Edy Zahid Blog The Thoughts of One Game Developer

Dream City:Life Events – May 2010

After giving out much consideration and thought, I decided to change Chronicles of My Life game title to Dream City: Life Events game title to take advantage of Dream City IP I've been developing so far. The most important thing, Chronicles of My life name is already belong to a well known novel, if I'm not mistaken. I don't want to confuse people

Title change isn't nothing new to me. Before I already change my previous game title called Sphere Core to Blade Thrust Tactics.

Hopefully with this new cool title, I have the necessary zeal to further the game development as this has been lacking for months now.

Dream City: Life Events – November 2009 Update

Development for the game is a little bit slow on early part of November because I was concentrating my effort of writing strategy guide for Blade Thrust Tactics. But since I've already finished writing it, then I can go back to this game project.

The major improvement I've made on the game is overhauling the diary system. Nathan Chin has been complaining about this stuff last month so I guess I have to do something about it. The avatar graphics right now is repositioned to the right to give room for diary text.

Karma System

The other major improvement I've made is introducing karma system. Whenever your character perform a good deed, her karma will increase and vice versa. Keep a high karma and there could be high chance your character will be rewarded with something in which case your karma will be exchanged for the reward. Having a high karma also will prevent you from ending up in trouble or disaster as some of your karma will be exchanged with the trouble or disaster.

Yes, this game revolves around morality. Everyday we face this kind of situation. Think karma as some sort of moral currency. The more karma you earn, the more good reward you can exchange or more trouble/disaster you can prevent in the future. I get the inspiration of karma system from Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

The karma system is not yet properly balanced because I don't add enough events that improve karma. So your character most of the times will not get any reward derived from karma and will suffer disaster or bad events due to lacking of karma.

Job Overhaul

I also make a lot of changes in term of job. You can now quit from your job. You also earn salary increase if you stick working for the company for certain amount of time which mean loyalty is rewarded. You can't apply new job or get promoted during economic recession. I also flesh out more details about the job. For instance, if you apply for fashion designer job, the company is called GA Apparel which involves in chic casual dress market. By giving more details to the company, I can think up a lot of events related to the job such as product launch, brand war and lots of interesting stuff.

Lifestyle

I also made some changes to the transportation gameplay. If your character want to use scooter, small car, sedan car and luxury car, she will have to buy it in full price. I was thinking to use more realistic system on down payment and monthly installments but the system is way complicated to execute at this point. Buying it can be done in Buy Asset Panel. Once your character buy it, your character can use it by choosing the option in Lifestyle Panel. So it is possible for your character to buy it but not use it.

Assets depreciation does not yet work.

Activity Overhaul

I also overhaul activities by introducing weekend activities in addition to evening activities. There are a lot of weekend activities you can do such as window shopping, going to the spa, chatting on the Internet, watching soccer match in the stadium, go fishing and the boring part time schools. Yes, there is no more evening part time schools. All part time schools are carried out at weekend.

The scoring system also has been overhauled. If you finish the game, you'll get total score:
1) 1 - 199 : You have a terrible life.
2) 200 - 399 : You could've done it better.
3) 400 - beyond : You have a good life!

The new version is Dream City: Life Events 0.21 released on 16 November 2009. It still come in a small download file. I welcome any feedback.

Dream City: Life Events website

Dream City: Life Events October 2009 Update

Dream City: Life Events game project starts on July 2009 when I'm doing some graphical touch up on Blade Thrust Tactics game. The graphical touch up process is excruciatingly bored the hell out of me. It makes me realize that I have to do something different alongside the graphical touch up process. Spend a few hours on graphical touch up process and another few hours on something else.

Since coding and content creation process for the game has been finished at that time, this gives me opportunity to develop a new game. I always want to do character simulation game that plays almost like reading a diary. The idea is player is controlling a character and try to guide her over her life in terms of job, lifestyle, activities and relationships.

The game runs in turns. For each turns which might represent a week, player will write any interesting event that might have happen in the week. The event might be getting a new friend, starting on a new job, trying new activity and many other events. This is the biggest highlight of the game - player have to end the turn to find out any events that might happen in the week. Some of these events occurs randomly which adds some unpredictability factor in the game.

Turn Based Games Can Be Addictive to Play

Turn based game if done effectively can be addictive to play. The classic example is Civilization series game created by Sid Meier. Although the game is complicated to play, the turn based gameplay makes the game interesting to play because you have no idea what your enemy will do to you in the next turn. You HAVE to end the turn to find out. You can't have this kind of feel while playing real time game.

As I mentioned before in my previous post, I have myself a working prototype of the game. I'm surprised to find out that I will be able to come out with a prototype so early. This could be because the game is basically text based and I borrow a lot of user interface code from Blade Thrust Tactics game.

To give you an idea how the game looks like, here is the game screen shot. Yes, it does not look like too much right now but all buttons you see in the game are functional. I'm using a month to represent a turn but this could change in the future. So far I haven't fully make use of turn based game play because there is only a few events in the game. This is the area that I should focusing on.

Guess what? Why just see the screen shot when you can PLAY the game right now? Yes, you heard it right. I have taken the trouble to create a temporary website for the game. You can read the game details and even download the game from the website. Since the game is text based, it comes in a small 124 KBytes file. If you play the game, don't forget to give me your feedback.

Dream City: Life Events website

Well, happy gaming to all of you guys.