Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The
RollerCoaster Tycoon
series requires the player to construct roller coasters in a
theme park. The roller coaster must be designed in such a way that it doesn't crash
or make the (virtual) riders sick but is still exciting to ride.
RollerCoaster Tycoon
com-
bines the challenge of meeting physical standards with an economic challenge:
Each element of the theme park costs money, and the player must stay within a
budget.
Whenever you require the player to build to a standard and test his construction,
when he fails he needs to know why—otherwise he can't learn the principles upon
which you based the standards.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 2
includes a feature to show the
player how high and how steep the different segments of the coaster are, so he can
figure it out with a little experimentation. See
Figure 5.1
.
FIGURE 5.1
RollerCoaster
Tycoon 2
's coaster-
design screen
CREATING TO AESTHETIC STANDARDS
With an adequate physics simulation, any game can test a player's creativity against
a physical standard. An architecture game can test a building both for structural
integrity and also for usability—rooms with no way to get into them are useless.
Aesthetics present a much larger problem, because they don't consist of a set of uni-
versal laws in the way that Newtonian physics does. To test the aesthetic quality of
a player's creations, you have to set some standards of your own. Consider some of
the following options:
