To keep up my endless self-absorbed conversation about #GameDesign going, I want to talk about the lifestyles of the little people in your base in base-building games.
In the most famous of these games, like DF, the little people live their whole lives in your base. There's nowhere else for them to go. So their entire life is determined by what you provide.
This obviously includes things like clothes and food, but it also includes things like cultural norms, available hobbies, and contacts.
But that's not necessarily always the case. Plenty of base-building games feature characters that commute into your base - whether it's a school or a lab or a bar or whatever.
In these cases, the influence you have over their life is much lower. You can make their worklife great or miserable, but they still live in London and go home to their dog and buy clothes at The Gap - or whatever.
Now you might instinctively think that's a weaker option.
If the successes and failures of your base design are embodied by the lifestyles of your population, then obviously the more life they style in your base, the deeper, more diverse, and more clear that feedback can be, right?
Well, not necessarily. Because there are a lot of decisions you make in your base that have nothing to do with what you want your base to be about, and that influences lifestyles in ways you don't care for.
You are trapped into providing room and board and social opportunities for everyone in your base because they have no Other Place they go to.
Every base MUST feature room and board and social opportunities and-
And if your image of what your base should be involves those things, it works out. If you're imagining a frosty mountain cliff where fantasy dwarves dig for gold, sure. You style their taverns and their sleeping quarters and their temples and you like it.
But in many cases, that is simply a distraction, and most games of DF or Rimworld or any other similar game involve "stamping out" boilerplate room and board and just shrugging off the lifestyle implications because it's The Norm.
Now, that isn't to say the boilerplate doesn't help tell the story of your base, as your people go from sleeping outside to sleeping in a dorm to sleeping in individual tiny rooms to sleeping in a palatial estate-
But we can say that about any progression system.
The progression of establishing and refining room and board adds to the story of your base... but that's because EVERY progression adds to the story of your base. There's nothing particularly critical about room and board.
For example, if you're making a video game studio in any of the Video Game Dev Office Builder games, you go from one scrappy little dev working long hours and sleeping under the desk to a team of devs in slick offices going home on time, because it's a fantasy.
Would it make sense for you to build them bedrooms in your Video Game Dev Studio game?
No, of course not. The point is that when they fail to reach the faroff beds they actually have, it's a sign of crunch, a sign of overwork.
You're not running a hotel or an apartment building, beds aren't part of the story.
So they are abstracted out.
That's the point: what story do you want to tell? What mechanics can offer you progressions that tell that story?
If it's the story of the base you're building, then obviously the goal of your base matters.
If the goal is life support - like in DF - then things like room and board matter.
But if the goal is manufacturing cookies or giant war mecha, room and board are not going to add to that except in very specific situations.
Instead we would simply say "the employees go home at night".
But -
What about their lifestyles expressing our successes and failures? 80% of their life is spent away!
Well, here's the thing - there's no reason those exotic faraway lands of, uh, suburbia, can't simply reflect our base too.
This is especially true if our technologies and products are based on their obsessions.
They go home - and then they drink to forget the horror of the day. They go home - and they propose to their girlfriend because there was a big breakthrough at work.
The only issue with these is how to express them casually. We don't want to have them reported in a big list.
But these are responses to successes and failures of our base construction.
If things go well at the mech factory, how do we reward the player, how do we tell them things went well?
Number go up?
Sure. But also -
Show brief conversations between workers as they head home, celebrating success and mentioning they're going to propose to their GF.
And then - you can cut across to the carnage your mecha have wrought on the battlefield, the smouldering ruins, and give a cheery "VICTORY!" popup.
We can use ALL the offscreen story elements to support each other.
The lives of your crew are mostly spent away from base - but so are all your supports. Your contracts. Your politicians.
If we understand that, we can just do whatever we need to do with those lives to show you your successes, your failures, what that means to your people, what that means to the world.
Specifically because it's not limited to your base and the actual presence of people on it.
Craig P