For a while now I’ve wanted to design a ‘game’.  I won’t say it’s really a game.  I think I’d like to play around with it, but it seems almost like more of an economic simulation than a game in the strictest sense.  At least, in its current state it wouldn’t be a game.

The basic premise?  There is a town.  In that town, there are people who own different businesses.  These businesses will, given raw materials, produce goods to be sold as raw materials to each other, or as food/clothing/shelter to each other.  For example, someone owning a garden would sell vegetables which serve as food.  Having different types of food available would be key.  A certain happiness index would grow out of how well fed, clothed, and sheltered the people are (what good is money if it can’t buy you that?).   The individuals would make decisions to try and get more happiness.  In the meantime, the player is injected into this world in a separate town, trying to build a place that people would like to move to in order to profit from their activities by hiring them as employees, and then feeding/clothing/sheltering them.  A fourth segment would specialize in building materials.

Now, the problem I foresee having is that the food/clothes segment is basically self-sustaining.  Money will flow to them because they’re providing something that is needed each turn.  The housing segment will work just fine, and will pull along the fourth segment as people invest.  But, as soon as investment stops, the fourth segment won’t work anymore.  The fourth segment is needed in order to provide enough demand to make food/clothes work.

There’s also a set amount of money in this economy.  The only way money increases is by people moving into the towns.  I know I could just make some sort of ‘export’ economy and feed more money per person into the game, but I think that would defeat the purpose.  The purpose is to simulate a small scale global economy – where the resources you have are all you have.  In that case, I may need banks.

Now, a bank would feed money into the system – but where does that money come from?  This isn’t the sort of game that is going to just grab money from nowhere.  There must be a central control for all this.

Perhaps that’s where the player will come in.  Instead of trying to create an economy to get rich, perhaps an economy being controlled by the government-player (or at least enhanced) to make people happier instead would be the way to go.

It might just be a crazy idea, but if we had a government AI instead, which was trying to build things, employed people, and had a lot more resources than any of the individuals, and the ability to tax them…

Obviously, the individuals must still be free, and the government would need a mayor (it would be by town) and that would make the player be the mayor of the empty town.  The government could give loans to the banks to loan to others. 

So what types of public institutions would we want to see the government building?

Roads

Parks

Wells

Schools

Police Dept.

Fire Dept.

Town Hall

That would make the lumber/stone/building industry come alive.  All the extra employees for the departments would keep pushing the food market to expand.  There will be a certain economy of scale to hit, as well.

So, that money would be funneled out of and back into the economy.   With the additional people, expanding the food industry will make sense.  Expanding the clothes industry will make sense.  And then, because it’s expanding, too, the government will have to do less to keep it going, which will be just as well because they’ll be short of money from the initial expansion. 

It looks like the key to growth is not going to be found within the food/clothes/lumber/housing industry but within the government – the more government jobs, the more likely the other industries will expand.  As food and clothes expand, lumber/building/housing will become profitable.  At some point, hopefully, housing will be paid for by the individual instead of being government-owned.

Even with that, though, the money supply is still the money supply.  New people will move in with their money, but it will be limited.  I’m most interested to see which industries bring the money in, so that these people reinvest their money, buy their own house, expand their business and hire new employees. 

There are many things to think about when setting up the parameters.  How much wood can a woodchuck (or woodcutter) cut?  How much lumber can be made out of that wood, and how much lumber can a single employee convert?  Then, how much of that lumber is needed to build a house?  How much for a fire station?  How much can one builder do? 

The first thing to think about is theme.  It will bring out what I want out of the game – immersion into a world without contradictions.  Second, balance.  You don’t want to make an industry that cannot ever make a profit.  You don’t want to make an industry never fail to make a profit, or always have a higher profit than the others.  Return on investment, at least.  If it costs a lot, it should get a better profit. 

There is also a huge barrier to entry that I have yet to discuss.  Wheat fields will be cheap, but useless without a bakery to turn the wheat into bread.  So, no-one will start one without starting the other.  Of course, the proceeds need to be enormous in order for it to make sense for the first one, and I think that will work.  See, the food types don’t sell directly to a consumer – they get bought into a market and then sold out from there at a profit for whomever owns that market.  And the market wants to be fully stocked, so it will buy 3 of the least expensive type of food per person in the town, and then 2 of the next least expensive, and then 1 of the most expensive.  Same for clothes.  So the first bakery will probably make bread cheaper than the garden makes vegetables, and end up with a huge profit in the first round of its existence, while also stunting the competition.

My main hurdle right now is storing the information, and writing the functions that will create sales/purchase offers and process them, and then process the production, especially since there is the ‘building’ exception where it outputs different things and has different inputs.

Any input into this would be helpful.