Home Tycoon Potential: Part One
by Gideon, HSM team writer
Buzzing with excitement, the populace of Home is eager for the release of games looming on the horizon, and rightfully so. With the recent release of No Man’s Land and the upcoming release of Mercia, Sony — via its third-party developers — is providing Home gamers with what looks to be full game experiences delivered through the increasingly surprising capabilities of PlayStation Home. Perhaps none of these announced games are more surprising than the promise of Home Tycoon.
With this new title from Hellfire Games, users see the impending release of a genre that is entirely new to the Home experience. Never before has such a complete simulation been attempted in Home. No doubt taking cues from the Sim and Tycoon games of the past, Home Tycoon enables Home users to try their hand at city building. Hellfire gave us a brief yet surprisingly thorough glimpse of Home Tycoon in the Virtual 2012 E3 booth and graciously held a Q&A session to shed some light on some of the mysteries surrounding this new program. For an in-depth look at what has been announced for Home Tycoon thus far, check out a pair of articles written by BONZO HERE and HERE.
Unfortunately, from what has been shown of the simulation aspect of Home Tycoon, there isn’t much about the game that would make it stand out amongst the past dozen or so year’s worth of city building simulations. In fact, there are some features that have become staples of the genre that will be absent from Home Tycoon, at least at first. Much to the dismay of the more sadistic of virtual mayors, one feature that will not make the initial release of Home Tycoon is disasters. Terrain editing and weather will likely be omitted from the initial release as well. There are, however, aspects of Home Tycoon that will draw in the crowds and will hide the absence of features that aren’t going to be included, at least for a time.
Just look at this beautiful screen shot of… hmm… possibly Home Ty… er…maybe Sim Ci… uh…might be City Tyc…um… kinda looks like GTA 3?
Of course, the feature of Home Tycoon that sets it apart from other Sim games is the ability to explore and play mini-games in cities both built by a player and those built by their friends. Instead of simply building a city, players build an arena in which to play, and it just so happens to have a city building dynamic attached.
Once the buildings are placed within the provided gridded play area, Mayors have the option to explore their city on foot with the Home avatar of their choosing. While this concept is intriguing and will no doubt be used for machinima and the like, the novelty of this feature will likely wear off quickly. After all, each player will be using the same building blocks to construct their cityscape in an open field similar to the one every other player will be using. Will it be worth the trip to a friend’s city to see that they placed a park on each side of their city hall instead of across the street? This sort of sharing of city-planning concepts may be interesting once or twice, but not enough to sustain the long term plans for Home Tycoon.
The mini-games that will be offered will likely be a much more enticing feature of Home Tycoon. The ability to play games with friends within a customized city is one that will likely keep the attention of many gamers for a good many months. This feature is also dependent on Home Tycoon offering a diverse gameplay experience through which friends can experience something different in each city they visit.
Just imagine the power you will have as mayor of your OWN city! Isn’t it exciting to think of all the … HEY! This coffee is decaf! I HATE decaf.
To date there have been only a couple of mini-games revealed for Home Tycoon. The first is a mission-based mini-game that will unlock different types of buildings by utilizing different “key people” within your city to gather the appropriate resources to get a project completed. These resources, as far as we can currently tell, are revenue, electricity and water. If this resource list were expanded to include building materials such as steel, concrete, wood, brick and glass there could be a wide variety of gameplay experiences added to Home Tycoon that would open up a wealth of possibilities, but more on that later. The second type of mini-game that was announced was the street racing.
The racing is one of the aspects of Home Tycoon that gives it truly dynamic interaction, but even this feature runs the risk of becoming stale. The ability to create your own 90-degree turn tracks with a loop here and a jump there could become redundant quickly. There should be a variety of modes of racing gameplay to keep the activity fresh. If the mini-games are limited to races with loops and jumps and races without, there could be an early stagnation of the program.
The key to the survival of Home Tycoon, as it is with any Home game, is variety.
Remember when THIS was the limit of Home’s “Creative Potential”?
The potential for variety within Home Tycoon has a vastness that hasn’t been seen in Home since…well, maybe ever. The program could even develop into a sort of Home within Home (please, no one make a Homeception comment, I beg of you). It could very well come to pass that different individuals build their cities in such a thematic way that their city becomes as popular and alluring as any of the publically available spaces. Since it is possible that users will be able to visit spaces that are not only built by their friends but by anyone within the Home community, individual cities could eventually become the places people meet for the first time and seek out when wanting to hang out with friends.
While it will be the creativity of the individual that forges each city, it will be the tools available that will make the cities strong enough to hold the attention of gamers for more than a glance. The level and quality of the variety of the buildings, cars, mini-games and interactivity cities will keep Home players interested in Home Tycoon and will keep them coming back time and time again to see what their fellow players have conjured into being.
Following this article will be a series of articles that will each highlight a different possible aspect of Home Tycoon and will suppose its potential. Not so much a series of predictions as it will be a collection of what-if concepts. These concepts will take into consideration the structure of Home Tycoon and will try to not suggest concepts that will exceed the capabilities of Home and Home Tycoon.
Since your Brain can be used for more than giving that pretty shape to your skull, why not use it to think about Home Tycoon?
Example: there will not be the suggestion that people could sell apartments to their friends within their city so they can have their very own customizable apartment to stay in while visiting SteveROCKS’s City. The concepts presented will attempt to stay within the design concept of Home Tycoon, as best we know it from the data that’s been divulged publicly so far, and respect the ambition of the project.
Feel free to brainstorm your own ideas to leave in the comment section of each article as they are released. If there are enough unique ideas in the comments by the end of the planned articles there could be an article of reader-submitted ideas to wrap up the series. With that in mind, please keep ideas in the appropriate article’s comment section.
Up next in part two of Home Tycoon Potential: vehicular mini-games!
July 12th, 2012 by Gideon | 6 comments
Gideon is a team writer for HomeStation Magazine and likes cheese in all its forms. Whether it be block, slice, cream, wheel, log, string or aerosol, Gideon cant resist the pungent bitter taste of good cheese. Heck, he'll even take mediocre cheese, as long as its slapped between two pieces of whole wheat bread with a little bit of mustard.
Home Tycoon is indeed exciting. To my mind, when LBP’s concept was released to the public there were plenty of nay-sayers, that the idea of HAVING to build your own levels was a wasted effort since the consensus was most people would get bored of making sub-par 2-D platforming levels. What most commenters failed to recognize however, was simple human curiosity and imagination. Just look at how the LBP community fed off eachother, see how with even the simplest of tools their minds were able to craft such fantastic, crazy, beautiful and moving levels.
There will be things made with these tools (Tycoon) that even the developers didn’t see coming, mark my words.
Oh and speaking of Little Big Planet (shameless plug) try my Mushroom Garden or Worst Toilet in Scotland levels! Just search for my name KrazyFace, or the level names given.
I’m gonna enjoy these next articles Gid, looking good so far.
I too am waiting to see where this new idea leads. I like the way they have built a real social aspect into this game by being able to bring others to your space and the games they are offering there just add fuel to the fire. This whole concept is fun to me, as I have never played a Sims or Tycoon game before, this is unexplored territory and I will have a huge learning curve to conquer, which is a challenge to myself and that makes it fun for me.
I am looking forward to all of this. Nice read as always Gideon.