Hey everyone, Just wanted to know if anyone can point me in the direction of some resources relating to business simulation/tycoon games. I''m interested in learning the game mechanics of these types of games. Thanks Mick

I was going to suggest reading post-mortems of similar games, but I haven''t been able to find any to point you to. Maybe a search on GamaSutra would turn up some results (I did a cursory search on Google).

I can point out the following though:

1. Tycoon games are "customer"-oriented. The core gameplay revolves around providing services/creating attractions that the customers find interesting/worthwhile and are willing to pay for.



2. Customers must have independent behavior models, with quirky and interesting consequences. The robustness of the model depends on the scope of your game: Pizza Tycoon required a much simple model because of its tight focus and locationality, while Theme Park required a much more complex model because of the variety of activities and logical consequences - like eating, going on a ride and puking. Note that "independent" doesn''t mean "one per customer entity"!



3. Customers must have "urges", "wants" and/or "needs" which the business fulfills to various levels of acceptability. It is this acceptability that determines how many customers patronize the establishment and the player''s success as a tycoon.



4. Remember workers! No business establishment can operate without staff, and that brings up a variety of interesting issues. Workers in Theme Park occasionally went on strike, necessitating negotiations to restore operations (otherwise you''d be bleeding money and losing customer satisfaction, interest and goodwill).



5. Keep the interface simple. In the aforementioned Theme Park worker negotiations, the actual bargaining was automatic; the player was merely to have slid the "hand" across the table to shake the worker representative before the pile of cookies ran out. A relatively simple interface is necessary to allow the widest variety of people get into the game quickly, especially casual/non-hardcore gamers (like me) who may not have the time or interest to learn the innate intricacies of complex two-handed interface schemes.

Hope that helped a bit. Good luck!

I, too, had difficulty finding much information on the game mechanics in business simulation or tycoon-type games. However, from what information I have discovered, Oluseyi is completely correct in some of the more essential aspects of such a game.

I don't know how much it might help, but I wrote an article concerning the simulation in Pizza Business, an open source game that I wrote much of the "simulation" for. While most of the algorithms in the simulation are fairly straightforward, and if you take into consideration the fact that the simulation is turn-based rather than real-time, it still might prove useful.

Somewhat related is the fact that we've begun designing the next version of the game which will be very much a modern tycoon-type game, and the basic techniques that I used in the turn-based simulation will be used in the real-time solution as well, although obviously with some changes and more complex algorithms. The article is here: Simulation in text-based, turn-based, pizza business game

Oh, one other thing. If you have any specific simulation-related questions, it should be worthwhile to ask them in the AI forum as there are many knowledge people in there. In fact, one of them (InnocuousFox I believe) is the lead designer for an airline simulation.

I don't know if this will be useful to you either, but here's a thread I started back in August, I believe, concerning one of the aspects of a tycoon-ish game: customer generation. I got some really good answers to my question including one from Oluseyi. Customer generation in simulations

I have also begun to look at some information pertaining to statistics, probability, and simulation. While much of the information I found was large academia-centered, i.e., not game-focused, it still might prove a source of useful information.

[edited by - ares32585 on March 28, 2003 8:36:12 PM]

quote: Original post by ares32585
I don''t know if this will be useful to you either, but here''s a thread I started back in August, I believe, concerning one of the aspects of a tycoon-ish game: customer generation. I got some really good answers to my question including one from Oluseyi. Customer generation in simulations

I was trying to find that thread and reference it here. Thanks.

Fascinating article. How far have you guys gone on the real-time version? I think I''ll peruse the site and see if there''s anything I can contribute.

Cheers.

We haven''t gone far at all with regards to the real-time game. Right now, we''re pulling together a game design document and trying to work out the various aspects of gameplay. After we''re finished with that, we will begin work on a technial design document. And after that, actual coding will begin. We could certainly use whatever help you might want to give. We can usually be found on IRC - server: irc.freenode.net channel: #pizza-business None of us do this professionally, though, and we certainly don''t claim to be experts. In fact, the text-based version of the game was our first attempt at a game of any notable complexity.

However, assuming that the game gets far enough along, I do have plans to write a series of articles on various things related to the development of the game. While I do not claim to be any sort of expert, it seems that there is not much information regarding the development of simulation games and I figured that it might be helpful to share our experiences.

I''ve been tinkering around with a business sim design recently. I was playing Capitalism II a few months ago, which is interesting for the scale they tried to achieve, but there were a few too many buggy areas for my liking.

As for the mechanics of a business simulation, almost all of them seem to be some kind of cellular system: individual parts, whether they are single customers or a "manufacturing unit", have a set of internal states that get updated with every tick of the clock. For example, in Zoo Tycoon each zoo guest has an energy level, a hunger level, some other properties. They use these properties to decide where to go next, like a snack stand or the lion exhibit. But all the guests seem to have access to the same map, they don''t store their own internal map (which would take up a lot of memory if there are hundreds of guests). Or maybe they do, I didn''t study it too much.

In Capitalism II, each factory has a number of slots for purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and selling. A manufacturing unit determines what to make based on the components that are provided to it, and produces items at a rate based on the experience of that unit. Each tick of the clock, the game runs through all the units, moving stock between connected units, making things, selling things, depending on what type of unit it is.

One characteristic of a cellular/state system is that the units tend to have very short memories. What a unit does next is only based on their current "memory". In ZT, you can let lions run around the park attacking customers, but once they''re back in the cage the whole thing is quickly forgotten.

The limited perspective of cellular units also causes units to fixate on something. In Cap II, if a unit is building stereos and you change the inputs to start building shampoo, the unit will try to finish building stereos until it runs out of stereo parts, even if certain parts needed for stereos are no longer being sent. Units can''t see the big picture -- but then that''s supposedly why there is someone playing the game, no one needs a game that plays itself.

In my current design, I''d like to model a small business, where each employee has some particular job like a factory worker or accountant. The player has a lot of freedom to pick what industry or type of service they want to provide, but their business decisions take a certain amount of time to perform. Say you want to hire a new worker, you''ve got to spend time to place a job listing, then you''ve got to review the resumes that get sent, and then you have to interview the people. But if you''re not interested in doing that kind of stuff, you can delegate the task to other people in the company.

So in this game, you can focus on hand picking your staff and let them take care of your assembly line and products, or you can micromanage the equipment and assembly lines and let other people worry about hiring.

I also want employees to have different personality types, so if you put conflicting personalities together you get unhappy employees. This will simulate the dynamics of what happens as a company gets bigger, because no matter what you do, once there are a lot of employees they will start to clash.

You should look into books on operations research and operations management for ideas on how to model specific aspects of a business.

I've wanted to make a factory sim for a couple of years now. I didn't know it had been done before in Capitalism . I thought I'd someday be the first to release a factory sim. Silly me. I should know better than that. At least I no longer have to worry about someone beating me to it.

[edited by - chronos on April 4, 2003 6:32:36 PM]

quote: Original post by chronos
You should look into books on operations research and operations management for ideas on how to model specific aspects of a business.

I''ve wanted to make a factory sim for a couple of years now. I didn''t know it had been done before in Capitalism .

I might do some research, right now I''m just basing it on work experience and common sense. I want to make sure it is fun to play, and not just an accurate simulation.

Capitalism II is obviously the sequel to Capitalism, which I''ve never played but I hear people have used it in business school. There''s also a game called the Corporate Machine [http://www.stardock.com/products/machine/], where you try to dominate the world market for a specific type of product. Neither of these allow for the personal satisfaction of firing a bad employee, which is what I''m interested in.

> Neither of these allow for the
> personal satisfaction of firing
> a bad employee, which is what I''m
> interested in.

Try "Startup2000" from Monte Cristo Business Simulations (distributed by Interplay). The user interface is ackward wrt Cap2, but you have total control of the Human Resources function. You may want to look into MarkStrat 3 by Strat*X. This is a business simulation game aimed at teaching the dynamics of marketing and is aimed at an B.Com/MBA audience.

If you''re looking for the math behind those simulations (especially for solo player AI) then grab a copy of "Marketing Models" - by Gary Lilien, Philip Kotler & Sridhar Moorthy, Prentice Hall, 1992 - at your University library.

-cb

Funny there was no mention of the Activision game Big Business Tycoon, here''s some places to check it out:

http://www.venturetycoon.net
http://www.activisionvalue.com

It was a good try at this type of sim game, including an almost ''The Sims'' approach to how your workers ''live'' in their workspace, and the ability to not only build your offices, but manage some decent aspects of marketing as well.

- Chris