Design Principles
These articles describe broad principles upon which the design of the game will be based.
Tools: Integrated Plugin Manager
Submitted by John on Fri, 03/04/2011 - 19:09
From the beginning, one of the goals for Metropolis has been to create a game that is not only "friendly" to modders, but is actually built from the ground up with moddability and extensibility in mind. To that end, part of the goal for the Metropolis Project is to create not just the game, but a set of tools which make modding and configuration accessible to players. Naturally, being open source, the game will be open to modification by anyone, but in practice simply packaging the source code with the game limits modding to those with the technical expertise to not only code, but to make sense of what already exists. By providing utilities that open modding and asset creation to as many people as possible, we can encourage a robust ecosystem of player-created content like the one that exists for Sim City 4.
Game Versus Simulation
Submitted by John on Sun, 12/06/2009 - 23:45
This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com
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One of the crucial design challenges specific to a game like Sim City is where to draw the line between "game" and "simulation." This may seem a purely semantic question, but in fact it has a lot of bearing on what the final software will look like. A game and a simulation may overlap, but ultimately their purpose is different, and we need to decide whether our game is one or the other... or a mix of both.
Design Goals VI: Longevity
Submitted by John on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 11:20
This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com
Before finishing this series of posts, I want to talk briefly about the last design consideration that should be a guideline for our new game: longevity. In a way this is redundant to some of my other posts, but while previously I covered longevity with regards to game enjoyment, I'm referring here to longevity in the sense of eventual upgrades and expansions.
Design Goals V: Scalability and Mutability
Submitted by John on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 19:23
This article originally appeared on The Next Generation blog at Simtropolis.com
Another challenge for PC games is the wide variety of hardware they have to be able to run on. City simulation games tend to be especially demanding of system resources, with a lot of processor power needed for the simulation and a good GPU for 3D rendering. So, when creating a game, we want it to be scalable: able to take full advantage of advanced hardware while still scaling down gracefully to an older system.
