Hey, guys.. wanted to quickly see what people thought of a couple development things running through my head:
1. Would you hate me forever if I removed the "Move Building" tool? It'd mean that if you wanted to move a building or a road, you'd have to actually delete the old one, and build a new one in the new position. Main benefits of this are that it's marginally more realistic, it gets rid of the design question of how much moving a building should cost the player, and it frees up space in the "Town" tool pane. The downside, of course, is that you'd have to delete the old building and create a new one. Which might be annoying. If I did this, it would be as part of 1.1, to help make space for more new buildings.
2. I've been thinking about slightly reducing the size of the MMORPG map. Right now, it's played in a 20x20 grid of regions; I've been thinking about dropping that to 15x15. Is anyone imagining they'd actually use the larger grid? Benefit of reducing this is that it'd become cheaper to draw the fully-zoomed-out map, and it'd make the game somewhat less imposing for a new player. Bizarrely, under Windows, drawing the zoomed-out map seems to be the most expensive thing in MMORPG Tycoon. (I'm going to be profiling this to find out why it's so expensive) This is a minor point; it'd be trivial to make the size of the map something that could be set in the UI; the save game files already support arbitrary-size maps. If I did this, it would probably be for version 1.1.
3. Moving "time" to be a more obvious part of the gameplay than it is now. Right now, there's no real sense of "time" to the game. That is, although there's a little clock in the top right corner of the screen and a "current day" counter, that doesn't really enter gameplay in any meaningful way.. and yes, you may notice you have more people connected during US prime time hours than at other times of the day.. but by and large, time can be totally ignored in the game. What I'm proposing is to do something similar to (but less extreme than) what's done in Square's "My Life as a King", where gameplay briefly stops at the start of each new day, to present you with reports on the events of the previous day. In MMORPG Tycoon, I don't imagine that gameplay would actually stop in the same way, but I'd like to provide a pop-up that updated reports have arrived, and I'd like to use the "skip ahead to tomorrow" functionality used in that game. This way, instead of having four "time speeds" (paused, normal, fast, ultra-fast), you'd have three, and a "skip to tomorrow" button. The "skip to tomorrow" button would run the same simulation calculations, but could run much faster by not needing to draw the world while it's doing it. Benefit is that it means you always know exactly when you have new reports available. Drawback is that it might be a bit intrusive (though if that's the case, I could switch it to 'weeks' instead of 'days'). This increased focus on time would be for 1.2 or later; this is not something I'm contemplating at all for version 1.1.
As players, do you guys have thoughts on any of these? Good ideas, bad ideas?
