Home Tycoon Potential, Part Four: With a Little Help From Friends
by Gideon, HSM team writer
Welcome to the continuation of the wild speculation of the features that could be included Hellfire Games’ upcoming classic, Home Tycoon. Now, it’s only fair to mention that most of the ideas featured in this article series are not based off of actual Hellfire Games’ announcements. While a few do have roots in what we know about Home Tycoon, the vast majority of them belong in a file labeled “Wonderfully Wild Wacky Whimsical Wishes” and that should be put in a filing cabinet drawer marked “Aggravatingly Abhorrent Alliteration”. If you care to rifle through the previous entries to the series to see what has been covered thus far please click HERE for the intro, HERE for the vehicular based ideas, and HERE for some thoughts on what the interactive capabilities of cities could be.
In this fourth foray to the Home Tycoon Potential series, we will dive headfirst into what sort of friend interactivity Home Tycoon could provide its players. After all, Home IS a social gaming platform and Home Tycoon is in a unique position to take advantage of the social aspect of Home like never before. As always, these ideas will be taking into consideration the core tenets of Home Tycoon and will try not to suggest ideas that are completely outside the realm of possibility.
What we do know about Home Tycoon friend interaction is quite limited. We know that friends will be able to visit and interact with other cities but this might not be limited to friends. There will be many different scoreboards within Home Tycoon to compete with friends, and there seems to be some sort of voting dynamic that could be involved within Home Tycoon. These few factors will be taken into consideration for some of the suggestions within this article.
There are a good deal of concepts to outline, so let’s jump right in.
Different Strokes for Different Mayors (Hey, I never said I could rhyme)
Home Tycoon has the possibility of being a sort of hybrid public/private space in which an individual Mayor builds a city that is then open to the public for viewing and visitation. If this is indeed true, it could be one of the first times that PlayStation Home truly lives up to the ideology of Play, Create, Share that has been championed by Little Big Planet. There should, however, be some Mayoral control over the accessibility of each city with three levels of privacy: Private, Friends, and Public.
A completely Public Home Tycoon city would quickly fill with randoms, trolls, and noobs.
If a Mayor wishes to keep their city private, then it should be able to be kept private. After all, there are those that might not want to reveal the design of their city until they are completely done with its construction. A city that has been designated Private could include the option for friends to be invited but should remain inaccessible when the Mayor is not within the city themselves. In this way, the space could act very much like a personal space.
The Friends privacy setting could open the city ever so slightly so there is greater freedom for those who are on the Mayor’s friend list. On this setting, friends of the Mayor would be able to come and go in and out of the city as they pleased, without the expressed permission that is required in the Private setting.
A city designated as a Public space should be freely open to all. These cities could allow any player within Home to visit and play through its street at any time they please. This could encourage the highest level of interaction within a city and mini-games, such as those spoke of in Home Tycoon Potential: Part Three, could benefit the Mayor if they are ever implemented.
This doesn’t mean that a Public city should be a free-for-all for any Home player. There could be certain interactions that are still restricted to friends. There should be a benefit to being friends with one another as they pertain to the development of Home Tycoon cities. Friends-only interactions would be those that most directly benefit the growth and development of the cities while Public interaction with Cities should be limited to casual activities such as mini games and vehicular races.
Trade and Trade Alike
Trade between cities of friends could have a direct result on the design and development of each city built. While trade was explicitly denied as a feature of Home Tycoon upon its offset, it is one of the many future features of the program that, if implemented, could take Home Tycoon from a simple passive activity to a fully fledged simulation.
The proposed dynamic of resource cultivation, mentioned in a previous article, for more advanced structures could also be achieved through trade. A city that has a thriving economy based on racing could trade Tycoon Tokens for building materials, or a city that is focusing heavily on iron production could trade their surplus material for another building material they do not have the proper structures for.
Trading posts could be actual locations within cities where friends can try to trade and sell their items.
These trades could be accomplished through a trading post of sorts. Here Mayors could offer up their surplus material up for trade. Friends who visit a city’s trading post could offer whatever resources they have available for trade. If accepted, the trade would be successful and the appropriate resources would reallocate. The Mayor who initiated the trade could get a small Tycoon Token bonus to encourage future trades. Also, the trading post should take the form of a purchasable and buildable structure that is placed within the city so users who are not interested in trading would not have to include such features in their city.
Limiting the trade feature to friends would encourage community building and could also play a factor in the gubernatorial concept covered later in this article. The trading post building could also feature upgrades that would allow non-friends to purchase items at set prices for Tycoon Tokens and could offer auctioning of pre-determined resource packages that mayors could choose to fill and sell if they are so inclined. Of course, the means by which Hellfire Games would be making their revenue off of these transactions would be the direct selling of Tycoon Token packages from the Home Tycoon store.
To Build a Better Tourist Trap
Another aspect of interactivity between Mayors could involve the establishment and encouragement of tourism between friend’s cities. Being that the tourist industry is so vital to many real life cities and the fact that Home itself relies on virtual tourism, it isn’t a large leap to suggest that Home Tycoon could support an intercity tourism dynamic.
Could these show up around your city?
This feature of Home Tycoon would only involve the virtual citizens of the Home Tycoon cities. A Mayor who has purchased and built tourism specific structures, such as aquariums, boardwalks, amusement parks and the like, could pay another Mayor Tycoon Tokens to advertise their attractions in their city. This advertisement could compel the virtual inhabitants of the city to visit and would increase the tourism revenue of the advertising city.
There could be, however, balances that would have to be maintained with tourism. If a city were to allow too many tourism advertisements within their city, their citizens could become disillusioned and unhappy from the increased traffic and advert saturation. A city’s own tourism industry could also be damaged from advertising other cities. After seeing an advertisement for a competing city, a virtual visitor might just choose to take their vacation in a different city the next time they have a free weekend.
Allowing too few advertisements could also be detrimental to a city’s happiness. Citizens could become disheartened, overworked, and downtrodden. If the happiness were to dip too low it could cause migration from the city, lowering population numbers and tax revenue. It would be the job of the Mayor to find the balance point between advertisements expenditure and advertising revenue.
The Hanging Chad of Hope
The concept of voting isn’t new for Home and it is one of the semi-confirmed aspects of Home Tycoon that has yet to be discussed in much detail. While there are very real possibilities that the voting aspect of Home Tycoon will involve the community at large, there are opportunities for voting to offer something unique for players of Home Tycoon.
Voting has existed in Home for a while now so the concepts shouldn’t be that foreign.
Hellfire Games has been vocal in their desire for there to be competitions between the cities and their Mayors. One way this might be accomplished is through thematic contest and voting amongst the community. Hellfire could announce a contest for the best suburban cities, Mayors could submit their city for consideration and visitors could vote for whichever city they felt was best. Prizes would of course be provided by Hellfire and awarded at whatever interval they deemed appropriate. While this sort of voting element to Home Tycoon would work well, there is an opportunity for something a little more eclectic to exist.
Each Home Tycoon city is run by a Mayor, but there has not yet been any discussion if other higher forms of government may exist in the simulation. The prospect of a Governor could add an interesting aspect to Home Tycoon that could affect exactly who Mayors allow on their friends list. In this concept, each Mayor is given one vote to cast toward any Mayor on their friends list. Any Mayor who receives the appropriate number of votes would be given the title of Governor and could be afforded new revenue streams to invigorate their city’s economy. A casted vote would remain cast for that Mayor until the owner of the vote changes their mind and decides to re-cast toward a different Mayor.
Using this voting system a Mayor could, in theory, have multiple people on their friends list that holds the office of Governor. This shouldn’t have a negative effect on any involved since the authority of the Governor should only impact those who are currently casting their vote for them. If a Governor’s total vote tally dips below the required number, their status would be reverted back to Mayor and they would lose all gubernatorial privileges.
Could Kiosks be placed around a city to allow for voting?
The benefits of Governor would rely on the success of the Mayors who voted for them. Governors could be granted a Tycoon Token tax revenue which would be dependent on the financial stability of each Mayor’s city and should be able to be set by the Governor. It is for this reason a successful Governor would seek out a diverse collection of city types to build their governorship on.
In return for their taxed Tycoon Tokens, Mayors would gain access to Governor provided monuments which could grant their cities metric boosts, the ability to trade with other members of the governorship who are not on their friends list, access to automatic disaster relief that would dramatically decrease the damage sustained by a city when disaster strikes (more on this in the next article) by siphoning the appropriate funds from the Governors coffers, and could be able to request Tycoon Token loans from the Governor, which may or may not ever be able to be paid back.
While these sorts of gubernatorial powers would be cumbersome and too much for the casual Home Tycoon player, clubs and Home based organizations would likely jump at the chance to establish such a hierarchy for their group. There would be individuals who would enjoy a sustained and consistent Governor seat and those that would lose their seats quickly without ever being able to truly benefit from the position.
There is no doubt that voting will be part of Home Tycoon. Its just that the actual system has yet to be announced.
Home Tycoon is in a unique position in the gaming arena where it can offer the best of multiple worlds of gaming. By tapping into the social resources of Home, Hellfire Games could infuse a real sense of community into this little city simulation. While these are but a few suggestions that could promote friend interaction within Home Tycoon they all point to one irrefutable truth: The success of Home Tycoon is largely dependent on how it handles and monetizes the desire for community within its city building simulation. The gimmick of being able to visit and drive around a friends city will draw in the crowds at first but is not enough to sustain an ongoing simulation within Home. If the community is utilized properly Home Tycoon could become a cornerstone of Home and could be the reason many players come back to Home time and time again.
As members of the Home community there’s bound to be an idea or two floating around about what Home Tycoon could offer its players to entice them to spend more than a week or two within its city building walls. What community aspect of Home Tycoon would keep you coming back week after week, month after month? How would you like to build you city with your friends and in what ways could they assist in its livelihood?
With vehicular mini-games, structure based mini-games, and friend interaction covered it might seem like there isn’t much more to speculate about Home Tycoon. Let me assure you dear reader that there is at least one more session of speculation to be had on Home Tycoon. After all, Home Tycoon it isn’t out yet, so now is the time to guess wildly into the night!
August 18th, 2012 by Gideon | 3 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.
Having never played this type of city building game myself, except for a slight divergence into one called Evony on the internet for a few weeks, I can’t truly add to the ideas here. But I must say that I like them. If Tycoon lives up to its promise it stands to create a whole new aspect and genre to the Home experience that will dramatically change the face of Home and its potential. Nice read Gideon.
Remember, Hellfire Games has already announced that natural disasters will NOT be featured in Home Tycoon. Hopefully that isn’t the sole focus of the next speculation article.
The ideas pertaining to disasters were supposed to be a quick side-note on THIS article but just didn’t “fit”. I make mention in the next article that disasters are NOT going to be part of Home Tycoon when it gets released and that there are no plans to include them. I will indeed be discussing things other than disasters but a good part of the article will be spent salivating over the prospect of Home Tycoon disasters like a large eyed puppy coveting a the unseen food my human is preparing, hoping beyond hope that the morsel I long for will drop from the counter and into my eager maw.