Currently I'm working a strategy game where you run an evil company. The player as access reasearch, espionage, commando teams, as well construction, manufacturing and sales. Think of it as beining charge of the Bio Developmant division of umbrella corp for the Reseident evil games. I'm curious as to how much accounting information that players want to deal with. I have divided the information into several layers for ease of explaining, each layer includes all the previous layers. Layer 0 The simplest layer, player has access to the following three pieces of information. Gross Income Expenses ---------- Net Income As well as that infomation for the previous quarter and the previous year. Layer 1 A more detailed breakdown of layer 0 the player has access to following subheadings. Gross Income

• Sales
• Contracts
• Other Services

Expenses

• Personal
• Operating Costs
• Purchases
• Maintences
• Other Expenses

Layer 2 Layer two is my personal prefrence it includes a furthur breakdown of the subheadings into catagories. Sales by product Contracts by company Personal, Operating Costs, Purchases, Maintences by department Layer 3 This layer breaks everything down further this time by facility. So what amount of accounting information due people want? Is there something more they would like to see? Optional extras that would be helpful to include? Such as graphs, or the ability to access any layer at will? The latter I would prefer not to do since its seems like a wasted extra effort. ----------------------------------------------------- "Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own." Current Design project: Ambitions Slave [edited by - TechnoGoth on May 15, 2004 3:17:51 PM] [edited by - TechnoGoth on May 15, 2004 5:58:06 PM]

give them all the information you can, in fine detail, but allow them to hire "accountants" (or somesuch) to handle the day-to-day stuff. the accountants can bring it to the player''s attention if something is wrong.

The acutal accounting work is done by an account, this is just the information to be displayed to the player. May main question is about information detail, which layer would people prefer to operate under? Most games I''ve seen use layer 0, or layer 1. Is that enough or do people want more?


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"Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own."
Current Design project: Ambitions Slave

hmmm... how much detail is necessary to play the game? i mean, does it have any impact whether the player knows the extreme details? can they alter them through normal gameplay (i.e. is there some way the player can affect the sales contracts for a certain product at a certain facility)? or is it just a display of internal calculations, for kicks/realism?

you could also let them drill down, so they get a general report, but can expand items to get more detail (like the windows file explorer tree thing).

I see it as a simple rule - I don''t want information on anything I can''t influence independently. For example, I don''t care about the breakdown into Purchases and Maintenance unless I am able to influence them using different mechanisms. If they''re just arbitrary subdivisions of a single variable that I can influence, then this information becomes worthless.

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Well, The accounting infromation would allow to alter anything Its merely a breakdown of you income and expenses. But this is where you would goto see where your income is coming from or being spent.

For instance personal show how much you are spending on personal, purchases how much spent on purchases and so on. In this way you could see that while you are running in the red this month it is because you spent 5 million installing a nuclear power generator in your facility. Or it could reveal that the reason your running in the red is because you are spending twice as much on slaries as you are bringing in in sales.

In the case of the latter it would tell the player that it might be a good idea to fire some personal and streamline their company.



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"Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own."
Current Design project: Ambitions Slave