The Ultimate Train Set
I wss playing Timberborn recently with Emily, and she pointed out to me that I am totally the guy to end up spending his golden years nursing an elaborate model train set into my own little world of switches and levers and scenery and automation. And you know what? She is so right.
Timberborn gets close, I have to say, but I am still looking for the right game to really scratch that itch, and I have kinda taken that as the anchor point from which I’m hanging the whole design philosophy of this space-based resource sim I’m using to learn Unreal Engine. I do have a name for it, but I’m not ready to reveal it yet so I’m just gonna be a little bitch about it and not tell you.
I wanted this game to have challenge, right? As amazing as Tinyglade looks (check it out if you somehow haven’t heard of it) it’s still not quite right, you know? I want to tend a garden, but it needs to be in opposition to the environment. What’s the point of walling off a garden if there isn’t anything to protect it from? I get that it just sounds like I want your average resource management/city builder game but not quite. There’s a central issue in those games that I want to address, and it’s something I call the groundhog day problem. Or, at least, I’m calling it that now. I can coin terms, shutup.
So this groundhog day problem is something that comes up in management games where you feel like you just solved a problem and, through no change of your own, that problem starts over again as if you’d done nothing at all. You find yourself expanding just to resolve something that seemed to be balanced at your current population size, or whatever the meter for growth is in your game of choice. Take Cities Skylines for example. Either one, although you’ve probably only played the first one. In theory, you play that game, and things get to a point where they feel kinda balanced. You have enough people to fill your jobs, enough education to diversify them, and enough jobs for them to fill. Your meters are empty, essentially. Then, almost immediately, you have demand for people. No one died, no new jobs were built, but suddenly the game is calling for you to expand. And I get it, right, that’s the point. If you weren’t being pushed to keep expanding there would be no point to the game. Loads of people love cities skylines 1, and some people are familiar with 2. I’m not saying the game is bad, I personally don’t like that method of driving the player forward.
From where I sit, it feels like everything I’ve worked for is pointless. My ideas didn’t solve any problems, they just kicked them down the line. You CAN’T solve problems in a lot of these games. And that’s what I like about Timberborn. You can. The first time I played that game, all my beavers died. I squeaked through the first drought, lost some life on the second, and by the third it was clear that the population would be zero in no time. So next time, I came back with a plan: build a stupidly big dam right out of the gate, to hell with the expense. And guess what, it worked! For the rest of that playthrough droughts were never a problem again unless I fucked up. I had to maintain my dam and make sure I wasnt wasting water, but I was never at a point where the drought was just too severe for my planning. If something went wrong at that point, it would have been my own fault. That is the feeling I’m trying to recreate. Because it should be my fault. They’re management games, right? Failures should be a result of poor management, not a magical increase in hazards.
In games like Timberborn and Frostpunk, the hazards increase, but steadily. It’s a clear and consistent trend. In Cities Skylines and many others, dangers feel like they’re triggered by your successes rather than your failure to anticipate a problem. Hopefully, some of the ideas I have for my game can address these issues in a way that’s fun and engaging. But, who knows? Maybe I won’t be able to make it work, and Timberborn is as close to the sun as we can fly. I love that game, but I hope my wax wings hold up a bit longer.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you in the next one.
