Sim City + Civilization + Essence 8+ Alchemical = ???

[Kyeudo]

So, I've got to program an iPhone app for my senior project and decided I wanted to program a game. Trying to root around for which game to program, I came up with the idea to try doing a city sim using an Alchemical city. So, I'm looking for other people's brains to pick to flesh out my idea some. If I actually get this done in a publishable fashion, I'll see about putting it up for free use.


Right now, I'm trying to think of everything such a simulation would need to track. To start with, there's resources. The six magical materials will of course make the lists and definately metal, but what else would be a resource to use in expanding an Alchemical city?


Then there's simulating the citizens. I should probably track food consumption, but what else should I require people to manage as their city grows? Water? Sewage? Souls?


And then there's Alchemicals. What's the point of simulating an Autochthonian city if you can't have your own Alchemicals running around doing stuff? That, though, begs the question of what stuff should Alchemicals do? There's going to be a need for defense against gremlin attacks and so forth, but what would non-combat focused Alchemicals be doing in a simulated city? How detailed should be simulations of Alchemicals? Should I even bother to simulate their Charms? Broad categories of Charm packages?


Thinking out loud helps and any additional input would be appreciated, be they comments, suggestions, or criticism. Especially criticism. Knowing what is infeasible is often better than knowing what would be really cool.

 

[Plague of Hats]

Right now, I'm trying to think of everything such a simulation would need to track. To start with, there's resources. The six magical materials will of course make the lists and definately metal, but what else would be a resource to use in expanding an Alchemical city?

Essence conduits and nutrient paste.

Then there's simulating the citizens. I should probably track food consumption, but what else should I require people to manage as their city grows? Water? Sewage? Souls?
And then there's Alchemicals. What's the point of simulating an Autochthonian city if you can't have your own Alchemicals running around doing stuff? That, though, begs the question of what stuff should Alchemicals do? There's going to be a need for defense against gremlin attacks and so forth, but what would non-combat focused Alchemicals be doing in a simulated city? How detailed should be simulations of Alchemicals? Should I even bother to simulate their Charms? Broad categories of Charm packages?


Thinking out loud helps and any additional input would be appreciated, be they comments, suggestions, or criticism. Especially criticism. Knowing what is infeasible is often better than knowing what would be really cool.

Really depends on how complex you want the game to be, which is certainly constrained by when you have to turn the project in. Social Alchemicals could be really useful to develop for managing popular happiness (worker discontent, including population loss due to gremlin syndrome and tunnel-rat propaganda), relationships with neighboring cities, etc.

 

[Revoke]

Alchemicals could be reduced to a handful of numbers; more detail than that is unlikely to be meaningful to the player. So, something like: War, personal combat, social combat, social engineering, crafting, and what have you. You put them in charge of things and they make those things awesome. As the alchemical does a thing, that stat increases slowly. Addtionally, the alchemical has charm slots, and gets more as it ages. A charm boosts one of the stats. But the alchemical can go in for a refit to change which charms it has installed, so, for instance, in an emergency your non-combat alchemicals can refit for combat and head off to the front lines. You'd have to balance to your liking how important the base stats are compared to charms. I have no idea how to represent the castes.


That's my unfiltered brainstorming. In short: your alchemicals will have to be greatly simplified, but you can still try and capture their flavour.


I'm not sure how autobot's resource systems work...everything comes from pipes the inhabitants tap, right? Maybe...water, for example, is a big pool which your city depletes, but it slowly refills. As it grows, it consumes water faster, but sufficient recycling systems can compensate. If you run out...bad things happen?


Now I want to play this game.

 

[Thanqol]

Gremlin syndrome should be the crux of this game.


You should start with a beautiful, functional gleaming city that produces tonnes of resources and has huge scope for expansion. Then little decay spots start appearing. Initially, these are easy to handle, and your champions level up from clearing them out. But then a champion turns, and bringing it down is a long and costly battle. And in the time that takes, a dozen other rots have sprung up.


The game should be about making hard decisions about what to sacrifice. Do I lock that factory down and seal it off, or do I send my valuable champions in to save it? Do I Switch to more repressive policies that lower happiness and economic output but reduce gremlinism? Do I begin refitting factories to produce weapons?


The point of the game should be to try and survive as long as possible. The feel of the game should be desperately trying to sustain a dying empire that's spiralling out of control, as everything goes wrong.

 

[magnificentmomo]

Gremlin syndrome should be the crux of this game.
You should start with a beautiful, functional gleaming city that produces tonnes of resources and has huge scope for expansion. Then little decay spots start appearing. Initially, these are easy to handle, and your champions level up from clearing them out. But then a champion turns, and bringing it down is a long and costly battle. And in the time that takes, a dozen other rots have sprung up.


The game should be about making hard decisions about what to sacrifice. Do I lock that factory down and seal it off, or do I send my valuable champions in to save it? Do I Switch to more repressive policies that lower happiness and economic output but reduce gremlinism? Do I begin refitting factories to produce weapons?


The point of the game should be to try and survive as long as possible. The feel of the game should be desperately trying to sustain a dying empire that's spiralling out of control, as everything goes wrong.

I vote this.

 

[wordman]

The original SimCity was released as open source. From the look of the code (and from what I know of Cocoa) only some of the code would be at all useful. I'd totally ignore all the graphics stuff and just use the code for algorithmic inspiration.


Good luck.

 

[chalicier]

You should probably be aware that if you actually release this game you'll get sued by White Wolf. They're pretty well known for being rather zealous about protecting their IP.


That said, if you can obfuscate it sufficiently, it should be fine. Play from the principle concepts rather than the setting itself and you'll be OK (of course, IANAL, but that's essentially how the entire history of game development has gone to date). If you finish it and you feel like getting an Android port done, let me know

 

[Mr. S]

Hmm, I think you should actually start as one of the city-states upon its founding, so that the player has a period of mostly gremlin free time to build up his city and learn the ropes. Then the gremlins start causing trouble after the player has a sense of accomplishment concerning what he's done. Also, when your alchemicals get old/big enough to be their own city they could become tributarias that feed resources into your main city, so you don't have to constantly manage two whole cities, unless you want this game to be about nation building, instead of city building, in which case never mind what I said. In that case I'd look more into Civilization source code than sim-city.


One piece of advice that has served me well in designing software is that you should break your work down into many different phases where you could presumably turn in a "complete" project and have a list of enhancements that could be added later. Good luck.

 

[Kyeudo]

Essence conduits and nutrient paste.

I was thinking of tracking the city's Essence pool to determine how many Charms it can support at any given time and how often it can invoke special effects.


Perhaps I should be more clear about what I meant by resources. What things should constrain what the player can build? What things should a player have to stockpile before throwing down something particularly expensive? Nutrient paste seems more like something that should be tracked rather than spent, although I do think that once will be something important to track.

Really depends on how complex you want the game to be, which is certainly constrained by when you have to turn the project in. Social Alchemicals could be really useful to develop for managing popular happiness (worker discontent, including population loss due to gremlin syndrome and tunnel-rat propaganda), relationships with neighboring cities, etc.

I have a semester to just design the thing and another semester to code it, plus all summer if I want to throw that in. I can get pretty complex if it adds anything to the game.

Gremlin syndrome should be the crux of this game.
You should start with a beautiful, functional gleaming city that produces tonnes of resources and has huge scope for expansion. Then little decay spots start appearing. Initially, these are easy to handle, and your champions level up from clearing them out. But then a champion turns, and bringing it down is a long and costly battle. And in the time that takes, a dozen other rots have sprung up.


The game should be about making hard decisions about what to sacrifice. Do I lock that factory down and seal it off, or do I send my valuable champions in to save it? Do I Switch to more repressive policies that lower happiness and economic output but reduce gremlinism? Do I begin refitting factories to produce weapons?


The point of the game should be to try and survive as long as possible. The feel of the game should be desperately trying to sustain a dying empire that's spiralling out of control, as everything goes wrong.

Well, that's not quite the game I want to program. Sure, that sounds like an excellent end-game, but I'd actually like them to start out with building that shining city from the begining, both as a warm-up and because then it will mean more when that factory explodes, the water supply gets poisoned, and a gremlin army marches into their streets.


Here's what I'm currently thinking on Alchemicals: I abstract down to ratings in some broad categories, like combat or social engineering. An Alchemical will have a number of Charm slots and some amount of Charms spread around those categories. Each Charm an Alchemical has in that area is a +1 when working on tasks in that category. This, of course, raises the question of "which categories should there be?"

You should probably be aware that if you actually release this game you'll get sued by White Wolf. They're pretty well known for being rather zealous about protecting their IP.

Really now? Keychain seems to get along fine without getting sued and it draws heavily on Exalted's material.

One piece of advice that has served me well in designing software is that you should break your work down into many different phases where you could presumably turn in a "complete" project and have a list of enhancements that could be added later. Good luck.

Good solid advice in general, but I still have to figure out what the ideal is before I can pare back to the basics.

 

[Thanqol]

Well, that's not quite the game I want to program. Sure, that sounds like an excellent end-game, but I'd actually like them to start out with building that shining city from the begining, both as a warm-up and because then it will mean more when that factory explodes, the water supply gets poisoned, and a gremlin army marches into their streets.

Yes, that's exactly what I was getting at . I was actually going off a three stage thing:


Period of Expansion


Period of Decline


Period of Panic


Difficulty sliders can give you more or less time before gremlins start appearing. Early game should be easy and also serve as the tutorial, getting used to combating easy gremlin threats and seeing how they spread and how to combat them. Then it slowly ramps up as time goes on.


But the early expansion is just as crucial as your micromanagement later. You get to build your sandcastle before the tide starts coming in.

 

[Kyeudo]

Anybody know if Autochthonians have anything against knocking out walls to expand their cities?


Got any thoughts on how many buildings in an Autochthonian city are actually Charms? Like do the appartment buildings and warehouses have magical properties?


Do Autochthonians use electrical power?

 

[Arrghus]

Anybody know if Autochthonians have anything against knocking out walls to expand their cities?
Got any thoughts on how many buildings in an Autochthonian city are actually Charms? Like do the appartment buildings and warehouses have magical properties?


Do Autochthonians use electrical power?

1. Autochtonians in general seem to live and die by practicality. Knocking out walls seems to be par for the course there.


2. I... guess not. Only so much Personal Essence to go around, you know. Far from sure, though.


3. No, they use Essence, which is channeled through crystal cables and behaves pretty much exactly the same in every way relevant to the situation.

 

[Kyeudo]

3. No, they use Essence, which is channeled through crystal cables and behaves pretty much exactly the same in every way relevant to the situation.

So, they use Lightning Essence. Do cities tap into Autochthon's Lightning Essence to subsidise the cost of running lights for millions?

 

[Revoke]

Anybody know if Autochthonians have anything against knocking out walls to expand their cities?

Like, punching holes in the great maker's innards? I would have imagined their cities grow around obstacles rather than through them, but I'm not really clear on what Autochton's internal topography looks like.

Like do the appartment buildings and warehouses have magical properties?

An apartment building might not itself be a charm, but it might be granted magical properties by city-wide charms that make it more robust, nicer to live in, and so on (in the same way an regular-sized exalt might wear mundane armor, but improve the armor through charms).

 

[Thanqol]

Anybody know if Autochthonians have anything against knocking out walls to expand their cities?

I would assume not, on the grounds that they're big on mining. When they put up walls or buildings they probably take the time to integrate it with the Maker's body, though.

Got any thoughts on how many buildings in an Autochthonian city are actually Charms? Like do the appartment buildings and warehouses have magical properties?

Charms are distinct enough to be different from ordinary buildings, or upgrades on ordinary buildings. Each should have some dramatic, powerful effect as well as being hella-expensive.

Do Autochthonians use electrical power

Yes, but through the lens of magic science.

 

[chalicier]

Really now? Keychain seems to get along fine without getting sued and it draws heavily on Exalted's material.

Keychain is a fan webcomic, something IP owners routinely ignore as it mainly serves to bring people in to the IP as new customers (how many people have gone looking for Exalted due to Keychain? Or D&D due to OOTS?). OOTS gets away with merchandising because it strays so far from D&D, while KoC can't even do that for fear of the WW fist descending.


Actually releasing a game onto the App Store, even a free one, is a very different kettle of fish. Firstly a game is inherently an infringement of Exalted's copyright (a comic is not a game, see) and secondly White Wolf are now owned by a computer games company. They WILL notice and they WILL have it shut down. That is a given. They have lawyers whose main job is to do exactly this.


If you want an example, look at the online project to create a Shadowrun MMO. The whole intention of the project was to present a prototype to MS Game Studios as a possible full project. MS shut the prototype down - no questions, no discussion.


So basically what I'm saying here is, Sim/Civ Steamcyber spaceship uberworld with champions = fine. Sim/Civ Alchemical Exalted = *SIRENS* :?

 

[Kyeudo]

Well that just sucks. Part of the appeal of doing an Alchemical city sim game was that most of the broad strokes were already laid out - all I had to do was work out some of the specifics. Trying to keep it lawyer friendly is like trying to solve the whole problem all over again.

 

[Plague of Hats]

I'd suggest contacting White Wolf and asking about what is and isn't allowed, instead of presuming.

 

[chalicier]

Well that just sucks. Part of the appeal of doing an Alchemical city sim game was that most of the broad strokes were already laid out - all I had to do was work out some of the specifics. Trying to keep it lawyer friendly is like trying to solve the whole problem all over again.

You don't really need to keep it lawyer-friendly. Standard practice in the games industry is to take the plates off, file off the serial numbers away, and repaint it pink, metaphorically speaking. I've been involved in a couple of projects like that in the last few years. Unless it involves patented mechanics (most of which are unchallengeable, like the ones Hudsonsoft used to attempt to claim over online matchmaking. The only strong patents I've ever seen in the games industry have been the Guitar Hero interface, and even that's been ripped in a variety of ways) then just changing the surface of a game concept is enough to keep the lawyers at bay.


If you want an example, the now-defunct MMO Dark Age of Camelot was originally a Rolemaster title. When the relationship with ICE fell apart, the developers filed off the "Rolemaster-y" bits, renamed a bunch of things, and released the game as DAoC. Even a cursory play of it, however, was enough to reveal that it was still Rolemaster under the surface.