Good morning Game Design! I had posted this thread on it’s own but realized it could be seen as self-advert/spam, I apologize for that and posting here instead.
City-Building game is a genre that doesn’t get much love these days. I’ve seen a few projects on the forums here but they never seem to get done. If you’re interested I’d like to brainstorm on the genre specifically in my current project. “Manor Lord” (working title).
I have to be honest here, I picked up Unity in May last year. I had never done any game design work before I just had a little experience in programming. I made a simple space invader clone following tutorials and then started working on a tower defense game. I wasn’t into it so I abandoned the project. I always loved city-building games so I started slowly working on one.
One thing I overlooked was the whole Game Design thing. I just thought games were made by saying I want to make a game where the player builds a city and everything would work from there. It’s been almost a year and a half (part time) now that I’ve been working on the project now that most of the systems are implemented and working I find myself realizing that you can’t build a game on mechanics alone. So I’m trying to keep development in a straight path now by actually trying my hands at game design.
Ok, What this thread is about, I’d like to try an explain what the game is about, what my expectations are, a few ideas I have for the future. I’d like to discuss the general design of a city building game and see if the way I’m going about mine has potential for interest.
And what this thread isn’t about, I know this is a very bad idea for a first project, I bit more than I can chew etc, etc. I get it. Keep in mind I do not intend to make a living out of this game I’m mainly building it for myself so even if it takes another 5 years to complete I don’t mind. So if you want to read about my game go on, if not see the end of this post.
What is it?
At its core, the game is a sandbox city management game where you build structures and take care of your population. It’s set in a fictive country in the early middle ages. It’s heavily inspired by the British Middle Ages, right before the first Viking invasions. I wanted to take a look at a less popular side of the middle ages, where the world was split up into thousands of little hold each governed by someone. There was a king but it didn’t really mean much unless he had the support of his lords. The game will explore the everyday activities and struggle of managing a village as well as the emergence of Market Towns. You play as a newly appointed Manor Lord, given a new piece of land after showing your talents in battle.
Your goal is to take that piece of land and turn it into a thriving Manor or Market town. (note I’m not sure about including combat in the game, see further down)
What makes it special?
If you ever played Crusader Kings 2 you should feel right at home with the AI system. People have 5 main attributes:
- Diplomacy: Defines the ability to deal with other people, gives satisfaction bonuses. As the Manor Lord it directly influences the way people will react to your decisions.
- Constitution: Defines the physical side of a character. It directly ties in with their strength, general health, and how much they can produce when working at a constitution based work place (i.e wood cutter)
- Craftsmanship: Defines someone’s artistic or engineering ability, it defines how much people can produce when working at a craftsmanship based work place (i.e Blacksmith) and defines how much Renown your city gains.
- Stewardship: Defines someone’s ability to handle resources. It directly affects the prices when someone buys or sell and will also influence the amount of money you make from taxes and trade.
- Ruse: Defines someone’s ability to deal with intrigue and crime, there are no work places using this attribute but it will help people commit, notice and get away with crime. It can be used to check against special events.
On top of that people have traits that affects these stats. Traits can be gained or lost throughout a person’s life. Traits are more than just modifiers, they will also trigger unique events and responses to other events. Note here Events refer to an actual Event Quest, a window opens up giving you a description of what’s happening and what choices can be taken.
Every character will also have these stats:
- Gold : actual money, used to pay taxes, employees if you own a business, improve your buildings and some events require gold to complete
- Renown: akin to CK2’s prestige. Renown can be earned by owning specific buildings, as a reward for some events and a few traits. Renown is required for certain actions such as increasing your city’s power level.
- Piety: I added this mainly because I thought I had to. This part has not been fleshed out yet but I thought making a game set in the middle ages without religion doesn’t really make sense, it’s still an if
How the game plays:
The game evolves in real-time, but takes some mechanics from turned based games. Each year is broken down in 4 seasons (3 months each). Each season lasts 10 minutes (you can scale time x2, x5 or x10). At the beginning of a season you can collect taxes, pay your workers, gain renown, piety. Pay maintenance on buildings you own, etc.
You never have direct control of the villagers, not even yourself. Everyone is autonomous and will deal with their surroundings according to their social ranks. When you build a new work place you can assign someone to work there in exchange for a salary (which can come back in your pockets as taxes or by exercising your judicial rights). The core of the game is managing villager’s satisfaction rating and resources productions and consumption.
People in the game age in real time, now the only way to get more villagers is for your people to have kids, and waiting for those kids to grow up. Which makes it very long, say someone can become a worker at 10 years old, you need to wait 6 hours (if you play at 1x speed) for your newborns to become workers. I might have to rely on immigration to increase your population.
You’ll get some events every once in a while that will help define your character and his relationship with other characters.
Each building has the following:
- Hide Value, this is the gold value of this property, this is what taxes are based on (10% of hide, 30% of hide, etc)
- Desirability (affects health of nearby residents and possible crimes)
- Fire Risk
- Building Health and repair costs (every season)
- Modifiers: Water Access, on guard patrol route, mason nearby, fire station nearby (in order to be -upgraded some of those modifiers are required)
So this is pretty much what I have so far, I think it’s a solid base but there are somethings I need to iron out. For example what’s the end game?
I thought about possible victory conditions but I want to keep the sandbox feel. For example here are the three possible victories I thought about:
- Gain enough support from the villagers and surrounding cities to gain the title of Duke.
- Trade 100 000 worth of resources in a single year to be granted a Market Town liscence.
- Build a great cathedral and become a pilgrimage site
Being a sandbox game I also think you should be able to set your own goals, or set yourself a certain Renown you want to attain.
I’m thinking about combat, because no matter what angle you look at the middle ages, war was a part of daily life. I think that this is something the player could select at the beginning of the game so deciding where to setup your fief you might decide to go into a province that’s very civilized so that war chance is fairly low. Or go to a more remote place where there are barbarians or where there’s a lot of tension between neighboring villages so that combat is more likely to happen.
But I can’t think of a way to properly design combat so it doesn’t take too much away from the city building vibe. I though about having turned based battles, but the game is set in a “realistic” setting (no magic, no fantastic creatures) so turn based combat of melee units with fairly low hp would be boring.
I also thought about a real time combat like in stronghold, but contrary to stronghold people do not spawn every 30 seconds to replace your dead villagers. Say Vikings land on your shores and wipe out 80% of your male adults, and kidnaps 50% of your female adults, it’s kind of a game breaker.
If you’ve made it this far I’m really grateful for your time.
Here are the actual questions:
Here’s the kind of discussion I’m looking to spark:
- After reading the above, do you think a game like this has potential?
- Do you think it’s a good idea to mix City-building with other genres? RPG and RTS or turned-based tactical strategy?
- What do you think is the main motivator for players who like city-building games?
- Do you like the fact that people are well defined in this kind of game? Name, family, traits, ambitions, etc. Or does it detract from the large scope that a city-builder usually offers?
- If you think combat should be in the game, would you favor real time or turned based combat?
Thank you very much for your input, I’m looking forward to reading your ideas.
Hugo
Edit: Screenshots available upon request
