Simplify

The storyboard for what I’m trying to do here is quite simple.

Now game publisher have released several series of management games so called tycoon games. What I have always found lacking, was that the games where not deep enough in terms of company management. The games always focus on building a certain industry, selling or transporting the goods to the end customer. That’s where most tycoon games stop, not giving you the depth of full company management. Like human resources, setting salary’s, unions, advertising, organizing company departments to function like at optimal levels. Not to mention setting the goals for your R&D department, picking your CEO’s, CTO’s., CAO’s etc. for your company.

I would also like with the full depth of the managment part of the game, have access to several industries. Like production, retailing, transportation, construction, real estate, media, hotels etc., at your desposal to work with.

If you combine all of this aspects of the game, you get a quite a range of possibilities and long term playability. That is just the basic story board.

Ok lets start with the game design, first off all to outline the available layers of the game. Once I complete all the layers, hopefully they will stack up nicely, and provide me with a playable game.

Basic game layers:

1. Map layer
2. Resources layer
3. Objects layer ( buildings, roads, etc.)
4. Construction layer
5. Economic layer
6. AI behavior layer
7. Random events layer
8. Game development layer ( general developments as the game progresses – population rise, economic states etc.)
9. Object behavior layer
10. Data layer ( file system)

Now I might add some or drop some layers from the picture as the development process goes on, but this should be the basic layers that the game should consist of.

I am quite of a casual gamer, you know that type that always complains and always wants more and more of features etc. I understand game developers have a hard time of developing games and adjusting them to please as much gamers as possible. Since I am a software developer my self, and I always have to bend over for my clients, whose count fortunately is not in the millions rather just a dozen of those super smart “managers”, you could say that i have it easier then the game developers.

I have often thought about writing my own game, to correct all that stuff that i found lacking in the games i played. I found often that the games had a good start, but at a certain point it seams like the development stopped, and the features that could have been implemented have not been.

Until now I did not think that one man, without no previous knowledge about game development, directx, graphics and etc. could do, I am a back end, enterprise solution developer, so drawing is not something that I am good at. But now after a saw a few demonstrations by Microsoft, on WinDays, TechEd and community conferences XNA Studio could solve a lot of my problems.

So off to install XNA. First to download the installer, some 80 MB download free from microsoft, and lets try it. But then i find out, I dont have a habit of reading those readmes and so on, that you need Visual Studio Express C# SP1 installed. So I figure this has to be an install bug, since I have Visual Studio Team System SP1 installed on my laptop. But <span style=”font-weight: bold;”>no </span>Microsoft decided that for now it would only support the Express version of Visual Studio for use with XNA Studio. So i download the C# Express version, and install it the same with SP1. Next i find out that the Express version does not support my favorite add in ReShaper, which i find as an essential tool for any serious development. But luckily Microsoft is considering running XNA Studio on other version of VS in the future.

So to recap, to start with XNA you need:
1. Visual Studio Express C# (no exception, there is no hack to run XNA on other versions of VS)
2. Visual Studio Express SP1
3. XNA Studio 1.0 refresh

The OS on my laptop is Vista, and XNA Game Studio does not by its spec support Vista, but fearless as I am, I did it anyway, so far I did not have any problems.

Loaded the SpaceWar example and started to try to figure it out keep you posted