Hello! Since my last post on my Business Ethics Management Simulator project (I need to think of a catchier title), I’ve finished the next steps I had planned and wanted to give an update on how that went.
1. The Employee Training System
This system will enable the player to train up an employee with a particular skill or for a promotion. For the time being I just have “management” training in mind as a way to promote an employee to be a manager, which is an end of level goal.
From the code side, this worked in a similar way to the research system I’d already implemented. There is a “Manager Training” Button on the employee UI (all very placeholder, just to get it working) which will activate the training when the player has enough money.
During the training, the employee gameobject is disabled and not available to the player for tasks. A progress bar shows the progress of the training in the menu and once its complete, the employee gameobject is enabled again.
I’ll be aiming to make the training cost expensive and potentially something the player needs to unlock as the player will work up to it.
2. The Employee Skill System
From this, employees can gain experience in certain tasks anytime they do them. When they have enough experience they’ll go up a skill level and gain different benefits.
I used an exponential scale for the amount of experience each skill level needs, going up to a maximum of 10. At the moment they’d achieve the first three levels fairly quickly and then it would take more time from there, but it will need more iteration to see if this feels right.
For now, the benefits I’ve added are things like increasing the happiness level and reducing the time it takes to perform the task. I’m still thinking on where to use the employee happiness level, but as part of this skill system I linked it to the gameobject’s speed; so the employee gameobject moves faster or slower depending on its happiness level. I liked the idea as a way to show the employee’s motivation and to link it more to gameplay, but I’ll keep testing it out to see if it makes sense.
3. The Event System
This was the system I was most looking forward to having in the game but also dreading how to go about doing it. I think leaving it to last was a good idea as I’d learnt a lot from the earlier systems that I could apply.
The aim was to have pop-up in game events where the player would need to make a choice that could have an impact on their moral stats as well as affect future events in the game.
There will be events that pop up as part of the main story and when the player achieves something, and there will also be random events which are probability weighted. I love morality systems in games where it feels like your actions impact the game and story, as well as random story events in games like Stellaris which make each playthrough feel unique; so I wanted to give them a try in this project.
I’ll do a separate post on how I approached it in more detail but after some trial and error I’m happy with how it’s working!
4. Art and Animation
I added some art and animation to make it a bit clearer what everything was! This Unity Asset Store pack was recommended by a colleague and it was great for what I needed.
I’ve not added a lot of assets into Unity before and might not have done it the best way as I managed to break some of the scripts. It took me a while to get everything working again but I think it was good to add some art now rather than later when more could have broken and so it will be easier for people to eventually test out.
5. Design
As so much of the game will be based on spending and making money, I wanted to start by getting all the sources of cost and income in one place so I could balance them.
I’ve looked at a couple of helpful resources on balancing in-game economies but I’ll keep looking for more as its such a big part of the game:
- An article from Paul Benson on some tips when making economies: https://medium.com/@pbensonconsulting/designing-game-economies-d915ccbf864d
- Game Maker’s Toolkit video on the design for the Witcher 3’s economy: https://youtu.be/Zrf1cou_yVo
In true production fashion, I’ve started a spreadsheet to work all this out but it’s already been helpful for thinking about how to use some of the systems I’ve made and where I might need to change them.
One Idea I really liked that will need a bit of a change to the research system, was to start the game off with next to no information on the customers, like what they’re interested in, their price range, average purchase amount etc. This way you would need to use the market research system to learn more about them and adjust your stock and pricing accordingly. It would be like a real-world business in that you don’t have all that information up front and would mean players can’t min/max their business right away.
Now that I’ve got through these goals I want to work on these next:
Next Steps:
- Finish the first balancing pass for the in-game economy
- Make changes to the systems needed from working on the design
- Write some in-game events for the event system
- Improve the UI