Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
You can also build a bargaining feature into the mechanics of a trader, such that it
sells at a high price but can, via a user interface mechanism designed for the purpose,
lower its price after a little haggling. Your scheme might make some traders more
flexible than others, thereby encouraging players to shop around for the best deal.
Production Mechanisms
Production mechanism
describes a class of mechanics that make a resource conve-
niently available to a player. These include sources that bring the resource directly
into the player's hands, but they can also include special buildings, characters, or
other facilities that gather resources from the landscape and make them available
to the player. Many real-time strategy games employ special characters to perform
this function. For instance, in the
Command & Conquer
series, a harvester vehicle
collects a resource called tiberium and carries it to a refinery where it is converted
into money that the player can use to buy weapons. The harvester is a production
mechanism; the refinery is a converter.
Tangible and Intangible Resources
If a resource possesses physical properties within the game world, such as requiring
storage space or transportation, the resource is said to be
tangible
. On the other
hand, if it occupies no physical space and does not have to be transported, it is
intangible
. In a shooter game, ammunition is tangible—it exists in physical form in
the environment, and the avatar has to carry it around. Most construction and
management simulations treat money as intangible: It exists as a meaningful
resource in the game world but takes up no space and has no particular location.
A number of games treat resources in a mixed fashion, sometimes tangible and
sometimes intangible. In
Age of Empires
, food and building materials have to be
transported from their production points to a storage facility; during transport,
these items can be stolen or destroyed by an enemy. Once stored, however, materi-
als become intangible: They cannot be seized or destroyed even if the enemy
demolishes the storage facility.
Similarly, most construction and management simulations and real-time strategy
games don't require a resource to be physically transported before it can be spent or
consumed; the commodity simply vanishes. When constructing a building in
Age
of Empires
, the player doesn't transport the stone from the storage pit to the con-
struction site. This takes an extra management burden off the player. The section
“Logistics” in Chapter 14, “Strategy Games,” discusses the gameplay implications of
intangible resources at greater length.
Feedback Loops, Mutual Dependencies, and Deadlocks
A production mechanism that requires some of the resource that the mechanism
itself produces constitutes a
feedback loop
in the production process. Note that this
