Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
DEMOLITION
In addition to letting your players construct things, you might need to give them a
way to demolish things. A big part of the fun the player gets from a CMS is building
the city, theme park, or other entity the way
she
wants to build it. If construction
decisions are irreversible, then the player cannot change her mind or react to new
circumstances. This might be OK for strategy games (many war games, for example,
allow you to build factories and defenses but not to demolish them), but in CMSs,
forbidding demolition prevents the player from exercising her full creative freedom.
You should consider whether you want demolition to cost something, cost nothing,
or actually earn money. If it costs money to demolish something, you are, in effect,
penalizing the player for changing her mind and perhaps encouraging her to plan
more carefully in the future. She loses not only her initial construction cost for the
item but the demolition costs as well. If demolition costs nothing, the player loses
only her construction costs. If she actually gets something back, it's usually called
selling the item or structure rather than demolishing it, an arrangement that further
reduces the price the player pays for changing her mind. If she can sell a structure
back for exactly as much as she paid, there is no net cost at all for building a thing
and destroying it later. CMSs rarely work this way because to do so removes some
of the challenge of managing their resources. Players can build madly, secure in the
knowledge that they can always get their money back by selling.
Victory and Loss Conditions
A good many CMSs do not provide any victory condition; the player simply builds
whatever she likes as effectively as she can within the constraints of the system.
These games might well provide a loss condition, however. For example, total
depletion of resources (or, in monetary terms, bankruptcy) is the loss condition in
Monopoly
. Victory in
Monopoly
consists simply of bankrupting all the other players;
that is, forcing all the other players to meet the loss condition so that the last one
left is declared the victor.
If you do want to define a victory condition, it's best to do it in the context of a pre-
defined scenario that you have created for the player rather than a free-form
construction mode. Give the player a partially constructed city (or whatever) and a
set of initial conditions, and then define the victory condition as achieving some
other condition. It could be as simple as “To win, your enterprise must be worth $5
billion,” or it can be as complex as you like. You can also start the player in rapidly
deteriorating conditions and challenge her to turn them around or simply to sur-
vive for a certain length of time.
Competition Modes
CMSs are almost always single-player games. It's possible to make them into multi-
player competitions, but competition discourages the kind of creative experimentation
