Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

Special Design Considerations for CMSs

The following sections discuss some design considerations particular to construction and management simulations.

Simulating Individuals

Many CMSs simulate the behavior of a group of people (or, in the case of SimAnt, ants) within an environment that the player is managing. If it's a very large number of people, as in the original Sim City, behavior is usually modeled statistically and separate values are not kept for each person. However, you might want to simulate the actions of unique individuals that the player can see moving around and doing whatever it is that they do in your world. This will make your game a good deal more entertaining because there will be more for the player to see and because he ...