how to build this genre of game with CI

[eluser]Michael Nielsen[/eluser]
I'm a massive fan of Virtonomics.com. It's developed in Russia i think and has a lot of flaws + they're now charging so I'm thinking of creating my own.

It's a business simulator and I can probably figure most of it out however I'm not sure how to create the update process; where the entire days actions are processed, e.g goods sold, buildings completed and stocks sold from factories.

The think i'm most unsure of is the algorithm which how many customers visit a store and the amount of goods sold, also the determining of prices by demand and quality ect.

any information is welcome. probably best if u create a account so you can get a better understanding of what I'm trying to achieve.

Thanks.

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
For the repeated updates, this is best handled with a cron job. Cron is a unix utility that allows you to run a given script on any time-internal you like, such as hourly, daily, every few seconds, etc.

For the economics, the key is things need to seem to work well - they needn't be based in reality or correct mathematical economic modeling. The key is appearances - it just has to behave reasonably. As you go you will generally find lots of tricks and shortcuts, so it can easily appear more deep and complex than it really needs to be.

You will find you will simply want to make it so you can easily tweak the time between updates and allow yourself to manually call an update for testing purposes. Thus you can easily click through weeks of natural development and see how you like the results. You will want to also make it easy to make adjustments to key variables so you test, test, test.

This I learned from creating an extensive gameplay improvement mod for Civilization 3. There is no amount of theory or forethought that will change the immediate experience of gameplay and how it works. Tweak, tweak, tweak. Being able to save the gamestate and roll back to previous ones is highly recommended as well so you can aid yourself in the adjustments of various stages of the game without having to clear everything and start over.

You will also want to keep in mind that you will want to create multiple "parallel universes" so you can test and compare multiple concepts side by side. Later this would be useful so you could also have a "fast" game and a more casual game, if you should ever want such options.

[eluser]Michael Nielsen[/eluser]
I don't suppose you have any examples i could take a look at for this genre of game or any resources?

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
[quote author="Michael Nielsen" date="1256465385"]I don't suppose you have any examples i could take a look at for this genre of game or any resources?[/quote]

None I can think of, probably just need to go a Googlin'.

All I know I got from an unhealthy degree of near-obsessive fascination with this genre of games for the last twenty years, a power-gamer attitude towards most games (I once bought the strategy guide for Asheron's Call and read up on D&D rules so I could create a solid theoretical model for how Armor Class worked in that game...man, I was such a nerd as a teenager...trying to pretend I'm not still...), and wanting to be an Economist was one of the reasons I went to college. Of course I left because I found out I did not, in fact, want to be in academia for most of my life Creating a mod for a game was also a great way to ease into figuring out how games work behind the scenes, and the Civilization series is pretty friendly that way.

And for games, it can be hard to remember but they are just like any other business application. The difference is that they are for fun, not for real-world accuracy, and graphical presentation is a big deal if you want it to be popular.

I heard a great quote once, which you should keep in mind if you want to make a game: "Making a game is as to playing a game as baking a cake is to eating cake." If you don't like programming in general, you won't likely enjoy programming a game.

[eluser]Michael Nielsen[/eluser]
[quote author="BrianDHall" date="1256468144"][quote author="Michael Nielsen" date="1256465385"]I don't suppose you have any examples i could take a look at for this genre of game or any resources?[/quote]

None I can think of, probably just need to go a Googlin'.

All I know I got from an unhealthy degree of near-obsessive fascination with this genre of games for the last twenty years, a power-gamer attitude towards most games (I once bought the strategy guide for Asheron's Call and read up on D&D rules so I could create a solid theoretical model for how Armor Class worked in that game...man, I was such a nerd as a teenager...trying to pretend I'm not still...), and wanting to be an Economist was one of the reasons I went to college. Of course I left because I found out I did not, in fact, want to be in academia for most of my life Creating a mod for a game was also a great way to ease into figuring out how games work behind the scenes, and the Civilization series is pretty friendly that way.

And for games, it can be hard to remember but they are just like any other business application. The difference is that they are for fun, not for real-world accuracy, and graphical presentation is a big deal if you want it to be popular.

I heard a great quote once, which you should keep in mind if you want to make a game: "Making a game is as to playing a game as baking a cake is to eating cake." If you don't like programming in general, you won't likely enjoy programming a game.[/quote]

Well thats good because I love business (im 18 and run my own, super fun love it every day) and I love digging into programming, particularly working on someone else's project optimizing them and getting the most out of them ect.

Thanks for the help.