Internal Economy - Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design - page 77

If you are designing an economy construction game, there are three strategies that
can help you keep the complexity of your task under control:
n Don't introduce all the player's building blocks at once. Construction and
management simulations typically allow the player to build something—a farm,
factory, or city, for example—out of elementary units, building blocks, that play a
role in the economy. (In SimCity , these are zoned land and specialized buildings.) It
is a good idea to gently introduce players to the different elements in your game, a
few at a time. This makes it easier to control the probability space, at least initially.
By allowing certain building blocks and disallowing others, you can craft scenarios
and create special challenges. If your game has no distinct levels or special scenarios,
make sure that not all building options are available from the start. Have players
accumulate resources before they can use the more advanced building blocks that
unlock new options. Civilization is an excellent example of an economy construc-
tion game in which most of the building blocks are locked at the beginning of the
game and must be unlocked one by one before the players can use them.
n Be aware of the meta-economic structure. In an ideal economy construction
game, the number of ways of putting the economic building blocks together is end-
less. However, in most such games, certain approaches are better than others (and
in games with a victory condition, some approaches are unwinnable). As a designer,
you should be aware of typical constructions that might be called meta-economic
structures . For example, in SimCity , a particular mix of industrial, residential, and
commercial zones will prove to be very effective. Players will probably discover
these structures quickly and follow them closely. One difficult, but effective, way of
dealing with patterns that could become too dominant is to make sure that patterns
that are effective early in the game cease to be effective later. For example, a particu-
lar layout of zones might be an effective way to grow your population initially but
causes a lot of pollution in the long run. Slow-working, destructive positive feedback
is a good mechanism to create this sort of effect.
n Use maps to produce variety and constrain the possibility space. SimCity and
Civilization wouldn't be nearly as much fun if you could build your city or empire
on an ideal piece of land. Part of the challenge of these games is to deal with the
limitations of the virtual environment's initial state. As a designer, you can use the
design of the map to constrain players or to present opportunities. So, although
there might be a best way of building the economy (something that we might call
a dominant meta-economic structure), it is simply not possible to do so in particular
terrain. This forces players to improvise, and rewards players who are more flexible
and versatile. In SimCity , the disaster scenarios in which players can unleash several
natural disasters on their cities challenges their improvisation and flexibility in a
similar vein; and of course, SimCity also generates disasters at random, setting back
the player's progress.