Game Dev Story / management sims (part 2)
I’ve been thinking about making a tycoon/business management sim game.
Why? Well, because I enjoy them. That’s it.
I especially enjoyed Game Dev Story by Kairosoft. I started doing a bit of reading around how one would approach designing such a game. It’s not so easy to find out about - for a start, “business / management sim” often leads to results about serious business training games, “sim games” can be anything from Surgeon Simulator to Flight Simulator, and “tycoon games” tends to refer to more complex games with big economies. I’m not interested in making compulsive freemium games right now, either.
So, after about 10 minutes of reading about models for virtual economies, I decided to instead take a look at Game Dev Story and break it down a bit.
Why do I like it so much? Let’s see...mainly because it’s a simple game. More specifically:
You don’t have to manage space or physical objects
This is, I believe, quite unusual in this style of game. Most of them have some elements of construction (in freemium, usually to make you pay not to wait for it to be completed). And in games that do use it, I often find the relationship between the positioning of objects to be a bit abstract - either inconsequential (and therefore, a distraction) or too ambiguous and requiring a frustrating amount of trial and error. Either way, I personally don’t find it appealing in a business/management sim (on mobile, at least).
Secondly, there are clear phases of gameplay, with a clear indication of what to do in each
Game Dev Story is made up of a very simple loop:
This lets the player understand what they should aim for in each phase. For example, the travelling salesman only visits periodically - the rest of the time, you don’t need to worry about purchasing items. You are only asked at the appropriate time to select a staff member to work on something. In short, you are only concentrating on one choice at a time - and the consequences of your choice are, in most cases, fairly immediate and fairly linear.
So, after a few rounds, you can draw up a mental model of how resources are moving around:
Of course, this level of simplicity does have a limit of how long it will keep your interest. Although investing in new consoles - unlocked every few cycles - allows you to spend more money for higher returns, it does, inevitably, start to feel like churn. (I think this could be improved if these larger investments also proved more risky - but normally by this time in the game, your staff have high enough skills to guarantee successful sales).
It’s not an advanced strategy game, for sure. But it’s quite entertaining - for a while.
At first, I was thinking about how to apply a similar model to a few different ideas, but I also think there are some places for improvement, and perhaps that’s a better starting point.
Mainly, the game does not require you as the player to improve your skills as you go on - it gets easier, not harder to make money, and while that may be a realistic business model, it’s a limiting style of gameplay. So, how could we add a difficulty curve to this kind of game? A few ideas:
Build in complexity as the player progresses
If every cycle adds one more layer of (interesting) complexity, the player has to learn to juggle more and more factors - but only once they’ve seen the clear cause and effect from the previous ones. If you also set up a fail condition (I think you can go bankrupt in Game Dev Story), then the player will want to replay just to discover what the next unlockable feature would be.
Allow the player to take bigger risks
Game Dev Story almost does this with higher value games as you go on, but it’s too easy to make back your money. Adding less-certain investment opportunities would give the player 2 possible strategies - slow/safe or risky/big reward.
Include phases where other (non-managerial skills) are required
e.g. mixing in a phase with a mini-game. Perhaps you have to do some manual labour yourself, arcade-style, or solve some puzzles. It definitely has the potential to feel shoehorned in, but if it fitted the context and narrative of the game well, I think this could work.
There’s more to investigate here..
