One of the crucial design challenges specific to a game like Sim City is where to draw the line between "game" and "simulation." This may seem a purely semantic question, but in fact it has a lot of bearing on what the final software will look like. A game and a simulation may overlap, but ultimately their purpose is different, and we need to decide whether our game is one or the other... or a mix of both.
Before finishing this series of posts, I want to talk briefly about the last design consideration that should be a guideline for our new game: longevity. In a way this is redundant to some of my other posts, but while previously I covered longevity with regards to game enjoyment, I'm referring here to longevity in the sense of eventual upgrades and expansions.
Another challenge for PC games is the wide variety of hardware they have to be able to run on. City simulation games tend to be especially demanding of system resources, with a lot of processor power needed for the simulation and a good GPU for 3D rendering. So, when creating a game, we want it to be scalable: able to take full advantage of advanced hardware while still scaling down gracefully to an older system.
One of Sim City 4's greatest strengths as been its capacity for being modded. The chance to create our own content, to see it in game, and to contribute to the wider community has doubtless extended the title's life by many years. Indeed, the huge universe of custom content available for Sim City 4 has become a substantial asset of the game, which any competitor has to take into account. But what is an asset in some ways is a liability in others.
One of the challenges of making any game is tuning the difficulty. Ideally, a game should be intuitive enough for someone who has never played it (or any game) to pick it up and be able to get started, while on the other hand having enough depth to keep a player interested for the long term. Sim City 4 hit this balance pretty well, although perhaps leaning more towards the steep learning curve side of the equation than otherwise. The question with our new game is, how can we deepen the SC4 experience while still retaining, or improving upon, SC4's accessibility?
Following on from the previous post, I'd like to begin introducing some more specific goals for the game's design. I want to look at these goals from a holistic rather than a technical point of view; Rather than trying to decide on an implementation at this point, I think we need to set some guidelines for what the game should be, or what qualities it will have. As I said before, I don't think any of these are too controversial; But it's important to make clear what the highest priorities are when the game is designed, and let the rest of the decisions follow from those.
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.
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