So I have an idea to make a film industry business simulation-esque game for some of my friends.
Backstory:
Me and my friends last year made fictional directors and actors, made short films with only ourselves in them, and then created an Oscars called the ‘Tallens’ which we held a few months back with plastic trophies from Amazon. I’m currently away from my home for the summer and want to make the game as a gift for my friends.
I want the game to take a considerable amount of inspiration from Lionheads’s The Movies. I don’t want there to be any animations/graphics, just text and pictures. Since I don’t know how to code I was wondering what I’m looking at difficulty wise.
Laying out the game, it will start with choosing a movie studio and then managing its clients (directors and actors). Instead of having the game move day to day I thought it would be easier to have a recap each week/two weeks/month where on one side of the screen there is an “objectives” table and then on the other side is a “news from the past week/two weeks/month table”. An example of an objective would be to market your clients movies. By clicking on the objective you’d be brought to a page where your studio’s movies are listed with their rating/reviews from fictional reviewers. Higher prestige studios start out with more points to put towards marketing and you can gain points by winning awards, getting good reviews, headlining festivals, etc. Marketing bad movies would negatively affect the studio, while over- marketing movies that have yet to be rated and turn out to be reviewed bad will greatly hurt the movies chances to make money, etc. (this was heavily referenced from The Movies)
A other possible objective would be having a client be interviewed and you would choose answers for 2-3 questions from 3-4 preset choices. Your answers will affect how many people come to the movie (if the actor/director says some problematic less people will come) and also the client saying good things will help their personal status along with gaining ‘points’ for the studio.
Another idea I had in these beginning stages of thought is each two years the actors/directors get older. They would go from Newcomer to Young to Middle Aged to Old to Retired. Also, I’m not sure how to program/code having each director choose from a pool of 3-4 movies each 1-2 years based off an algorithm. I thought maybe to have a genre pool where genres with percentages are matched up with filming styles. Example: one director has a personality-specific genre pool of Drama (30% chance of making the film this genre), Action (20%), Adventure (25%), Western (15%), and Crime (15%) (the sixth genre would be Epic (passion project) which isn’t a percentage until they are Middle Aged and grows considerably as they turn Old) and its matched up with filming styles such as Animation, Documentary, etc. How would I make it so that the game randomly selects a genre/filming style duo for the director to make?
I want it to be realistic where certain directors have personalities that cause them to wait years to make movies while other directors churn out movies quickly and the game reflects that by having those directors have a very high percent chance of making a movie each year.
At this point, I feel overwhelmed and thought that without graphics or animation that the game being heavily text based would be fairly easy to create but am now having second thoughts. What do you think I should do?
To make things simple you'll want to build your foundation within spreadsheets, so make sure you're able to work with CSV files. You can do it in all the above languages.
