get into and how to alert the player and let them fix it...
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Good stories need drama or tension. Though I'd argue games have grown to a broad spectrum, as have movies and books. And one end of the spectrum has so little interactivity it's just movement and observation, like a virtual fish bowl or "walking sim". Elaborate screen savers served this market long ago. Then games offered cheats as a form of customization outside the usual difficulty knobs, even if their original purpose was just to aid testing. Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games. The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they want.
  - dqpb 5y ago
    Maybe the players job can be to disrupt the economy. A game of sabotage.
xwdv 5y ago
The player should be playing the role of the Fed.
notahacker 5y ago
About 60% of SimCity is watching the algorithm grow the city (including placing buildings) according to rules you set. The only bit you must build is core infrastructure
billfruit 5y ago
A similar feeling I get from some of the Paradox games, they claim to be complicated simulations etc, but eventually much of gameplay boils down to waiting for progress bars to fill, which is exactly what is the gameplay in idle-clicker phone games. Thats what got me out of Paradox games. Even Civilization games are essentially computerized board games, there is nothing of fidelity in its historical topics or in its simulation aspects.
yxhuvud 5y ago
Build infrastructure? Make the player do well if people do well.
greggman3 5y ago
Not an answer to your question but Sid Meier gave a talk at like GDC 1995 (+/1 4 yrs) on "How I almost ruined Civilization". One of his points was, "I almost ruined Civilization by making the game fun for the AI but not fun for the player" (or something like that). Basically, game devs, particular programming ones, imagine the algorithms that are running in their sim and they get enjoyment from seeing the results (the NPCs doing things, the economy running, the traffic flowing, etc...) but none of that is fun for the player. You have to design the game around interesting things for the player to do, not interesting things for the developers to develope
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Haha, I will google for that talk if it still exists, but I take your point and agree (and suffer from this)
dataduck 5y ago
Sounds like Capitalism Lab: https://www.capitalismlab.com/ https://www.capitalismlab.com/
e3bc54b2 5y ago
Perhaps dealing with ongoing event? Like a pandemic? Political upheaval? Foreign incursion and so on.. Too many possibilities, and as the law/policymaker, the player can make decisions in the fly, changing parameters that force the NPCs to make hard choices. Some profit, some lose and that can be seem with the resources/buildings/neighbourhoods affecting in real-time or semi-real time. It will definitely make things more complicated, but a morale mechanism will speed up visual feedback on other things. I like your idea, and it is very enjoyable in games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is where player can technically put down buildings, but almost all interactions with the world are via policy making and event based interactions, and most of the actual world moves on via actions of NPCs.
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  Ah, that's a good idea. I'm tracking things like wages, employment rate, GDP growth, hunger, happiness, education, health/disease. Less concerned about product differentiation (how many types of juice can I make?) and more concerned about how the various sectors of our modern economy interact and how AI/automation changes the equation. Based on yours and other replies, sounds like setting various policies would be a good way to go. A couple prototype screenshots in case you are curious as to what I'm talking about: https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1377196666663677957 https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1377196666663677957 https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1375063612281217024 https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1375063612281217024
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    Looks pretty nice, and I am very much looking forward to someday playing through your make. Now something that I must say, but know that it may not be universally shared. I see you are making a 3D game. But there is a very particular reason why games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is/Civilization/Rimworld/Prison Tycoon/Factorio are 2D. They are inherently numbers games, and appeal to specific crowds. These are ultimately tabletops or rather very complex spreadsheets and ultimately as a player you re being statistician. There many successful franchiseare s on the contrary, like Tropico, StarCraft, SimCity but after playing through all of them, I've realised that fancy 3D worlds, while very pretty, take the toll on cognitive processing. Dwarf Fortress, while 3D with multiple layers, forces player to look at, deal with and think about only one at a time, with very distinct..uh..visuals and they do the job better than anything else. Ultimately you want to convey the information to player as fast as possible, make it as instantly identifiable, and intractable as possible. Graphics, especially faux 3D like Ck3 or Civ4/5/6 are pretty nice and help with that ultimate goal, not hinder. Just my 2c, and something to think about. Be assured that I'll play your game regardless (I spent many an hours on Tropico series, along with every other game listed above. No regrets :))
jedberg 5y ago
If you read the memoir, Sid points out that the fun of games comes from making decisions. So you have to give the player something that requires constant decision making. Perhaps setting the tax rate and the money supply? Choosing which businesses to nationalize, and which services the government will provide from tax dollars?
IAmEveryone 5y ago
If you manage to pull of the holy grail of fully simulating a real town, I bet it could sell as sort-of a screensaver, with very little or no playing mechanisms and just watching the world. Maybe allow players to build a scenario, then switch it on and watch it run. Traffic is one real-life operation done from a position of somewhat centralized planning, so maybe allow players to build bus routes or subways. Or just sell it to city planners. They are used to joylessly watching everything go awry.
Folcon 5y ago
I've been working on something similar for the last couple of years, mine's more focused on a fantasy style society =)... I've built a couple of different models all of which have failed to be quite fun =)... I've talked about it before here[0], the newest one I'm working on is much simpler, and focused around player interactivity and giving them knobs to tweak at the outset. Let me know if you'd like to do a call and chat about this, it would be fun to see what kinds of things we've been attempting =)... - [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186912
Folcon 5y ago
Have you looked at or heard of the Humans of simulated New York project? It reminds me of what you're looking at [0][1](github[2]). The project broadly covers what you're doing with agents also starting businesses and going out of business with simple supply chains. There's even some stuff to do with health. -[0]: https://www.trytobegood.com/projects/hosny https://www.trytobegood.com/projects/hosny -[1]: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/apr/03/humans-of-simulated-new-york/ https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/apr/03/humans-of-simulate... -[2]: https://github.com/frnsys/hosny https://github.com/frnsys/hosny
roenxi 5y ago
If you are trying to capture life as faithfully as possible, maybe the player represents breakthroughs, inspiration and the social networks outside the simulated community pushing in ideas, fads, trends and technologies? I can imagine it being a fun game for spreadsheet players to try and tease apart how to recover a death-spiralling community by applying new ideas in the right order at the right time to the right people. Ideas can be unleashed into key parts of the sim and only live for so long before they become 'proven discredited' and ignored, or whatever. Good luck! Simulations are fun.
voidfunc 5y ago
Write a traffic sim and you have got the core of a SimCity clone.
mysterydip 5y ago
You might be able to do something akin to early simcity or simtower where you decide on the zoning (what's allowed to be built where) while your simulation decides if it's successful or not. Your NPC's may want to start a new business but there's no commercial spots available, or lease office space etc. They move out if they close down or decide to move to a better place. The player's job is to monitor citizen's happiness/goals and plan the town accordingly.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Make it a game about being a guardian angel. Set objectives for the people, a few non intrusive tools (moving cats around, blowing wind, changing light traffic), and as the angel, the player must influence the world so that objectives are reached.
- xkeysc0re 5y ago
  I think the game will age better if the objectives were optional and it was more like an ant farm. If the OPs model is really good, then emergent behavior will make things interesting and create a self-sustaining gameplay loop as the player explores the potential of the model.
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago
  It’s called populous :)
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    I don't know how other people played populous, but I was more an asshole than an angel with my believers. Not doing what I want ? Eat this volcano !
- zabzonk 5y ago
  "It's A Wonderful Life"
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  Ghost Master is the game like you describe. Basically you summon various types of ghost, wraiths and spectres and they have special abilities like manipulating temperature, siren song to lure humans in, shriek to scare them away and others in order to manipulate the human NPCs to achieve your mission objectives.
- chongli 5y ago
  Sounds like the game Actraiser for the SNES. A favourite from my childhood. Excellent music and graphics that really showcased the advantages of the SNES vs the NES.
airstrike 5y ago
You can make this into a somewhat nationalistic game and leave the domestic and foreign spheres separate. In the domestic one, the player is looking to regulate / optimize competition and collaboration to maximize output, whereas in the international one you're looking to beat other nations with favorable trade, attracting talent, staying ahead in research, etc. From that, there countless trade-off themes emerge – industrialization vs. sustainability, regulation vs. laissez-faire, bilateral negotiations vs. multinational institutions, and so on and so forth
setr 5y ago
My thinking is that games are inherently all simulations, to varying depths of complexity, and the players goal in nearly all games is really to learn and understand, optimize and eventually break the simulation to achieve game-specified or player driven goals. Thus, the primary thing you need to introduce in a sufficiently complex simulation is those points of interaction, to influence the simulation. Essentially god games and dwarf fortress are the points of inspiration — and then you need a reason to optimize the economy, which is either internal (need to eventually produce some expensive thing to win, like factorio’s rocket) or external (e.g. need to continuously improve the defensive infrastructure against ever-stronger foreign attacks). Another way of looking at it is on levels of operational complexity — whether the player is acting at the level of tactics (a single fight; Starcraft), operation (a single campaign/theater; total war), or strategy (resource control and long-term politics; grand strategies). From the sounds of it, if your AI manages the cities themselves on their own, then they key interaction point is on the resource dependencies - land acquisition, trade routes and manipulation, etc. The player’s goal is to learn to select resources the AI can best make use of, and acquire them efficiently, to ever-expand the city itself (or perhaps multiple). Also note there must always be some negative feedback loop, e.g. pollution, to contend with. Also note that IMO random events like Godzilla attacks and disasters are a bit of a cop-out — it’s just shit that happens, but you can’t do anything about. It’s more a nuisance than anything else. Jurassic Park tycoon was slightly more interesting — dinos always had some chance of escaping, becoming more common as you had a bigger park (negative feedback), and disasters like typhoons just exploded that risk. The typhoon damage wasn’t of note — it was the rampaging t-rex’s it unleashed because of your fragile placement of barriers. That last part is important, I think, because you can still interact with the disasters such that they weren’t plainly random events. SimCity on the other hand is just a nuisance trigger every now and then that you can’t plan for, mitigate, or really do anything about.
Hiopl 5y ago
Huh, I've been working on something similar. One of my suggestions would be to play it as a God simulator. Let players make changes to the simulation, play with the variables and see how it affects things. Add goal states based on economic metrics that provokes players to experiment. Sort of like a puzzle-like experience.
sliken 5y ago
Dunno, sounds like Majesty 1/2, Parts of Civ (often you manage cities/civilizations not units), and a a fair number of other games where your citizens/armies make their own decisions but you control the environment they live it. You could have challenges, migrate to renewable energy within 10 years, flood your enemies by causing oceans to rise, migrate from a car based economy to public transit, out compete other nations while eliminating tariffs, fix the US economy, win over your war focussed enemies with better science/schools, cause your enemy countries economies to fail, etc.

Jarwain 5y ago

My first thoughts are: Add some sort of story or goals. Encourage business starting, innovation trying to get more futuristic or get to space or something? But to Achieve these goals, the player has to pass the right laws, manage their economy, ensure sufficient funding & taxes, etc. The core game loop being passing laws and seeing how it impacts behavior, then repeat to achieve a goal Could be an interesting colony sim or something

dave_sullivan 5y ago
Thank you, perhaps setting laws or policies and then seeing what happens isn't a bad game loop. Goals could work too. I will hack on it a bit today and see what comes out :)

swilliamsio 5y ago

A game of study for comparison might be Victoria 2. It's a grand strategy set in the Victorian period and has a decent economic simulator that the player can influence in a fair few different ways. A few different ways a player can effect their nation's economy include: unlocking technologies, conquering territory for resources, expanding a nations sphere of influence for resources and markets, electing parties with different economic policies (planned economy vs laissez faire), playing with taxes/tariffs, encouraging certain industries, etc. The economic simulation isn't super deep, but it is deep enough to be engaging and fulfilling to a player who likes these sorts of spreadsheet simulator games.

dave_sullivan 5y ago
Thank you, that sounds like a cool game and excellent research opportunity, I will check it out.
the_only_law 5y ago
I haven't played as much Victoria 2 as I have EU4, but I recall some of the economics related screens being wildly complex, so much that many of the Steam guides I read noted that few players actually understand it and that it's best to let the automation run.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Looks like you are basing things on Austrian Economics. A friend of mine who’s a strong advocate of this philosophy said that the reason why Keynes is so popular in the real world (fiat currency, national banks, micro/macro economics) is that it gives politicians something to do. It’s worth thinking about what economic philosophy your game is following or is biased towards (I always felt that the older civilization games were biased toward “research is good” and against democracy as the senate made it too difficult to go to war. Last one could be argued to pro democracy if you try to bring the lesson out of the game and into the real world. ) But zoning, setting taxes, building infrastructure, police and military are things that no one has really managed to leave to the market forces. I believe sim city added disasters because they felt players didn’t really have anything to do...

dave_sullivan 5y ago
Yes, good point. One of the key things I'm trying to explore is the effect of automating jobs (through researched technologies which business owners then apply) and how this leads to income disparity. Basic income schemes will also come into play. So automated socialism I guess, haha.
- subw00f 5y ago
  Interest rates are also important, if your game has a banking system with a central bank that makes monetary policy. If agents can start businesses, or take mortgages to buy a house or a car, that would be very cool to see the impacts of that in the simulation. Also, heritage has a very important role on wealth accumulation, if there's a way to make wealth and return on capital part of the system. This whole thing is too interesting.
- shagie 5y ago
  Game bit... look at the game Democracy (in any of its variations) by Positech Games. You can dabble in what happens by enacting and funding laws policies. For an economics simulator, score the simulated economy on say... a dozen things. Make that into a radar plot and the overall score is the area of the plot. Now the player can do things by enacting rules that cause changes in how the AI plays the game in an attempt to maximize their score.

msg 5y ago

Good on you. Certainly the player can just be one more player in the economy against/among the AI. This is basically the premise of Rise of Industry. And more actively, less realistically, Offworld Trading Company. Running one business is sort of the premise of the tycoon genre. Generally, trouble is fun (Losing is Fun), so you may want to put pressure on the player to make the thing work. Maybe it naturally runs to ruin or is fragile to balance properly. (In Dwarf Fortress, danger follows growth and success.) There could be adversaries. Or the world could be dangerous. They could be in charge of the macro economy or a town or a business. There could be pickles that the player has to work their way out of. Recessions and Depressions. Think about how towns collapse, businesses fail, people lose jobs. Businesses also cheat, wreck the commons, avoid taxes, break the law, exert monopoly power, form cartels, fight for dominance. There is a lot of trouble here for the player to cause, or to struggle against.

dave_sullivan 5y ago
"Trouble is fun" is not something I'd heard before but makes a lot of sense. Need to think about that, what sort of trouble the economy can get into and how to alert the player and let them fix it...
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Good stories need drama or tension. Though I'd argue games have grown to a broad spectrum, as have movies and books. And one end of the spectrum has so little interactivity it's just movement and observation, like a virtual fish bowl or "walking sim". Elaborate screen savers served this market long ago. Then games offered cheats as a form of customization outside the usual difficulty knobs, even if their original purpose was just to aid testing. Sometimes I like to watch sim games run to see what will happen 'naturally', or setup AI battles in strategy games. The best toys allow players to enjoy them however they want.
- dqpb 5y ago
  Maybe the players job can be to disrupt the economy. A game of sabotage.

xwdv 5y ago

The player should be playing the role of the Fed.

notahacker 5y ago

About 60% of SimCity is watching the algorithm grow the city (including placing buildings) according to rules you set. The only bit you must build is core infrastructure

billfruit 5y ago

A similar feeling I get from some of the Paradox games, they claim to be complicated simulations etc, but eventually much of gameplay boils down to waiting for progress bars to fill, which is exactly what is the gameplay in idle-clicker phone games. Thats what got me out of Paradox games. Even Civilization games are essentially computerized board games, there is nothing of fidelity in its historical topics or in its simulation aspects.

yxhuvud 5y ago

Build infrastructure? Make the player do well if people do well.

greggman3 5y ago

Not an answer to your question but Sid Meier gave a talk at like GDC 1995 (+/1 4 yrs) on "How I almost ruined Civilization". One of his points was, "I almost ruined Civilization by making the game fun for the AI but not fun for the player" (or something like that). Basically, game devs, particular programming ones, imagine the algorithms that are running in their sim and they get enjoyment from seeing the results (the NPCs doing things, the economy running, the traffic flowing, etc...) but none of that is fun for the player. You have to design the game around interesting things for the player to do, not interesting things for the developers to develope

dave_sullivan 5y ago
Haha, I will google for that talk if it still exists, but I take your point and agree (and suffer from this)

dataduck 5y ago

Sounds like Capitalism Lab: https://www.capitalismlab.com/ https://www.capitalismlab.com/

e3bc54b2 5y ago

Perhaps dealing with ongoing event? Like a pandemic? Political upheaval? Foreign incursion and so on.. Too many possibilities, and as the law/policymaker, the player can make decisions in the fly, changing parameters that force the NPCs to make hard choices. Some profit, some lose and that can be seem with the resources/buildings/neighbourhoods affecting in real-time or semi-real time. It will definitely make things more complicated, but a morale mechanism will speed up visual feedback on other things. I like your idea, and it is very enjoyable in games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is where player can technically put down buildings, but almost all interactions with the world are via policy making and event based interactions, and most of the actual world moves on via actions of NPCs.

dave_sullivan 5y ago
Ah, that's a good idea. I'm tracking things like wages, employment rate, GDP growth, hunger, happiness, education, health/disease. Less concerned about product differentiation (how many types of juice can I make?) and more concerned about how the various sectors of our modern economy interact and how AI/automation changes the equation. Based on yours and other replies, sounds like setting various policies would be a good way to go. A couple prototype screenshots in case you are curious as to what I'm talking about: https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1377196666663677957 https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1377196666663677957 https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1375063612281217024 https://twitter.com/_DaveSullivan/status/1375063612281217024
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Looks pretty nice, and I am very much looking forward to someday playing through your make. Now something that I must say, but know that it may not be universally shared. I see you are making a 3D game. But there is a very particular reason why games like Crusader Kings/Europa Universal is/Civilization/Rimworld/Prison Tycoon/Factorio are 2D. They are inherently numbers games, and appeal to specific crowds. These are ultimately tabletops or rather very complex spreadsheets and ultimately as a player you re being statistician. There many successful franchiseare s on the contrary, like Tropico, StarCraft, SimCity but after playing through all of them, I've realised that fancy 3D worlds, while very pretty, take the toll on cognitive processing. Dwarf Fortress, while 3D with multiple layers, forces player to look at, deal with and think about only one at a time, with very distinct..uh..visuals and they do the job better than anything else. Ultimately you want to convey the information to player as fast as possible, make it as instantly identifiable, and intractable as possible. Graphics, especially faux 3D like Ck3 or Civ4/5/6 are pretty nice and help with that ultimate goal, not hinder. Just my 2c, and something to think about. Be assured that I'll play your game regardless (I spent many an hours on Tropico series, along with every other game listed above. No regrets :))

jedberg 5y ago

If you read the memoir, Sid points out that the fun of games comes from making decisions. So you have to give the player something that requires constant decision making. Perhaps setting the tax rate and the money supply? Choosing which businesses to nationalize, and which services the government will provide from tax dollars?

IAmEveryone 5y ago

If you manage to pull of the holy grail of fully simulating a real town, I bet it could sell as sort-of a screensaver, with very little or no playing mechanisms and just watching the world. Maybe allow players to build a scenario, then switch it on and watch it run. Traffic is one real-life operation done from a position of somewhat centralized planning, so maybe allow players to build bus routes or subways. Or just sell it to city planners. They are used to joylessly watching everything go awry.

Folcon 5y ago

I've been working on something similar for the last couple of years, mine's more focused on a fantasy style society =)... I've built a couple of different models all of which have failed to be quite fun =)... I've talked about it before here[0], the newest one I'm working on is much simpler, and focused around player interactivity and giving them knobs to tweak at the outset. Let me know if you'd like to do a call and chat about this, it would be fun to see what kinds of things we've been attempting =)... - [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186912

Folcon 5y ago

Have you looked at or heard of the Humans of simulated New York project? It reminds me of what you're looking at [0][1](github[2]). The project broadly covers what you're doing with agents also starting businesses and going out of business with simple supply chains. There's even some stuff to do with health. -[0]: https://www.trytobegood.com/projects/hosny https://www.trytobegood.com/projects/hosny -[1]: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/apr/03/humans-of-simulated-new-york/ https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/apr/03/humans-of-simulate... -[2]: https://github.com/frnsys/hosny https://github.com/frnsys/hosny

roenxi 5y ago

If you are trying to capture life as faithfully as possible, maybe the player represents breakthroughs, inspiration and the social networks outside the simulated community pushing in ideas, fads, trends and technologies? I can imagine it being a fun game for spreadsheet players to try and tease apart how to recover a death-spiralling community by applying new ideas in the right order at the right time to the right people. Ideas can be unleashed into key parts of the sim and only live for so long before they become 'proven discredited' and ignored, or whatever. Good luck! Simulations are fun.

voidfunc 5y ago

Write a traffic sim and you have got the core of a SimCity clone.

mysterydip 5y ago

You might be able to do something akin to early simcity or simtower where you decide on the zoning (what's allowed to be built where) while your simulation decides if it's successful or not. Your NPC's may want to start a new business but there's no commercial spots available, or lease office space etc. They move out if they close down or decide to move to a better place. The player's job is to monitor citizen's happiness/goals and plan the town accordingly.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Make it a game about being a guardian angel. Set objectives for the people, a few non intrusive tools (moving cats around, blowing wind, changing light traffic), and as the angel, the player must influence the world so that objectives are reached.

xkeysc0re 5y ago
I think the game will age better if the objectives were optional and it was more like an ant farm. If the OPs model is really good, then emergent behavior will make things interesting and create a self-sustaining gameplay loop as the player explores the potential of the model.
loloquwowndueo 5y ago
It’s called populous :)
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  I don't know how other people played populous, but I was more an asshole than an angel with my believers. Not doing what I want ? Eat this volcano !
zabzonk 5y ago
"It's A Wonderful Life"
skocznymroczny 5y ago
Ghost Master is the game like you describe. Basically you summon various types of ghost, wraiths and spectres and they have special abilities like manipulating temperature, siren song to lure humans in, shriek to scare them away and others in order to manipulate the human NPCs to achieve your mission objectives.
chongli 5y ago
Sounds like the game Actraiser for the SNES. A favourite from my childhood. Excellent music and graphics that really showcased the advantages of the SNES vs the NES.

airstrike 5y ago

You can make this into a somewhat nationalistic game and leave the domestic and foreign spheres separate. In the domestic one, the player is looking to regulate / optimize competition and collaboration to maximize output, whereas in the international one you're looking to beat other nations with favorable trade, attracting talent, staying ahead in research, etc. From that, there countless trade-off themes emerge – industrialization vs. sustainability, regulation vs. laissez-faire, bilateral negotiations vs. multinational institutions, and so on and so forth

setr 5y ago

My thinking is that games are inherently all simulations, to varying depths of complexity, and the players goal in nearly all games is really to learn and understand, optimize and eventually break the simulation to achieve game-specified or player driven goals. Thus, the primary thing you need to introduce in a sufficiently complex simulation is those points of interaction, to influence the simulation. Essentially god games and dwarf fortress are the points of inspiration — and then you need a reason to optimize the economy, which is either internal (need to eventually produce some expensive thing to win, like factorio’s rocket) or external (e.g. need to continuously improve the defensive infrastructure against ever-stronger foreign attacks). Another way of looking at it is on levels of operational complexity — whether the player is acting at the level of tactics (a single fight; Starcraft), operation (a single campaign/theater; total war), or strategy (resource control and long-term politics; grand strategies). From the sounds of it, if your AI manages the cities themselves on their own, then they key interaction point is on the resource dependencies - land acquisition, trade routes and manipulation, etc. The player’s goal is to learn to select resources the AI can best make use of, and acquire them efficiently, to ever-expand the city itself (or perhaps multiple). Also note there must always be some negative feedback loop, e.g. pollution, to contend with. Also note that IMO random events like Godzilla attacks and disasters are a bit of a cop-out — it’s just shit that happens, but you can’t do anything about. It’s more a nuisance than anything else. Jurassic Park tycoon was slightly more interesting — dinos always had some chance of escaping, becoming more common as you had a bigger park (negative feedback), and disasters like typhoons just exploded that risk. The typhoon damage wasn’t of note — it was the rampaging t-rex’s it unleashed because of your fragile placement of barriers. That last part is important, I think, because you can still interact with the disasters such that they weren’t plainly random events. SimCity on the other hand is just a nuisance trigger every now and then that you can’t plan for, mitigate, or really do anything about.

Hiopl 5y ago

Huh, I've been working on something similar. One of my suggestions would be to play it as a God simulator. Let players make changes to the simulation, play with the variables and see how it affects things. Add goal states based on economic metrics that provokes players to experiment. Sort of like a puzzle-like experience.

sliken 5y ago

Dunno, sounds like Majesty 1/2, Parts of Civ (often you manage cities/civilizations not units), and a a fair number of other games where your citizens/armies make their own decisions but you control the environment they live it. You could have challenges, migrate to renewable energy within 10 years, flood your enemies by causing oceans to rise, migrate from a car based economy to public transit, out compete other nations while eliminating tariffs, fix the US economy, win over your war focussed enemies with better science/schools, cause your enemy countries economies to fail, etc.