Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

everyone wants to push hard, achieve more, and do what hasn’t been done previously.
If you spend too much time on any one prop or action behavior, you risk not
having enough time to complete another one later in the level or later in the game.
This game genre is particularly performance-intensive. It regularly requires some
pretty serious hardware on the player’s side. This genre is known for “upping the
bar” in machine requirements for graphics cards, memory, and CPU speed. These requirements
can be used to great effect for many titles, but from a commercial standpoint,
making the argument to your publisher that an average player will need the
absolute latest “everything” can be a very tough sell.
S IMULATIONS
Many popular simulation-oriented games let the player experiment with a growth
process of some kind. You might be growing a zoo, an amusement park, a futuristic
city, or a record business cartel. Some developers don’t even consider these kinds of
titles to be games at all, but rather something closer to a digital or software-based
toy. They certainly allow a player plenty of room to experiment with the experience
at hand.
In any case, this genre continues to hold serious player appeal. Most of the successful
titles to date seem to focus on growth and the shaping of a growth process. A
player’s decisions have impact and show positive or negative results. Raise the taxes
or the ticket prices too high, and suffer the consequences. These games teach players
to strive for a degree of balance in their dealings, and to find edges, or ways to maximize
a process without overloading it. They have been used by some as an entertaining
teaching tool.
Let’s look now at just a few design considerations:
� Unit-intensive
� Open-ended or “blank slate” beginnings
� Easy to expand
� Passive in a positive way
� Rule- and definition-dependent
C H A P T E R 5
Simulators are unit-intensive. They require hundreds (even thousands) of art assets,
which form the play pieces (such as buildings, roads, animals, ride pieces, snack
shacks, people, and vehicles). These titles can be extremely heavy in art asset requirements,
which becomes a design and production trade-off point. Your time and budget
only allow for a limited number of assets. Which to build to serve your game idea?
123
Design by Genre