SimCity X — Design Manifesto

Design Objectives

Make City-building Personal and Emotionally Involving – “Cities as Pets”

The next generation of SimCity needs to provide a more personal connection between the player and their city and its inhabitants. The player needs to stop thinking about their city as a “machine” or puzzle-box and instead begin to treat it as a living organism that needs care and attention. We need to avoid giving the player the feeling that they are fighting with their city to force it to be successful. We want the player to feel as if they are nurturing and caring for a pet or a child.

Part of that connection will come through humanization of key elements of gameplay:

• Leaders - Leaders are the equivalent of Sims with RPG-like traits (skills, capabilities, “equipment”, etc.). The player will be able to create and personalize their leader both in his “style” as well as appearance.
• Agent-based simulation – The intent is to pull the game away from a layered statistical urban simulation and simulate a large number of individual agents that the player can connect to in aggregate (e.g. “look at all the unhappy people over by the rundown slum apartments”). The city is a collection of identifiable individuals that are happy or unhappy, become criminals, etc.

Creative expression – “Build the city of your dreams”

The player needs to be able to express themselves creatively through their city. However, our goal is not to allow the creation of literal representations of real cities. Instead, we will focus on the creation of caricatures of prototypical cities with the expectation and intention that the versatility and interchangeability of the individual building blocks will allow players to combine them in non-prototypical ways.

Several sub-elements contribute to the overall creative capabilities of the product:

• City aspirations – In much the same manner that aspirations in Sims 2 allow the player to forcibly project a particular style onto their Sim, city aspirations will allow players to define the broad “template” style and tone of their city. The intent is that this will heighten and amplify the player’s perception of their city’s character as well as provide a meaningful canvas on which they can build interesting variations on those primary themes.
• Ideas – The idea discovery mechanism is based around a weighted progressive pattern-matching system that exposes new ideas based on the current gameplay context (buildings built, previous ideas researched, natural disasters, etc.). As such, the ideas that a player discovers will be thematically consistent with their prior actions and research choices. The hope is that the mechanism, by displaying only creatively relevant content, will allow for a large volume and variety of content without overwhelming the player with too many options.
• Breadth of content overlaid on simple Lego-like rule set – By providing a large quantity and variety of content that is grounded in the same simple core gameplay economy, the player should be able to mix and match a wide variety of elements to create nearly limitless permutations of mutually functional city elements.

Accessibility – “A SimCity that doesn’t make you feel stupid”

The SimCity franchise has gradually begun to cater progressively more and more to “hard core” simulation gamers, and it is believed that such direction prohibits market expansion. In contrast, the design of SimCity X is intended to be accessible and understandable by a more casual (and presumably broader) gaming audience. While there is no intention to create a “simple” game, the core mechanics and underlying systems shouldn’t require a PhD in statistics to comprehend them.

Several sub-elements of the design support this goal:

• A simple, “reverse-engineerable” core economy – The core underlying gameplay in SimCity X is based on a combination of simple, easily understandable rules. By creating all content (buildings, ideas, skills, etc.) from combinations of those simple rules, players can clearly understand the results of their actions, recognize problems more easily, and find new, creative solutions to issues in their cities.
• Emphasis on direct interaction and immediate feedback – The player needs to be able to trivially understand the cause and effect of everything they see and do in the game. It is essential that the player understand the reason for everything that happens in their city and that the solution to any problem is immediately evident. Moreover, the emphasis should be on direct player actions rather than indirect manipulation of the underlying simulation. Whenever possible, such direct actions should result in immediate player-visible reaction in the game world.
• No traditional “lose states” – Cities in SimCity X decay to “neutral”. It should be all but impossible for the player to “lose” in a traditional sense. For example, population will not decay to zero; funds will increase more slowly rather than continue to drop below zero, etc. A poorly constructed city ecosystem might, for example, degenerate into lawlessness and unhappiness, but its inhabitants would still be there, milling about unhappily and lawlessly. The player could then decide if they wanted to fix the “problem” or try to play the city the way it is (perhaps finding a way to harness the unhappiness)

Comparisons to Traditional SimCity Gameplay

While many of the issues in this section are related to the core product goals, they are singled out here and elaborated upon for comparison.

Immediate vs. Delayed Feedback

Due to the nature of the original SimCity design as well as the layered, often significantly time-sliced nature of the underlying simulation, feedback in SimCity has traditionally been excessively delayed. This can easily lead to confusion on the part of the player, as it is often difficult to understand if a particular action has had any effect. Moreover, the player will often mistakenly determine that an action has had no effect and perform additional “corrective actions”. The delayed feedback from previous actions may then be misconstrued as the causal result of subsequent actions, leading to even more frustration.

In SimCity X, our goal is to drive as much of the design towards direct player interaction and immediate, visible “cause and effect” feedback. The casual player should be able to trivially understand the connections between the results of their actions and the action that caused them.

Hierarchical and Dependency-based Hurdles vs. Mystery and Trial and Error

Gameplay in SimCity often involves a detailed understanding of the underlying simulation and careful analysis of simulation data (via graphs, tables, etc.) in order to determine the proper course of action. For a less-than-hardcore player, the experience often degenerates to guessing based on real-world experience, which often does not map to the underlying simulation, leads to unexpected results, and results in excessive trial and error.

In contrast, in The Sims, it is not the discovery of an individual solution that constitutes the challenge to the player. Instead, for any given situation or problem, the solution is almost always evident. My Sim needs to pee, so I need to buy them a toilet and direct them there (although they’ll even direct themselves once the toilet is purchased). My Sim is tired, so I need to buy him a bed. To buy a bed, I need more money, so I need to get a job. I need even more money, so I need a promotion. To get promoted, I need to build my skills. To build my skills, I need skill-building objects… and so on. It is not the individual remedy or solution that is a mystery. It is the actual “physical” achievement of those solutions cascading through layers of dependencies that present the challenge to the player.

The distinction between the player having to discover the action that will result in the desired reaction and the player knowing exactly what action to take but being limited by another gameplay element (which in turn they should also understand trivially how to overcome) is a critical one. The design for SimCity X is based firmly in the latter “Sims-like” model. In all cases, the moment-to-moment solution to a problem must be evident to the player whether by virtue of the underlying system being directly analogous to the real-world or through careful staged exposure and explanation.

Reverse engineer-able vs. Organic

Often in an effort to create emergent behavioral characteristics, complex layered simulations are created that make it difficult if not impossible for a player to understand the mechanisms at work. SimCity has traditionally been created from many carefully constructed and interwoven sub-simulations (traffic, pollution, property desirability, etc.) which when viewed in aggregate create a believable semblance of an urban city. However, due to the complex interrelationships between the various simulators, it is often all but impossible for the player to understand the cause and affect relationships between their actions and elements in the game world.

In SimCity X, the intent is to create a world based on simple, easily understandable rules and Lego-like mechanisms that can in turn be combined in a multitude of ways. The hope is that such elements can be leveraged in the greater design and by the player creatively to create greater variety without introducing unmanageable complexity.

In many ways this is similar to the design of traditional board games or even the collectible card game, Magic. Magic for example is grounded in a very basic set of easily digested rules… Five types of land, each generating a resource of a particular color. Cards require a certain amount of a resource to be played. Creatures have an attack strength, a defense strength and attributes (flying, trample, wall, etc.)… and so on. It is through the combination and permutation of those basic rules combined with careful introduction of exceptions to those established rules that a complex gameplay landscape is created. Each individual card, interaction, etc. however is easily understandable to the casual player.

Creative expression vs. Puzzle-solving

In many cases, frustration or dissatisfaction with a game is the result of a mismatch between the player’s expectation and the actual game experience. In the case of SimCity, many casual players approach the game as a creative sandbox. They try to create a particular type of city that they have in their head, only to find that the complexity of the simulation allows for only a limited variety of expression in order to create a functional city. In effect, there are only a handful of solutions to the urban simulation puzzle.

The goal in SimCity X is to create a combination of easily understandable gameplay dynamics that allow the player greater variety of creative expression. By providing a large number of interchangeable elements (buildings, agent types, etc.) built within the same simple orthogonal rule set, players should be able to find many more combinations of those elements that result in maintainable, functional cities. The challenge is not removed, but rather transmuted. The player still has the challenge of creating a functional ecosystem, but they do so with smaller, more readily interchangeable parts.

Build n’ Play vs. Plant n’ Grow

Traditional SimCity gameplay can be described as a “plant and grow” model. The player lays out their zones and their road, water, and power networks, and then they wait for their city to grow. They then periodically nourish and “trim” their city to maintain healthy growth or to limit or direct growth appropriately.

In contrast, SimCity X operates on a “build and play” model. Rather than the player laying a foundation and being forced to wait for growth, the player directly builds all structures in the game. The interaction is more similar to a train set or doll house in that the player creates their universe and then gets to experiment with it, poke at it, and story-tell. This is similar to the gameplay in The Sims in that all construction in the game is literal and player-directed, and the agents in the game then react to and are affected by the world that the player has constructed.

Gameplay Timeframes and Measures

For clarity, the following table suggests guidelines for overall frequency of particular game activities. These are obviously not exact, but should serve as the basis for the individual underlying designs.