The game puts the player in the position of managing at least one shop. Its played in an online server by a large number of players and/or AIs. The aim of the game is to make as much money as possible by building an empire of shops and/or become the most popular entrapaneur across all game servers.
Women in offices sat in front of computers with lunch-time half hours to waste. The game is intended to only require 30 minutes to an hour every couple of days to maintain he status of your shops for casual players. More adavance/experienced players may need to spend more time to manage a chain of shops spreading cities/servers.
The game must be ultra-accesible. Initially it is envisioned as an applet for power in the client while maintaining ease of access. However, it may be easier to access provided as a web based interface through JSP. A single executable installer may be possible but since the target audience is users at work this may not be suitable (coporate installation restrictions). All server communication must be through http ports to allow ease of corporate firewall traversal.
The game is presented as statistics and options only. The city itself should be presented in a sim-city style isometric layout. Any personal interaction, player-to-player, employees, city officials should be accomapanied with avatar images for the player and the other party in the conversation. Imagine lots of rounded cartoony style options screens to tweak the various options for the player's businesses.
The player starts out in Newbie-Town where they are given a fixed amount of money. This allows them to rent a plot of land and a building in which to house their shop/service. The player chooses one of the shops/services available to newbie users and proceeds to setup the statistics of the shops as described below.
The game is played within a simulated city. They may be multiple cities hosted seperately to ensure availabilty of game play and the concept of shop chains spanning across multiple cities. Players will be able to use the money/resources in all cities at any time.
Cities will be simulated as 100s maybe 1000s of individual person units that have wants, needs, fashion, knowledge and rumours. The people en-mass will define which shops are successful and which fail. For instance, in a given city there may be 5000 people, 20% of which own cars. A shop selling cars would therefore has a potential market of 1000 people. Those 1000 people may want fuel economic cars (based on how much some other player is selling petrol for). The car seller will therefore get an amount of business based on their market potential and how close their stock is to the desires of the people. What people want/need/desire will be influence by costs, advertising, the rumour mill and the quality of the sales people employed in the car yard.
The population of cities will grow and shrink based on several factors.
The potential for facility growth will be visible before hand as part of the town/city planning information. For instance, if an airport is going to be built it will be specified in town planning before hand with a potential completion date. It may make sense to build certain types of businesses or more shops based on the predicted completion dates.
Obviously the shops owned by a player are the primary interest. The details below describe the different aspects of shop that can be modified or must be obeyed by the user.
There will be a fixed number of shop types defined by the administrator/designer of the particlar game and/or server. The shops supported by the engine can range from retailer (e.g. furniture store), service provider (e.g. mechanic) to resturaunt (e.g. pizza).
Each shop (or plot of land) costs the owner a fixed amount of cash each month. Time passes in the game around 4x the speed of real life so your shop is expected to make payments about once a week in real time (maybe this should be faster?). The cost of the plot of land is dependent on the size, city and "quality of life" of the area.
If a player does not have cash to pay the monthly lease their shop and land is reclaimed and made available for purchase. A player who loses all their money can either apply for a loan or simply start a new character and get their new grant.
Loans act as an overdraft. They simply allow you to go into negative values in your bank account balance. Loan approval is based on your current bank situation, assets and previous loan applications.
Players will be able to specify the costs of the items their shop provides. The price will be presented both as the absolute price and the cost to the shop (i.e. how much profit/loss will be made per unit). It will also be possible to specify "deals" for each item sold. There will be generic deals that can be applied to all sale items (i.e. 2 for 1) and specific deals on particular items which will be defined as part of the shop/item specification.
The player will specify which of a selection of suppliers will be selected to provide different parts of their inventory. Each supplier will be defined as part of the shop specification and will have a quality rating which will cause their price to vary. Some suppliers will also conflict will political interests (i.e. child labour etc). The choice of supplier quality will effect the quality of the items sold in the shop. A retailer that sells low quality merchandise at an unreasonable price "may" got a bad repitation with people and hence get less business. Where saleable items are a combination of supplies each part of the combination may be purchased seperately. The final combined item will be factor of the quality of the parts and the skill of the employees doing the combining (see employees below)
A shop/chain owner is responsible for specifing their advertising budget on a per month basis. The player can also choose how far the advertising should go, local area, city wide or world wide? This makes more sense as the player starts to own chains of stores. The advertising can also be focused on certain items and/or deals within the store(s). The advertising will increase the chance of customers for the item/deals/generally.
The player can decide how many staff to hire in their stores. Different types of businesses will require different numbers of staff to function at an optimum level. For instance, a resturaunt requires more staff (and types of staff) per store compared to say an electronics store. However, the quality of staff to hire and how much above or below the expected level is also under the players control. Hiring staff cheap firstly may make it hard to obtain staff (depending on how many other employers there are for similar skills in the city). Secondly, cheap staff tend to be less able and hence the quality of products and service may suffer - potentially giving the shop a bad repitation and hence getting less customers (eventually).
Some businesses will be subject to inspections. Most businesses will be audited once a year. Some businesses may have health and safetly inspections - food servers for instance. Some businesses will have safety checks (e.g. garages). The chances of passing these inspections will be a factor of how much money is put into training staff and how much the staff are being paid.
If an inspection is failed the player has two choices. First they may pay their fines and what-ever is deemed as required to fix the problems. This cost will increase each time an inspection is failed. On the other hand they could attempt to bride the inspector - however, if they fail they run the risk of additional fines (which might put them out of business).
As player's shops do business the customers will go out into the world and tell other people what they thought of their service and goods they recieved for their hard earned cash. This will in turn effect how many customers decide to come to your shop. It will be possible to pay to have a survey performed on the general populace to get a feel for the current attitude towards the players shop(s). However, the results of these polls are not always entirely accurate.
Facts will be reported through a local newspaper. Facts include who's making money, who's buying land, who's gone out of business and what changes in city law/taxes there have been. The paper will also show the advertising for different businesses in the city. This should give players a view to the amount of money being spent on advertising by different businesses.
The location of a shop will have an effect on how many customers it will recieve. A shop close to residential areas is more likely to have casual customer interaction. However, if it gets a bad repitation no ammount of residential areas locally will help. If the shop is the only providing its services/items in a city then it logically has more chance of selling there. However, it does not have a monopolpy. If the prices/service is extremely poor customers will travel to other cities to obtain the things they want. This provides cities with "out-of-town business".
Once a player has earned enough money from their initial shop they can go on to buy more land and shops within any city. This allows players to own more than one shop and hence potentially start chains. The cost of buying land and building shops must be significant. The cost of a given section of land must also be determined based on the elements around it. A section of land in a residential area with a high quality of life (see sponsoring) must cost significantly more than a remote section of land.
Cities are inifite. It is always possible to buy more land within a city. Land is available at the edge of cities at all times. However, it is not possible to buy or build on a plot land more than 10 sections from any other building. This prevents players placing shops in the middle of no-where.
Sections of land can be bought and converted into several individual bonuses:
The quality of life of an area is defined by the facilities made available there. The city will pay for some of the facilities through the taxes it collects from the shop owners and citizens. However, some facilities must be sponsored by private companies. It will be possible for players to select facilities to buy for the city which can be named after them. When a sponsored facility is created the city may be required to buy buildings from players to provide space - this could be very lucrative for players should their building be chosen.
Examples of possible facilities are:
Since this is a multiplayer game the players will be expected to inteact with each other.
Groups of shops in an area may buy areas of land local to each other as part of a "Mall" or "Plaza". These groups may be considered similar to guilds in traditional MMORPG games. The groups can build common resources between their stores and operate a validation system to ensure users of the resources have shopped in appropriate stores. A good example may be a parking area shared between multiple shops to encourage shopping. The cost of these shared resources can be footed equally by each member of the group.
When the city requests sponsorship for facilities groups of players can contribute part of the cost in exchance for a vote on the name and location of the facility when its finally created. Since buildings may be bought from players by the city the location of sponsored facilities may be very important to cash flow.
Land and shops can be traded between players. However, there will also be a city tax on every transation of this sort which must be prohibitive enough to prevent transations taking place on a regular basis. There will also be a minimum and maximum value placed on land/shops to prevent gifting or money or land between players.
For the under-handed it will be possible to hire people to provide illegal services to tamper with your opponents sales potential.
It will be possible to hire people to spread unhealthly rumours about other businesses. This is risk free however doesn't have a high success rate since people who spread rumours arn't often believed.
It will also be possible to hire people to interfere with supply lines to other people's shops. This has a higher success rate at causing problems but is also completely illegal. If your hireling gets caught the player could end up paying hefty costs (legal and bribes) and potentially tarnishing your reputation.
Finally it will be possible to hire people to set fire to opponents shops. Again this is illegal and could incur huge costs on hireling capture. This always works (assuming the criminal isn't caught before the act) but may also cause damage to surrounding buildings. If you're implicated in the an arsen you might aswell leave town.
It must be possible to create and seed cities with businesses, facilities and residential areas before players start colonisation. The businesses in these cities must be AI controlled. However, the AI logic doesn't need to be intricate. It would be safer if players could out market AI players pretty easily to give a sense of success.
It must also be possible, at administrator disgression, to add AI business into a city at a later date. This might be to address a balance or need in the city or simply to make the city more interesting while player's build up. It would be ideal if the game engine could detect when a business was required and add it.
League tables will give players something to aim at from an overall viewpoint. They will be held on a per city and global stage. There will be a league table for the following categories: