Andy Gainey

Are you asking about a market size, i.e., number of people who would pay a typical amount of money to purchase such a sequel? Or are you more curious about the number of more dedicated players who actively get involved in the community and/or talk about the game a lot with friends and acquaintances? Last year I worked on a business plan focused on developing something that could loosely be considered a real SC4 sequel, so it was important for me to answer the first question about market size. In the ideal case (that is, with a magical marketing ability to reach the entire target market), I would speculate anywhere from 1 to 3 million, largely based on what limited sales data I could find for the SimCity series in particular, and various other city builders like the Tropico or Anno series as well. If one could break into a different, larger market (for example, crossing over into the realm of MineCraft players), then the target market could be 10 million, but that's a heck of a stretch. As for fanbase, I found that to be a lot harder to estimate. For a while I was considering a business model that would depend heavily on an active modding community, but the numbers I saw I would require were intimidating. So I chose to not focus on the potential size of the fanbase, and just concern myself with playerbase instead.

Oh yeah, I definitely remember MUDs. That's a pretty cool concept to integrate a strong creative component into a MUD system. In general I don't think the software architecture of MUDs will work for what I'm hoping to accomplish, but there might be some high level concepts that could provide inspiration. As you stated in the multiplayer thread, I do hope to have interesting behaviors and properties emerge from a simulated system, instead of hard coding those behaviors and properties. But in order to achieve the scale I want, I'm learning that I have to be very picky about what actions the simulation actually involves at a low level, in order to reliably produce only the types of emergent behaviors that are relevant to gameplay. I've seen (and created) simulations that have failed to produce the desired behaviors, and/or have produced lots of not fun behaviors. A common cause seems to be that these simulations often are based upon actions that are too low level, or try to model real life a little too directly. These simulations also tend to be unable to handle large numbers due to how specific and numerous all their actions are that need to be computed. Creating a simulation using this kind of model has been my instinct also, but I'm slowly forcing myself to think outside the box some. My brain doesn't like that very much though; it rebels frequently. Thanks! I've been reading some about Virtucity too. I'm interested in what decisions are working out, which ones caused complications, et cetera. Over the past month of development, I've been almost entirely ignoring graphics, UI, variety of features, and so forth, and instead focusing almost entirely on the core simulation. And boy have I run into complication after complication. My most recent struggle has been with trying to get the economic system and the transit system to play well together, such that who trades with whom actually takes travel cost into account reasonably, while being able to scale up to hopefully millions of agents trading with each other. I'm sure you can imagine some of the pathfinding pain that that can involve. I think I came up with a strange but workable solution, but it's one of those things like I was describing about where I had to actively avoid using a straight-forward realistic model and instead use a model that doesn't make realistic sense, but should produce the large-scale behaviors I want. (In particular, buyers and sellers that are closer to each other have a better chance of making a trade with supply or demand is limited, and their prices tend to be more favorable on both sides of the trade. In other words, local traders should have a competitive advantage over farther away traders.) I totally sympathize. Single player has been my greatest source of fun also, and I absolutely do not want to force or even nudge people toward a multiplayer mode. But my curiosity and whatever business instinct I have suggest that there exists a good way to implement multiplayer. One that might even appeal to players, myself included, who have traditionally gravitated toward single player modes. So my plan at this point is to simply maintain the technical possibility of a multiplayer mode, but otherwise design the game around single player. Once an early version of the game is out, if enough people take advantage of whatever limited multiplayer exists and seem to have fun with it, then I will try to expand that experience. I will admit that the technical requirements have already been a bit of a burden at times, and I'm sure they'll keep cropping up, limiting certain solutions that might work in a purely single player game. But keeping that door of possibility open is important to me; a business risk that I'm willing to take, I guess. I just want to emphasize that the effects of this decision are almost purely technical, however, and do not have much if any influence over the heart of what I want the game to become.

I've made some (painfully slow) progress on implementing the core simulation code for my Since I'm finally giving the economic simulation some concrete attention, I am curious about what the community might think of a particular feature that is currently part of that core. The general feature in mind is that the cost, speed, and quality of various player-initiated activities can be affected by the current state of the economic simulation. (Such activities include stuff like road construction or the routine operation of city services.) For example, cities with a strong steel industry might allow the player to build bridges more cheaply, rather than having to import more expensive steel. But cities with a weak construction industry might experience slower construction times and higher construction costs due to the need to import construction labor from out of town. Similarly, the prevalence of a well educated work force and a large high-tech equipment manufacturing sector could make it cheaper to operate a hospital, but lack of a well educated work force could cause schools to be more expensive to run or have less educational effect due to not being able to easily hire good teachers. In addition to the player being affected by the economic simulation, the economy could conversely be affected by player-initiated city activities. If the player goes through a few years of building a lot of stuff, the local construction industry might boom. But if the player quits building and zoning for a while, then the construction industry might experience a contraction if the city were a major source of construction work. In all these cases, I envision the behavior arising simply because the player is essentially just another participant in the economic simulation, not because the specific behaviors are pre-designed and hard-coded into the game. I realize that getting the desired kinds of emergent behavior out of a simulation can be tricky, but for now I'm hopeful on that front. On the other hand, if I can achieve such emergent behavior, I'm still not sure about what impact such behavior would have on the sense of fun that players would experience. Here are some hopes and worries: Speculated Pros The city will feel move "alive" and reactive, and the player will have more "interesting decisions" available. The player will feel like their decisions have more meaning to the evolution of the city. The player will feel like their decisions are influenced more strongly and obviously by the current circumstances of the city. It sets the stage for an interesting variety of designed scenarios or challenges, rather than faking such scenarios using superficial or blunt mechanics. Speculated Cons Changing prices might be more frustrating than fun. Relevant economic data might be hard for the player to quickly find, evaluate, understand, and respond to. The quantity of relevant data and the potentially complex consequences of player decisions might inhibit more casual play. (I don't want to "dumb down" gameplay, but I don't want the gameplay to turn into a tedious desk job either! ) I have some ideas to mitigate con #1, but even with those ideas, prices for the player will still change, just not very rapidly. For con #2, I imagine this will just require the proper effort to design high quality charts and maps. Once I have a simulation producing lots of this relevant data, I'll be able to more easily evaluate what it takes to understand it, and solicit feedback and insight from others about how best to present it visually. For con #3, the balance that I'll be attempting to achieve is for the player to be capable of mostly ignoring the details and still being able to build a reasonable city without dooming it all to failure. But for the players that want to dig deeper, I want the economic simulation to provide that meaningful depth. And I want interesting tidbits of those details to be poking up near the surface, easy to find if you're looking for them. Ultimately, I envision the economic simulation as a major source of story telling elements that the players will use to build narratives for their city. Do you share any of these hopes or worries? Have any additional hopes, worries, or general ideas to add to the mix?

Sorry for being quiet on here for a few weeks. I got mired in some technical difficulties and kept struggling to get through them. Fortunately that breakthrough seems to have happened a few days ago. The result is that I now have a partial foundation of the simulation running. After the player approves a blueprint for road/zone layout, the city goes to work buying land, buying construction materials, and hiring construction labor to get roads built. Private agents do the same to build houses, and then the same for industrial if there is enough demand from residents to warrant it. Price beliefs for residents who buy the resources from local industy (or import more expensive resources if there's not a sufficient local source) also adjust over time, which reflect increases in cheap supply or increases in demand. Eventually these price belief adjustments will be done for all buyers and sellers. All this economic activity has raised my next investigative question that I want to raise to the community, which will be posted shortly. Also, here's a screenshot of current progress: (Though I do want to stress that the visuals and the user interface are all complete placeholders right now.)

Yeah, those lists have been valuable as I've done research on various projects. Thanks for maintaining them, and thanks for the addition of my project! Sorry I don't have a name for the game yet. Names are so tricky; I've scrapped so many for being lame or having trademark issues. :-/ On a related note, another project also popped up just this last week that got a quite a lot of attention on Reddit and elsewhere: Citybound. I'll be eager to see its progress. The best of luck to all active city builder projects!

I've been making some good progress on the very earliest version of the game. You can read about it here. And here's a screenshot: Note that the grid-based 2D style is likely to eventually be replaced. But in the early stages I have decided that it is more important to get to the state where I have a "complete" game as quickly as possible, and then repeatedly iterate with new features, modifications, and totally replaced components. I'll surely "throw away" a lot of early work in the process, but I have no doubt that the project will be better for it. Trying to figure out how to get from nothing to the final envisioned version in one direct step would simply be untenable. Also, if anyone wonders about the zone colors, for now I'm trying to align more with industry standards (to the extent that there are standards) than with SimCity standards. I'm curious what people's reactions will be.

That looks awesome! I've spent so much time playing Pharoah before; I could probably have a ton of fun with 1849. I think my biggest issue that makes it difficult to play Pharoah today is the small screen size and some annoyances with the UI. That's a typical issue with me and old games. If 1849 provides similar core gameplay but with a more up-to-date UI, I'd totally dig it. (Oops, sort of a gold rush pun.) Voted for you on Greenlight. By the way, the link you provided didn't seem to work, but I found this one that did: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=217009121 It looks like they already have early access through IndieGameStand, though I don't know what the details are, and how it'll play out with a full release and the possibility of getting on Steam. https://indiegamestand.com/store/788/1849/

Very valuable feedback in general, thanks! As for the specific of more types of traffic, I'm in agreement. Freight in SimCity 4, for example, was nice, but not all freight leaves the city. Businesses and industries are shipping stuff between locations all the time. Certain commercial services are making house calls in residential areas. School buses are everywhere. Shopping is constantly happening. (I was surprised when I discovered that commercial zones SimCity 4 do well only if people drive by them on their way to work. Huh?) In addition, I think it would be fascinating to have other events too, stuff that isn't just routine day-to-day traffic. Weekend traffic is different from weekday traffic. Holidays can have various effects on traffic patterns. Seasonal patterns are often relevant. One-off tourist events (Olympics, anyone?). Heavy construction. Snow storms, heavy rain, dense fog, or other "minor" disasters. None of that is going to ruin a city necessarily, but how the traffic network is able to adapt to those various events can definitely affect citizens' opinion of the city and their quality of life. The trick of course would be to enable the player to comprehend the affects of these various events. But I think something as simple as providing a list of recent events and being able to limit any particular graph or map overlay to a specific event would be sufficient. For example, if you look at the congestion map, it will by default show the average congestion over the last n simulated days. If you want to just look at weekday congestion, that'd be an option. Or you see that their was a snow storm recently; limit the congestion map to show what congestion was like on the day of the storm. (Depending on randomness, it was most likely a weekday, but might've been a weekend, which would change how congestion was affected.) My hope would be that this would give each city a strong sense of personality and history; each city could feel more unique. Trying to experience the joys of creativity usually fails if you don't feel as though you can create something that is unique in some relevant way.

Haha, don't worry; no death threats from me. I love turn based. But I don't believe I've ever really considered doing a city sim using a turn based model before. On a technical level, many of the options I'm considering would work out to be more or less turn-based (the traffic simulation among them), but I still always envisioned typical real-time style of presentation. Making it truly turn-based would have some interesting implications. Off the top of my head, I imagine that the variety of available player actions and the scale of a single turn would need to be balanced so as to reduce the number of turns where the player does nothing but hit [End Turn] again. Otherwise, the game would frequently feel pointlessly tedious. Then again, even if I stick with a real-time presentation, thinking about it from a turn-based perspective could help inspire some solutions to the already existing problem of waiting for things to happen. If the game runs fast enough, sure, you can just run it at cheetah speed for a minute or so and then get back to spending money doing stuff, but it still feels a bit like you just wasted all that time in your city's in-game history. Finding meaningful ways for a player to always be doing something relevant and engaging is on my list of design considerations, and with the turn-based perspective, I think you've given me another tool in my toolbox!

Yeah, at this point I am definitely considering ways to create a statistical simulation that can be conveniently and believably translated into a visual representation when needed. I remember when I learned how SimCity 2000 chose the density of its marching ants, based on proximity to traffic generators. Drove me crazy seeing a long highway with heavy traffic near the origin and destination, but nothing in between. That's a system I emphatically do not want to resort to. While I do want to make the game relatively easy to play for more casual players, I do have the luxury of prioritizing complexity more than Maxis, as I don't have to sell something like 2 million units just to consider the project a financial success. Heck, 10,000 purchases in a year would be a definite success for me; 100,000 would be wildly successful. So I think my approach will be to ensure early on that the core of the simulation supports a relatively high level of complexity. From there I can incrementally improve the interface and balance the game to be playable and enjoyable even when only utilizing just the simpler game features. (As you might infer from this approach, my current plan is to pursue an alpha-funding approach, releasing the game for a cheap price as soon as it provides a sufficiently playable and fun experience, and then improving it from there. Existing players would receive all updates for free, and the price for new players might increase over time with major updates until reaching whatever I might consider to be an appropriate full price.) Indeed, even though the grid gets in the way of the numerous non-conforming parts of a city, it is super convenient for the majority transit network design. (Or at least would be if it could handle straight diagonals better.) I want to get away from the traditional fixed grid altogether, to properly enable the freedom that a gridless system can provide. But the convenience of the grid must still somehow be maintained. I had an idea a while back about letting the player configure virtual grids that could be used for snapping roads to them. After watching some Let's Plays of SimCity 2013, I realized that the guideline system moves in that direction, but I think it's too simplistic to really capture the balance of power and convenience provided by SimCity 4. I might talk about that more in the future, but the core of the idea is that virtual grids will work like guidelines, but will be configurable (angles, curvature, distance between each cell, blending style with nearby virtual grids, et cetera), can be present even in the absence of existing roads (or when overlapping non-conforming roads), and can persist for future design work that should properly match the flow and alignment of the existing city. Holy awesome information, thanks! So far I've been focused almost purely on route assignment, working under the assumption that I could come up with simplistic but sufficient models for the other three steps. (Not that I was aware of this 4-step model before now, but I can see how a lot of my thoughts fit very naturally into this model.) My assumptions may be off, however. I'll be studying this stuff in more depth! I'll admit that I'd been wanting to do an agent-based system, because I really want to have the simulation generate emergent behavior, rather than fake it based on patterns we've already observed in the real world. But I'm probably overlooking a large selection of statistical and/or aggregate models that still have plenty of internal feedback and can generate the type of emergent behavior I'm looking for. I also need to keep in mind this advice originating from Sid Meier: "The player should have the fun, not the designer or the computer." You all can keep me in check.

Wow, that is some serious dedication and patience! Maybe one day I can give them a more pleasant and natural experience. The "togetherness" that you mentioned about true cooperative play is indeed one of my primary objectives in considering multiplayer. A sense of togetherness is a very good way to put it, thanks! This ties in really well with a basic idea I had for projects. To take a tangent, I've always been annoyed by the immediate build system of most builder games: Spend your resources to make something, and if you mess up, spend more to destroy your first attempt and try again. So I'm planning to have let a player design projects first, seeing how much they would cost, but not spending resources until the player finalizes the design. I then realized that this could be extended to multiplayer with different players designing different projects. From there, different systems could be employed for approving plans, such as designating one player the "mayor/dictator" who has sole ability to approve/deny, or having a "city council" that votes on projects. I still imagined this just being among friends/acquaintances, but with care (such as perhaps with some of the nuances you mentioned), it could be opened up a little more widely to whomever wanted to submit projects for consideration.

Thanks for the thorough reply! Modularity sounds like a major component of your interests. Mine too. Your approach to breaking down the different categories of modular pieces is very interesting. For example, the way streets add street-side parking to whatever they're attached to is fascinating; I would have never thought of that possibility. Oh man I love the traffic query tool of SimCity 4. If I can't at least get that level of information out of my system, I'll be sorely disappointed. I would like to have at least enough detail in the simulation to more reasonably fake the real-time display of cars whenever the player slows the game down to near-real-time speeds. The cars in SimCity 4 provided an at-a-glance indication of congestion, but the fading into/out of existence really bothered me. Sure, it was just a surface detail that didn't really impact the simulation, but we each have our psychological weaknesses.

Continuing on with I'd like to discuss traffic simulation this time. I've spent the past couple weeks working on a prototype simulator to get a feel for what is technically achievable. (I'll have some preliminary results posted later this week; you can read about of my few early bugs on my blog.) But more important than technical feasibility would be practical value: How much (and what kind of) detail would actually maximize entertainment, in the face of certain tradeoffs? I would classify the tradeoffs into three broad categories: Performance, Interface, and Mechanics. On the performance side, naturally the more detailed a simulation gets, the slower it will run when attempting to run as fast as possible. For interface, it's sort of a tradeoff between ease-of-use and and creative power. And for mechanics, it's largely a matter of feedback from the game to the player: Can a player understand what's happening in the simulation, why it is working well or poorly, and what one could try in order to improve traffic problems? Running at max speed, how long would you be willing to wait for the simulation to process one in-game year? (What counts as an in-game year can be fuzzy, but you can loosely base it on other city builders you've played.) Would you be more forgiving if it were a large city? For example, what if a city of 100,000 people could simulate a year in 1 minute, but a city of 10 million, while playable, would take nearly 2 hours? Or would you prefer the SimCity 4 style where you could focus on just one segment of the city at a time, and thus get more predictable performance regardless of how large the overall city were? The tradeoff would be that the simulation for most areas of the city would be frozen or vastly simplified during that time. Regarding interface, I'm not sure I have any specific questions at this early stage. The ideal is obviously to achieve both ease-of-use and creative power simultaneously. I am optimistic that with effort, and with a lot of feedback and ideas from players, the ideal can be accomplished. But for now I think that just having an idea of priorities would be helpful to me. Judging from past discussions and player activity, it seems clear that a capable interface for designing highway interchanges, rail yards, bus/subway routes, and similar complex structures would be very welcome. What type of transit-related structures would you most like to see have a well designed interface? Finally, I have a concern that if the game mechanics contain too much complexity, even if the computer is able to process all the details, and even if the interface allows easy creation of complex transit networks, the result will be an incomprehensible mess of data, and an overwhelming array of options available to the player. But I also suspect that different types of players will judge this point of excess quite differently: Aesthetic builders would love to have a myriad of options. Functional tinkerers on the other hand would probably do better with just enough options to provide proper control over the behavior of the simulation. So from this suggested distinction, which transit network features would you like to have mostly for aesthetic purposes, and which are desired primarily for behavioral control? Which ones are important for both reasons? (For example, I suspect highway interchanges would be.) Other features to consider might include rail yards, lane count, intersection styles, road surface styles, specialized lane use (bus lanes, no trucks, et cetera), pedestrian routes, and I'm sure many more.

I had forgotten all about that game, thanks for the reminder. Never played it, so I didn't realize what the multiplayer was like, but found this YouTube review that summarized it well. It's telling how in the review he notes that one can almost forget they're playing with someone else. My guess is that this was in part due to a combination of weak competition (since the game isn't really competitive by nature) and weak collaboration (since you can't work together to build the same area, only adjacent areas). Yeah, it wouldn't be worth the effort and design impact to implement multiplayer if it wasn't going to actually feel much like playing with others. For those who've played with others on SimCity 2013 or CitiesXL, do they sometimes feel similar? Or does it remain more obvious that you're playing with others? (Sidenote: I haven't played any SimCity 2013, and only a few hours of CitiesXL. I feel like a bit of a fool trying to make my own city-builder without having experienced those two, but they just don't look fun enough to drop the money/time on them, given my personal interests and what I've extensively read about them. But for research purposes, I should probably play them each for at least 10 or 20 hours.)

Gotcha. I played one of the earlier Anno games briefly (1404 I think), but couldn't really get into the RTS side of it. I prefer collaborative games over competetive, and RTS elements tend to be competetive, even if only subtly. But I might give it another try, or acquire 2070, just to better familiarize myself with the system. I almost got 2070 during a recent sale, but a review said the game was always-online, so I passed. But now that I look into it more, it looks like the always-online stuff is optional?