Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
in warfare, but because sleeping soldiers don't make exciting viewing and certainly
aren't very interactive, most games just skip sleep periods. Allowing soldiers to fight
continuously without a pause permits the player to play continuously without a
pause also.
The Sims , a game about managing a household, handles this problem a different
way. The simulated characters require rest and sleep for their health, so The Sims
depicts day and night accurately. However, when all the characters go to sleep, the
game speeds up considerably, letting hours go by in a few seconds. As soon as any-
one wakes up, time slows down again.
The Sims is a rather unusual game in that it's chiefly about time management. The
player is under constant pressure to have his characters accomplish all their chores
and get time for sleep, relaxation, and personal development as well. The game
runs something like 48 times as fast as real life, so it takes about 20 minutes of real
time to play through the 16 hours of game-world daytime. However, the characters
don't move 48 times as fast. Their actions look pretty normal, about as they would
in real time. As a result, it takes them 15 minutes according to the game's clock just
to go out and pick up the newspaper. This contributes to the sense of time pressure.
Because the characters do everything slowly (in game terms), they often don't get a
chance to water their flowers, which consequently die.
ANOMALOUS TIME
In The Settlers: Rise of an Empire , a complex economic simulation, a tree can grow
from a sapling to full size in about the same length of time that it takes for an iron
foundry to smelt four or five bars of iron. This is a good example of anomalous
time: time that seems to move at different speeds in different parts of the game.
Blue Byte, the developer of The Settlers , tuned the length of time it takes to do each
of the many tasks in the game to make sure that the game as a whole would run
smoothly. As a result, The Settlers is very well balanced at some cost to realism.
However, it doesn't disrupt the fantasy because The Settlers doesn't actually give the
player a clock in the game world. There's no way to compare game time to real
time, so in effect, the game world has no obvious time scale (see Figure 4.7 ).
Another example of anomalous time appears in Age of Empires, in which tasks that
should take less than a day in real time (gathering berries from a bush, for example)
seem to take years in game time according to the game clock. Age of Empires does
have a time scale, visible on the game clock, but not everything in the world makes
sense on that time scale. The players simply have to accept these actions as sym-
bolic rather than real. As designers, we have to make them work in the context of
the game world without disrupting the fantasy. As long as the symbolic actions
(gathering berries or growing trees) don't have to be coordinated with real-time
actions (warfare) but remain essentially independent processes, it doesn't matter
if they operate on an anomalous time scale.
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