Design Goals: Mission Statement

Up to now I've been intentionally vague on the subject of what exactly "the next generation game" constitutes.  While I think there's a certain level of consensus in the community on the subject, I've specifically avoided trying to define it.  There are two reasons: 

First, I believe that a game that is truly community-centered needs to be shaped by the community, through an organized process of community input, and not by my personal ideas about what would be really cool for a new game.

The second is that an overabundance of details can distract from the impetus to actually get anything done.  It's very easy with these kinds of projects to go crazy with all kinds of neat suggestions for features; the problem is that the discussion then tends to devolve into debates on whether or not this or that feature is desirable;  And these tend to devolve further into wrangling about the technical details of how to implement the feature.  In the meantime, the much more pertinent question of how to organize a practical effort is neglected.

As a result, these projects can suffer from over-planning;  While more planning is usually a good thing, mandating too many details from the beginning can hinder flexibility when it comes to executing the plan, and can cause all progress to stop when the plan proves impractical and has to go back to the drawing board.

Of course, details need to be decided upon at some point;  But the key to doing so effectively is timing.  There has to be a trade-off between the what of the project and the how.  Both goal and process need to start from the very basics, and not be expanded upon until more detail is needed by the other.  In other words, don't worry about details until they are relevant.

Now, I don't mean to say that one should do no advance planning;  Quite the opposite.  But when doing that planning, it's important to start with the general and move into the specific;  And to plan not what you will do, but what you want to accomplish, keeping the actual implementation as flexible as possible.

So with all that said, I want to lay down a very succint mission statement for this project.  Stripping out any other considerations, what does this project hope to accomplish?  The essential answer is, of course, to create a city simulator game.  Or, to make a slightly more specific statement that I think no one would argue with:

The goal is to create the best city simulator game since Sim City 4.

With that as our base, we can start to refine it;  What does "best" mean, exactly?  I plan on addressing some more specific, (but still very general) goals for the project in an upcoming series of posts.  Naturally, as I said above, anything more specific than the mission statment above is subject to alteration by the community; But as a rule of thumb I will try to limit myself to talking about goals that I believe have the support of most community members.