Revisiting an old topic I've talked about but which is scattered across a bunch of posts...

I'm trying to settle how time works in my game. As it is an RPG-ish life sim mixed with a more freeform space adventure game I've got real time segments for adventuring and turn-based segments which are meant to span a human life. I need to determine how the life sim turns will be managed, though. Most life sims handle time in chunks (weeks or months or whatever) which give a limited number of turns until a life is over.

As a big goal is to change the game's universe, I want more of an epic sweep with a mix of long and short range periods.

Some possibilities:

1) Because time advancement can beget resource accumulation and abstract "skilling up", maybe it should be a reward. You balance your sim life, you advance in greater chunks. You achieve your life sim goals, you get to fast forward and compound your resources. You could use this to fast forward punishment (being marooned or in the brig) and take advantage of changes you predict in the universe (such as a technology advance or faction growing).

2) Time is arbitrarily mapped to actions which skip time forward instantly. Survey an alien dig? Y weeks. Build a colony? X months. An upside to this is that it *might* permit non-annoying timed missions, as you'd weigh things like travel time against solving a catastrophe or thwarting an invasion. Although more abstract than I intended, I could break each arbitrary turn into X phases or even real time segments in order to make it more interactive.

3) ???????

What do you think might balance this idea?

I was just thinking about this sort of system last night. Novels and films rarely give a blow by blow account of every minute from the start to the end of a story, yet up till now it would seem that this is exactly what most game genres have been doing - which leaves us designers desperately trying to find interesting ways of performing everyday tasks in game.

Initially I saw this system as some sort of advanced "wait" function that tends to crop up in games. Rather than just standing in the same spot for X hours, the players avatar could engage in tasks the user would otherwise not be bothered with (setting up a camp, cooking, sleeping, getting up the next morning and being ready to continue on a quest?). In this regard it would probably be best used for increasing immersion levels without things getting inane for the user.
There would be little need for balancing as the tasks being performed are pretty atomic and difficult to exploit. Performing one of these tasks (building a colony, survey an alien dig, build camp etc etc) would give the character a known stat effect.

Expanding on this idea - "What if I want to play my character as a child, then he settles down to a boring life working in a shop until suddenly 20 years later he is thrust back into the story". Now balancing becomes much more difficult, advancing time here may lead to an easy exploit to accumulate wealth and stats. Here is what I concluded:

1) Time advancement should be limited to actions with clear schedules. Working/living in a shop for instance. Your characters place in the game world is easily defined and deviations from this schedule would require the user to drop back into the world and give his character a push in a different direction.

2) There should be some concept of living costs. In a normal economy, you working in the same place and doing the same thing every day of your life will obviously allow you to accrue money, however, at the same time you are having to pay for accommodation, food etc which mediates this somewhat and might make balancing the time advancement easier.

3) Skills advancement should be linked to the schedulable roles and take a significant period of time to advance. Using the same example, If my character has worked in a shop for 20 years - he is going to be a damned good shop keeper, possibly picked up a bit of skill in trading and a friendly personality. But he should realistically have developed no other skills unless I as the user have dropped back in and played him in a different way.

The important thing with any manner of time advancement is that the game world can trigger events that force the user to come back into the game and make decisions/take actions. This might mean keeping track of moral decisions your character has made and getting player input when a decision has to be made for which your character has no precedent. This could possibly work better than fixed time segments or phases but I couldn't really make up my mind.

Conclusion: The main balancing element in a time advancement system would be the loss of low level control. Lack of micro management shouldn't disadvantage the player but should mean they have less control over the outcome of situations. It should also mean that the character in effect "looses motivation" in that the game will not grant them hugely increased stats during the advancement. The advancement should give either a fixed stat effect or assume that the reason that time is being advanced is that the player is happy with their character to meander down the path he/she is already on and will only get general boosts to stats based on what that path may be.

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Original post by daviscus I was just thinking about this sort of system last night.

Very glad to see someone else into this concept. (And nicely thought out first post, btw).

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Novels and films rarely give a blow by blow account of every minute from the start to the end of a story, yet up till now it would seem that this is exactly what most game genres have been doing - which leaves us designers desperately trying to find interesting ways of performing everyday tasks in game.

Yes this is frustrating if you want an epic arc. Technically I suppose you could arbitrarily advance time, as games like Fable or Fallout 3 do. But the progression in these games is usually so set in stone that I think it would be hard to use the same technique in a non-linear fashion.

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Initially I saw this system as some sort of advanced "wait" function that tends to crop up in games. Rather than just standing in the same spot for X hours, the players avatar could engage in tasks the user would otherwise not be bothered with (setting up a camp, cooking, sleeping, getting up the next morning and being ready to continue on a quest?).

I can see this. Simulationists like myself would enjoy this kind of thing provided that there was at a minimum a small number of trade offs, as opposed to the "waitplay" you get in many MMOs (clicking then watching a timer expire while you fish, for example) which has no real decision making.

One thing I like about life sims is that the stat-based management strategy is built right into the passage of time. Setting up camp, for example, might start off as a trade off between recovering HP from a battle versus fortifying defenses for the coming night. More detail (such as wounds that need specific times to tend or fortifications that take varying times to build) would add more strategic depth depending on the larger game. Add in time management (build before dark, get enough wood before dark, etc.) and it gets really interesting.

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There would be little need for balancing as the tasks being performed are pretty atomic and difficult to exploit. Performing one of these tasks (building a colony, survey an alien dig, build camp etc etc) would give the character a known stat effect.

Depending on how the parts of the game interlock and the ultimate game goal I think you'd still have to balance. Each action should have an effect on the larger game and not just be a dead end activity for its own sake. If you build tons of colonies, or really build up one, I think the player would be disappointed if that didn't have an effect. But that effect has to be weighed in the bigger picture.

Even the atomic life sim stuff has to be weighed so that you're not easily able to max everything out. Even without adventuring elements, the struggle/challenge should be in getting yourself into a certain state and having curve balls thrown at you while you're doing so. If you can just get into that perfect state then there's no real gameplay.

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1) Time advancement should be limited to actions with clear schedules. Working/living in a shop for instance. Your characters place in the game world is easily defined and deviations from this schedule would require the user to drop back into the world and give his character a push in a different direction. 2) There should be some concept of living costs. In a normal economy, you working in the same place and doing the same thing every day of your life will obviously allow you to accrue money, however, at the same time you are having to pay for accommodation, food etc which mediates this somewhat and might make balancing the time advancement easier.

How do you decide how long the possible time advancement should be? If you've got 80 years and live in a static, idyllic environment where little ever changes should you be able to jump 20 years (say when the aliens or evil wizards invade :P)?

I can see resource flow being a controlling factor, but if its positive then unless events happen on an arbitrary minimum schedule (every year, for example) there's no stopping point. The player's life could be 1 giant turn, which would be bad.

I'd thought of inserting skill decay and a stat like "thirst for adventure" or even "Boredom" as a way of shaking things up. A player may be motivated by skills decay if it's hard to advance, but this tends to be a pain. A Thirst/Boredom stat would be odd but might serve as a natural way to vary the pace.

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3) Skills advancement should be linked to the schedulable roles and take a significant period of time to advance. Using the same example, If my character has worked in a shop for 20 years - he is going to be a damned good shop keeper, possibly picked up a bit of skill in trading and a friendly personality. But he should realistically have developed no other skills unless I as the user have dropped back in and played him in a different way.

I agree with this.

Hmmm... if you can arbitrarily choose to advance time based on an activity maybe extrinsic threats could be a motivator. For the shopkeeper, for instance, there might be some notion of external challenges rising right along with the business. Maybe the customer's tastes automatically change over time, or competition arises, forcing them to stop and focus on acquiring new goods, new strategy or whatever else they can do to manage the threat.

With this idea you wouldn't need an intrinsic motivator, provided there was a good way of alerting the player to how things are changing.

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The important thing with any manner of time advancement is that the game world can trigger events that force the user to come back into the game and make decisions/take actions. This might mean keeping track of moral decisions your character has made and getting player input when a decision has to be made for which your character has no precedent. This could possibly work better than fixed time segments or phases but I couldn't really make up my mind.

I'm seeing an idea of stat improvements along automatically opposed trajectories. If you opt to be the honest business man, threats arise confronting your honesty. If you're shady, the law starts becoming a growing factor. Eventually these trajectories create a conflict you have to deal with.

One way to do this might be to always record stats for the real time interactions. If you're constantly cheating customers it builds up "Shady Merchant." Every time skip you do uses this stat to handle the results of business advancement until the rising law stat (hidden or not) creates a conflict event.

Alternately time advancement could be it's own screen with arbitrarily free options for day, week, year, etc. Each would list relevant stat trajectories, things like personal financial reserves, business progress, local crime level, etc. You could look at this and then decide how far you want to skip ahead. The gameplay here would be in analyzing the situation, trying to predict the future and choosing the best time option that benefits your character. If there's some fire to fight, you'll want to advance very little or play in real time. If everything's going great but you're building a starship you want to fly, maybe you'll want to jump forward by months.

This is a concept I’ve been struggling with as well. I had an idea a long time ago for adventurer game that gave the player unlimited time to spend in town but the player could only go on a limited number of adventures in their life time.

Currently I’ve been toying and playing with the idea of an active time system. The idea being that time only passes when the player performs specific actions. It can pass in different increments based on the action. Go to a meeting with a contact causes an hour to pass; turning a few commercially available pieces of equipment into a smart system enabled laser pistol takes 2 weeks.

But your comments about the events that happening during the passage of time have got me thinking. What about including a more advanced version of the sim3 working style concept. Basically in sims 3 when your sim is at work you can choose how you want them to be have at work options like, meet co works, socialize, suck up to boss, study, work hard, business as usual, take it easy. They affect performance, skill growth, stress, and relationships.

They same idea could work here with giving the player different options on how they spend there time during the task. For instance if decided to lock my character in the work shop barely sleeping and eating he might be able to finish the laser pistol in half the time but he’ll be sickly and out of it when it over. If tell him to keep op his morning 10 km run, and socializing it might take longer or the quality might be lower but other stats will increase or at least be maintained.

You’d probably want to interrupt the passage of time for long periods with opportunities. For instance if I’m surveying the alien dig the odd unexpected event might occur requiring me to make a decision. You might even have little plots associated with these events.
Like:
Day 3 - Sensor not started acted funny showing strange patterns and signals in space. How do you respond:
- ignore
- Send a team in the shuttle to investigate
- Have the engineer take a look at the equipment.
Day 14 – Scheduled supply shipment didn’t show up today
- Send out foraging parties
- Institute rationing
- Contact HQ
Day 17 – Chief Archaeologist Floyd went missing last night last seen at the dig site.

Etc..

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Very glad to see someone else into this concept. (And nicely thought out first post, btw).

Thanks! Long time lurker.

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Simulationists like myself would enjoy this kind of thing provided that there was at a minimum a small number of trade offs, as opposed to the "waitplay" you get in many MMOs (clicking then watching a timer expire while you fish, for example) which has no real decision making.

Perhaps it is the case that a "standard" player objects to the manner in which micromanagement decisions are presented to them. If instead of actions and choices - when say building a camp - being presented in a 1st person control mechanism (with either a 1st or 3rd person camera), gameplay took the form of a 3rd person control similar to The Sims or similar games - more complex decisions and interactions could be presented without them becoming overwhelming.

Say for instance we are setting up camp, the player is presented with the option to setup camp and the game enters an time advance mode where the local area is shown in 3rd person and time passes more quickly - the characters are automated performing standard tasks, but the player can drop in and give more specific instructions if they wish. Alternatively if they player doesn't wish to make any changes to the automated goal then they can just skip through the action.

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I'd thought of inserting skill decay and a stat like "thirst for adventure" or even "Boredom" as a way of shaking things up. A player may be motivated by skills decay if it's hard to advance, but this tends to be a pain. A Thirst/Boredom stat would be odd but might serve as a natural way to vary the pace.

I like the sound of this, but it has the possibility to punish players who just like doing the same set of actions all game - some players are happy with the mundane. (ANECDOTE WARNING: I should know, I once lent my younger sister my copy of Driver. Then proceeded to watch her drive around quite contently for 3 hours trying to obey all laws and not break the speed limit.)

Perhaps one way of balancing arbitrary time advancement or advancement that results in skill changes would be to give player avatars a fixed life time combined with skill changes during advancement being slower than if the player had played the same scenarios in real-time. This introduces the additional factor of time, where by advancing they are saving time in the skill advancement but also reducing the overall remaining playing time they have to experience other elements of the world.

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I'm seeing an idea of stat improvements along automatically opposed trajectories. If you opt to be the honest business man, threats arise confronting your honesty. If you're shady, the law starts becoming a growing factor.

Really like this idea, maybe a procedural narrator that tailors the story-lines and events to create a world where the player feels more central to what is going on. Though perhaps a topic for another thread...?

I like the idea of giving the player a screen with time advancement options and statistics. If you were careful not to overload the player with details it might allow the player to role-play a character with more detail, skipping through details until they got to the point where they were interested.

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Original post by TechnoGoth I had an idea a long time ago for adventurer game that gave the player unlimited time to spend in town but the player could only go on a limited number of adventures in their life time.

It seems important to have a good justification the player can follow. In your example I can see adventures being strategic opportunities, but other than "the game says so" I can't see them being limited unless they're far away and fairly involved. Expeditions to distant lands or other worlds fits this bill better than a choice of whether to spelunk in the sewers.

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What about including a more advanced version of the sim3 working style concept. Basically in sims 3 when your sim is at work you can choose how you want them to be have at work options like, meet co works, socialize, suck up to boss, study, work hard, business as usual, take it easy. They affect performance, skill growth, stress, and relationships.

This is definitely worth experimenting with. I can see it being a really good resource choice with task time being a part of it. With interrupts you may have a strategic form of gameplay where you try to stack up the important stuff as you hedge against an interrupt.

Resource juggling, be it in the form of intrinsic (morale, discipline, boredom) or extrinsic (time you get free from a searching enemy or money woes) factors might salt this nicely.

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They same idea could work here with giving the player different options on how they spend there time during the task. For instance if decided to lock my character in the work shop barely sleeping and eating he might be able to finish the laser pistol in half the time but he’ll be sickly and out of it when it over. If tell him to keep op his morning 10 km run, and socializing it might take longer or the quality might be lower but other stats will increase or at least be maintained.

Good example. One implementation actually might resemble a project planner, except that tasks would be graphical widgets you stack to fill a space representing time. It could be literal, say a high tech day minder, or more abstract (drawing in blocks or a tetris type thing).

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You’d probably want to interrupt the passage of time for long periods with opportunities.

Agreed. These things need to be upsets and challenges as well or the strategic aspect will become monotonous.

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Original post by daviscus Say for instance we are setting up camp, the player is presented with the option to setup camp and the game enters an time advance mode where the local area is shown in 3rd person and time passes more quickly - the characters are automated performing standard tasks, but the player can drop in and give more specific instructions if they wish. Alternatively if they player doesn't wish to make any changes to the automated goal then they can just skip through the action.

Hmmm... zooming out just may be a really good device. Imagine if the camp were a fort or even town that could be improved. A low level of zoom might increment time in hourly chunks, with people moving about and even fading in and out as they go to their tasks. Zoom further out and the people aren't visible but you see larger scale structures grow as days pass. Further and you're at the scale of weeks, seeing only things like new buildings or ships coming and going. Farther still and seasons pass.

Stopping at any point would allow you to dip back down into what might be a very changed world.

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Quote: I'd thought of inserting skill decay and a stat like "thirst for adventure" or even "Boredom" as a way of shaking things up. A player may be motivated by skills decay if it's hard to advance, but this tends to be a pain. A Thirst/Boredom stat would be odd but might serve as a natural way to vary the pace. I like the sound of this, but it has the possibility to punish players who just like doing the same set of actions all game - some players are happy with the mundane.

Good point. Actually natural boredom might be a factor to move players on. In open ended games when I get bored I go look for something to do, so it's not unreasonable that someone not experiencing any interesting events wouldn't do the same.

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Perhaps one way of balancing arbitrary time advancement or advancement that results in skill changes would be to give player avatars a fixed life time combined with skill changes during advancement being slower than if the player had played the same scenarios in real-time. This introduces the additional factor of time, where by advancing they are saving time in the skill advancement but also reducing the overall remaining playing time they have to experience other elements of the world.

I like this trade-off. I've been playing with limited lifespans for awhile but the slower growth when things are abstract might really work because it would be risk vs. reward. Ideally you'd risk less staying home than going out adventuring, although that concept only works if civilization is safe and the wilds hold great advancement opportunities.

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Really like this idea, maybe a procedural narrator that tailors the story-lines and events to create a world where the player feels more central to what is going on. Though perhaps a topic for another thread...?

That would be cool. Beyond me at the moment but still very cool.

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I like the idea of giving the player a screen with time advancement options and statistics. If you were careful not to overload the player with details it might allow the player to role-play a character with more detail, skipping through details until they got to the point where they were interested.

Visually I'm seeing some way to advance time with whatever the smallest increment (hour / day) being the default. If you want more, maybe you right click or click and hold to get a more detailed option window.

I lean strongly toward the idea still that there should be some resource that helps the player understand why time frames are constrained the way they are. Maybe some sort of tier system, where higher levels give you greater jump abilities. Have to see if this fits with the great ideas you guys have given me here.