And going in solo and with minimal preparation as well. Let’s see how it all goes.
Language: Java
Programming Environment: Eclipse
Graphics: GIMP 2
Audio: I’m not sure yet, I’ll probably get some royalty free audio from YouTube’s audiolibrary.
The first day of developing is about to wrap up for me, but let me give a short synopsis of what I am working on. The theme is ‘You are the monster’, which of course lends to a lot of possibilities, primarily involving, well, monsters. I like to think I got a bit more creative. In plenty of media it is the large corporation that is depicted as a monster, the massive, soulless companies that care not for its workers and that care even less about those that get in the way of their profits. To many, they are monsters. And in this game, you play one such monsters.
So the idea of the game is that you get a budget that just isn’t enough to buy up all of the houses, so you will have to turn to playing dirty tricks in order to succeed in turning yet another lively neighbourhood into a concrete jungle. The game reveals a neighbourhood of a varying amount of houses, all for sale. More or less. You see, people don’t always like to just move out, so you will have to convince them to sell, one way or another.
Home owners all are a random combination of names (both first and last names), personalities and household types. Based on the latter two, the price of the home and the willingness of the owner to sell will be adjusted. Further actions in the game will also influence these two values – overpaying a lot on a home will increase the price on all other prices, while the appearance of construction sites may increase the willingness of an home owner to sell. Certain actions, such as deceive and negotiate may lower the price, while threatening and muscle may improve the willingness of the owner to sell. Of course these all have a chance at backfiring and causing the direct opposite. Then there is also the way of the lawsuit; expensive ways of getting homes, but not always guaranteed to succeed – and will cause a lot of bad PR. Remember, there will be a score at the end, and if your PR is too low, you may just discover the termination of your contract instead. Because that’s the world of the corporation: perform, or get out.
Progress is good and I am really excited about it. I do worry a bit about how I am going to fix the art, but we’ll see. I’m sure I can make something work. See you tomorrow for another update.
As day 2 comes to an end to me, it’s time for another progress report – and progress has been good! So good, in fact, that I theoretically could submit the game for the Compo. More on why I won’t later.
A small recap on what the game is about:
You are a new employee at Mega Corp Inc., a company with its eyes set on creating a new Mega Mall. One problem: they don’t own the land yet. That’s why you are here: it is your task to buy all the properties of an unnamed neighbourhood, using a budget that is just too small, a deadline that is just too close by, and from people who really rather would see you relocated to Antarctica.
When I signed off for the day yesterday, I had an overview where you could see all the houses, see details on the owners, buy houses and see them transformed into construction sites.
Compare yesterday’s screenshot to that of today.
Contains some differences, doesn’t it?
The primary visual difference is that the game view has been cleaned and spruced up somewhat. I have made the locations of homes somewhat less erratic, and I have added some streets to make it seem more like a proper neighbourhood. Furthermore, there are now a few houses with the ‘sold’ notice on top of them – this is because Construction Sites now have actual in-game influence: a construction site directly lowers the worth on surrounding homes, as well as increase the willingness of the owner to sell. To make sure that a sold building doesn’t immediately start devaluing everything around it, there is now a week delay before a home becomes a construction site.
By the way, if you are getting a SimCity vibe, well, it wasn’t intended, but you aren’t the only one.
The second big visual difference is the colours on the buttons. Actions now have a cooldown – this means that when you use an action, you can not use that action again for a few days, depicted by the slowly turning green of the buttons. The lengths of these periods differ per action.
But those are just the visuals; let’s start talking mechanics:
The actions on the lower bar have now been properly implemented. The first four are rather similar: each have a chance at reducing the price of the home as well as increasing the willingness of the owner to sell – this can of course backfire and do the opposite. The differences between these actions are how likely they will work for personalities. Negotiating with a Paranoid home owner will have a low rate of success, while deceiving that owner will have a very high rate of success (the reasoning being that if you talk to a paranoid person as though you think exactly as how they do, they are easily convinced by you). That being said, deceiving a paranoid owner better not fail on you (5% chance this happens), because if it does, their price skyrockets and their willingness drops like a brick (failing in this situation has a very high chance at resulting in the biggest swings possible: a 50% price increase and 50 points of Willingness lost).
The odd one out is the fifth action: the lawsuit. The lawsuit has a very high failure rate (80%), but if successful, you outright get the home without costs. But if you fail, the willingness of the owner to do business immediately drops to zero, and regardless of the outcome, you get a 20 point hit on the reputation of the company.
Speaking about reputation, that is one of the three scores that has been really fleshed out today. There are three scores in the game that you will be graded on after finishing a game:
Reputation is how the public view the company you work at. It doesn’t directly impact you during the game, but it works as a multiplier for your final score – the higher the reputation, the better. If you end the game with a reputation score beneath the 20, you are fired. Reputation is increased by offering a good price and negotiations, and decreased by Muscle, Threaten, and Deceive. Lawsuit instantly knocks off 20 reputation points.
Remaining Budget is the money that you end the game with. It is possible for this number to be beneath zero – in fact, that is very likely. When you start the game (in the current balancing), your budget is 75% of all homes together. Pick your battles smart, intimidate the right personalities, turn the right homes into construction zones, and it may just be possible that you end the game with a positive balance. 10% of the remaining balance is added up to your final score prior to the reputation multiplier.
Bonus is the amount of money you receive for successfully being all the houses – this is completely dependent on how many houses there are in the game. You get 10k per house, but you lose 10k every month. This basically means that you get one month for every home. If your bonus is 0 at the end of the game, your slow ass is fired, regardless of how much money or reputation you got saved up.
Other functionalities that I have added are an about screen and audio support. All-in-all, the game is pretty much done, requiring only some finetuning in the balance. I did consider joining the Compo (there currently is some time left for that), but I don’t have any idea where to begin with creating music. Truth is, I will have to rely on some third party, such as the YouTube Audiolibrary, so that would disqualify me (I’d rather not submit a soundless game). On the other hand, I now get a day extra to improve the existing feature set, as well as implement a few more small ideas I had.
Gee, this post got a little longer than I intended. Oh well. See you in day 3 for a final update and the submission of the game.
And with the end of day 3, also comes the end of the jam.
Day 3 wasn’t my most productive day and was, unfortunately, the day I had to scrap a functionality: the sound system. I had it completely working and had a selection of music I was considering using (among them were Bass Walker and Local Forecast – Elevator, both by Kevin MacLeod), but Java doesn’t play too well with most sound files. So I converted them. And it turned my 100kB game into a 120MB one. Yeah, that’s not exactly ideal. I did manage to knock the size down to about 10MB in total, but the quality of the sounds suffered greatly from it, so I was forced to scrap it.
What else did I do? Well, mostly improvements to the existing feature set. I added decorations to empty plots, improved the art somewhat, rebalanced personalities, sped up the game, changed the message system, added an about screen, added logo’s, added the ability to quit a game in progress, etcetera. They aren’t really big changes in of themselves, but they do all add up, and all-in-all, it does improve the quality of the game somewhat.
I do not have a lot more to say about today’s progress, honestly. It was mostly just wrapping up, improving and fixing what was already there and then submitting it for the jam. I will look into writing up a post-mortem this week, but I don’t know if I’ll get around to it. In case I don’t: I really had an enjoyable time, it was great to challenge myself like this, and perhaps I will join in again in the future.
Be well.