This is a Unity project that I’ve been working on for around a year. It’s been slow going but fun to make, and I’ve been using it to learn more about C# coding.
Game summary
A business management sim based around business ethics. For this project I’m going to make one level focused on a retail business.
Inspiration
I’m a fan of management sims so this idea takes inspiration from some of my favourites like Theme Hospital and Sims 2 Open for Business, as well as the events that come up in Frost Punk.
I find business ethics really interesting as a subject so I thought it would be cool to explore it in a game and add a unique spin on a business management sim.
Goal of this level
I want the player to have a few goals they need to meet to win the level like making X amount of profit and training a member of staff to a manager level so you’d be free to move on to the next stage of the business, if the game were to continue beyond that point.
The ethics would come from the player choices on where you decide to spend money, policies that effect different aspects of your business and event prompts where you need to make decisions.
Right now, I feel like the ethics choices would affect the route the story takes across the levels rather then causing you to succeed or fail, so the player can run the business the way they want and it makes it a bit truer to life.
Progress so far
Up until now I’ve been focusing on the coding side to get the building blocks in place before I start to make it feel more like a game.
At the moment it’s a lot of cylinders moving around a plane!
I think I have most of the things I want in to start with, like:
- Customer and employee behaviour
- Ability to place objects in the world and hire staff
- Tracking the business and ethics stats, which are accessible in menus
- Menu to change policies that effect the business
- Time controls and date/time system. I found some info on making an in-game date/time system in the Unity forums as well as on Youtube, and I made some changes so I could more easily use this data in other functions.
- Camera controls. I followed this great tutorial and I made some minor changes so I could still move the camera when time was paused in-game.
Next steps
The next two things I want to add are:
- A skill and training system for employees, so they get quicker at doing things with the more experience they gain and it gives the option to train them to new positions like manager.
- An event system where events pop up that you need to make decisions on. These could be both story based and random events, and the choices will be saved so that can lead to new related events happening later.
After that I’m going to work more on the design and balancing it all, and potentially add some art.
I’ll update here with how I get on!