Seal Builds a City
by SealWyf, HSM editor
Despite the bugs, Hellfire Games has a winner on their hands with Home Tycoon. During the first week of its existence, it seemed like the only game on Home. Whenever I checked the Navigator, everyone on my Friend List was sitting in their personal city. Even now, a month later, I’m not surprised to see several copies of that familiar icon.
The cities’ unique serial numbers told the same tale: the number of my first city was just under 15,000. A week later, when I bought my second, the count was over 110,000. And the numbers have continued to grow. There are a whole lot of cities out there, and each one may represent several dollars in additional spending, a windfall for Hellfire Games and Home.
Home Tycoon makes us think about how we use games, because our use of this one is multifaceted. It’s game-playing vs role-playing with a vengeance, a case where the meta-games can easily overshadow the game as it has been presented. I have no doubt this is the reason for its success.
According to the leaderboard, there is one official game here: maximizing your population. But if you visit the largest cities, you see that a huge population produces a thoroughly unlivable city, a parody of a dystopic metropolis. And packing a city with premium high-rise apartments, the kind needed to storm the top leaderboard positions, would cost more than most of us would care to spend.
Another aspect of the official game is the quests linked to the expansion packs — fighting fires and aliens, delivering zombies to the hospital, cooling down a runaway reactor and apprehending talking bears in cars. The games are casual and fun, their crude graphics justified and enlivened by their quirky humor and unapologetically retro aesthetic. For me, they were over much too soon.
Then there is the social aspect — trading visits with friends, the sheer pleasure of exploration enhanced by the money and rewards earned through mutual tourism. It’s fun to hang out with friends in their cities, where conversations grade imperceptibly into role-play as you climb into your cars and cruise down Main Street to the Donut Shop.
And there is the creative side of the game, the joy of building something attractive, and the creation of a city personality. This also slides easily into role-play.
One of my friends told me how much he hated GloboSyn, and that he was deleting all of their buildings to make a political statement. He also put a police station on Wall Street so the cops could keep an eye on the stock traders.
We both knew that Home Tycoon is a game, and GloboSyn is a fiction. But it’s fun to pretend that it’s real. And the rival corporations, GloboSyn and TransUtopia (not to mention the unscrupulous banker, Silverman Socks), lend themselves to exactly this kind of story-telling.
Finally, there is the rather geeky meta-game of trying to deduce how Home Tycoon works by conducting experiments. Frankly, I find the underlying algorithms puzzling. Cash accumulates at very different rates over time in my main city. Sometimes the rent fills up in minutes, and sometimes 24 hours pass before it’s worth harvesting the money. But it’s usually a happy, productive, well-populated place.
But things are quite different in my second city. This is both amusing and annoying, because I built the second city to serve as a “cash cow” to support the first. But, in fact, the exact opposite has happened. Day after day, the population of my second city shrinks, despite a surplus of housing and employment. And the cash barely accumulates, even in office buildings filled with workers.
Obviously, my cities differ in some way. Is it the happiness coefficient? The crime or pollution levels? The time I spend in each city? The amount of ground covered by buildings? The total length of roads? Does the Home Tycoon server pay different amounts of attention to our spaces, based on its own half-random algorithms? Or is the game making value judgments?
My first city (“Good City”) is my attempt to build a place where I myself would like to live. The street grid is varied, carving out large and small parcels of land. Business is concentrated in a central district, with the outlying blocks reserved for housing, farms, parks and utilities. But even in the business district there is a lot of green space — a continuous chain of parks winds among the towers, leading to huge combined parks surrounded by high-rise buildings, like secret gardens. It’s a peaceful, happy place, and I love exploring it.
I’m constantly fine-tuning Good City, moving buildings around and generally sprucing the place up. Population peaked at about 12,000, and but sagged to 10,000 when I decorated for Halloween. My virtual people moved out of my lovely haunted housing developments! You would think they would appreciate the pumpkins and spooky sounds — I know I would. There is no accounting for virtual taste. But they have slowly gotten used to the ghosts, and moved back in.
“Bad City” is the opposite — my somewhat cynical attempt to game the game and rake in pots of cash. I designed the street grid to maximize usable land, dividing the space into long rectangles two squares wide. Each block is being filled with a close-packed mass of skyscrapers. There is a line of farms along one side for quick cash. Housing is mostly high-rise and high-density. I grudgingly added a Zoo to provide some happiness, since nobody was moving in.
I would be totally depressed living in such a place. And I’m guessing my virtual people are too, because they aren’t earning me any money. The few employees I have obviously spend their days surfing the Internet and talking sports around the water cooler. The middle managers are embezzling the profits. There’s nothing left for me. And most of the housing remains vacant.
It makes me wonder if there is some kind of feng shui detector in the Home Tycoon engine, an algorithm that values diversity and green space over uniformity and crowding, and earns money accordingly. There does seem to be an “owner is in residence” detector, since once I arrive in Bad City, the rent meters start creeping up. But they stop as soon as I leave, while the rent in Good City keeps growing.
It’s a fun experiment, even if the results are sometimes frustrating. I wonder if I should keep torturing the residents of Bad City, or change tactics and try to turn it into another Good City. For now, I figure I’ll keep going, because I’m enjoying it.
This is the joy of freeform game-playing. We create our own games, and they are not always what the game designers had in mind. Any substantive game is surrounded by a constellation of meta-games, the games we choose to play with the tools that we are given. We enter a new playing field, and we look around and say, “What can I do with this?”
Some fields have more possibilities than others, and these possibilities should be cultivated and expanded. This is not the same as saying “We should be given more stuff,” the knee-jerk demand for a bigger and better and, above all, cheaper source of entertainment. However, it is part of being human to want more. And to ask for it, understanding that the answer may be “No,” or that more sophisticated version of no, “That would exceed the memory limits.”
Home Tycoon is definitely pushing some limits already. But perhaps more could be shoehorned in, or built off to one side in its own memory allocation. So here is my wish list of improvements for this already engaging game.
First, and least likely to run into memory constraints: expand the quests and adventures. Make them an ongoing attraction. Those who own a particular expansion pack should sometimes be greeted with a phone call presenting more quests associated with it. More car chases and fire-fighting variants, more weird stories about zombies, space aliens and greedy investment bankers, more runaway nuclear reactors. Ongoing quests would give us a reason to keep checking in, and a motive to buy the expansion packs we have not yet acquired. And, since most quests reward cash, it would provide periodic cash infusions for those whose cities are not yet self-sustaining.
My second suggestion is that the City View and Postcard shots we create should appear in our image collections on the HDD. It would be nice to be able to document the growth of our city. We can take our own pictures at ground level, but the overhead shots are unique. We can’t really save those except with video capture.
Another request is that we should see the statistics of any city we visit. This would let us compare their stats with our own, and figure out how they got them. I have no idea why we can’t do this already. If some people don’t want to share their stats, there could be a stat-visibility setting. But I think most people would like to show off their high population and happiness, and their low crime and pollution.
Here’s a more complex idea, one which would require a major rewrite: decorations. I hated having to tear down my housing developments and rebuild them from scratch as Halloween-themed versions, especially since the Halloween houses were obvious re-skins of the original structures, and rebuilding them temporarily drove out my population.
In the real world, you don’t tear down your house to decorate it for the holidays. You simply hang decorations on it. So I propose that the game engine be expanded to allow people to buy “decoration packs”, which could be applied to existing structures — in effect, re-skinning them in place, without the expense and disruption of destroying and rebuilding them. It would be especially nice to have this feature in place by Christmas, so we can cover our skyscrapers with blinking colored lights, fill the parks with snow and put tacky plastic reindeer on our lawns.
Finally, we all really want to go inside the buildings. But since this is definitely beyond the memory capacity of the space, I suggest adding a series of personal spaces based on the buildings in Home Tycoon.
However, these would not be standard Home apartments. They would be a new category of purchasable items in the Home Tycoon store — Home Tycoon interior spaces. Like the Home Tycoon cities, other people could visit them, without invitation and even in your absence. However, unlike the cities, you could furnish and decorate them. They would work like clubhouses in terms of storage — furnishings would be stored on a central server, rather than the owner’s hard disk, so the owner need not be present for other people to see the decorations.
Interior space could include a high-rise office suite, a luxury apartment, a police department, a Donut Shop, and a customizable mayor’s office — any space, in fact, with a tie to the Home Tycoon landscape. And they could be tied to the owner’s cities, so the view out the window would be what would be seen from the actual building. Or you could visit an airship floating over your city, with the appropriate view drifting beneath.
Fantasy, perhaps. But I think something like this could be possible. We have models for all the components in the visitable Home Tycoon cities, clubhouse “cloud” furniture storage, and the tie-ins between the new F.U.B.A.R. personal space and the owner’s own game layout. It just all needs to come together.
I also think, if this were done, it would be wildly popular. Imagine inviting someone to your city. You drive around for a while, then park in front of the Donut shop. And then, you all go into the shop.
It might show up on the Navigator, like another city. Or the Donut Shop might detect that you owned its interior, and send you there from the front door. Once inside, you could sit by the window looking out into your city, discussing your building strategy, how to glitch the Zoo, how much you hate GloboSyn, and the fun of the recent alien zombie vegetable takeover of the nuclear power plant.
That’s the glory of meta-games. They can be much more engaging than the game you are supposed to be playing. The very best games are the ones that encourage us to play with them, and allow themselves to be reinvented. These are the games that don’t just challenge your competitive spirit — they engage your imagination.
Home Tycoon has set its hooks deep into Home’s collective imagination. I see it as a model of things to come — new ways we can build and experiment, role-play and daydream with the tools we have been given. It’s a glorious start. And from here it will only get better.
November 1st, 2012 by SealWyf_ | 12 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
Really like the idea of the interiors, and them being visitable while the owner’s offline. Shame the Tycoon Penthouse space isn’t already tied into this game ( I know, two different companies) but another one similar to it, but with your actual city out the windows, would be pretty cool. There is lots of fun you can have in Tycoon that’s not attached to any of the games involved, or the main builder element. I like to dress as homeless bum and poke around in the dump behind the doughnut shop, and shout obscenities at anyone silly enough to visit my city! Heh, yeah, I’m just kiddin’ about that last one; it’s really the hospital bins I rummage through…
But seriously, Tycoon still has room to grow as a game in different ways. The leaderboards will be something I’ll never bother with, since ( as mentioned) the only way onto them is slapping down the biggest scrapers till there’s no more space left. I’d rather acctually grow my city, give it a more natural look as far as cities go. After visiting a few cities with zoos I became enamoured with the idea of having one, and thanks to the rare %off briefcases, I got a zoo and some coppers to catch the GTA frenzied, hat wearing, talking bears. Last time I tried to apprehend one he told me his name was Jo-jo and was just trying to get back to his circus -- as if I’d fall for that old line twice. Besides,he was wearing a top-hat, so he OBVIOUSLY worked in a Trans-Utopia office somewhere.
And now my citizens are moaning about Bear-Tax, sheeesh!
Since I finished this article, I managed to break the population jam in Bad City by deleting the GloboSyn Towers. I guess the virtual folks really hated them too.
I’ve also started a third city, which I’ve dubbed “Farmageddon”, full of (you guessed it) farms! A farm does not need to be adjacent to a road to be “on the grid”, so you can make a quilt of them as far as the eye can see. It’s quite pleasant, really.
I’m having ENTIRELY too much fun with this game.
I have been enjoying this game very much, especially now that the worker bug is fixed. I invested when it first came out a bit, but now I am waiting to see what new stuff they add for buildings as I want to diversify my town more and there are quite a few things lacking to chose from still, like restaurants and grocery stores, I guess the people all eat donuts and veggies, lol. I will be waiting a bit to see what comes up, but if I like what I see I will likely invest more money into this as I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far. Nice read Seal.
Thanks, Burbie. Some of us were discussing this the other night in Home. We were hoping for an amusement park, a museum, a public library and some sidewalk cafes. A Starbucks clone would be nice too. We could have one on every street corner! And what about a bicycle rental place, with bikes added to the vehicles we can drive around the city? Riding a bike would be a way cute animation.
Is it just me, or are real cities starting to look more like Home Tycoon?
Stoplights.
This was an observation my four (almost five)-year-old son made when I let him play in my Home Tycoon city. It needs stoplights. And you know what? He’s right.
It’s such a little detail, but it’s so integral to our immersion in the virtual experience.
Stoplights would be fun. Not that any of us are obeying traffic regulations.
One thing that keeps surprising me is that housing is impossibly high-density, while workplaces are low-density. If you look at an aerial view of a real city, it’s mostly residential, with a relatively small business section. In Home Tycoon, you can jam 7,100 people into the largest apartment complex, but the largest office tower, which appears even taller, employs, what — 520 workers? (I’m not home with my PS3, so I can’t check those figures, but it’s something like that.) To balance residents and employment, you need lots more offices than apartments. It’s an interesting decision on someone’s part.
Yes, sorry about this. Better employment building options are on the way!
Oh, I didn’t think we would. I know Lance certainly doesn’t when he plays Burnout. But even in that game, the NPC cars stop and go according to the lights.
As far as the housing goes, take into consideration families. You wouldn’t have children working -- at least not in a city modelled after the 21st century western world. And then there’s retirees.
Which reminds me of another deficiency -- schools, besides the university. Possibly a pack that comes up next fall will see a grade school and a high school mixed in?
Yes, stats of other people’s cities should be seen. It would be both fun and a learning experience. I posted this on the PS3 Home forum and someone agreed.
Don’t trust the corporations. They’re evil. Sure, there’s a few bad people in the city and farms but most are just people trying to get along in life.
I have a clean and dirty city, the latter with factories and coal plants with an oil well thrown in for good measure. But I’ll be darned if I’ll put a nuclear power source in my clean city.
The farms are what I enjoy the most. I have been debating whether to build a city with almost farms only but we’ll see. I have quite a few farms as it is.
Someone one of my cities so I returned the visit and was astounded at what I saw!!! Half the city was nothing but parks… and I loved it. It was kind of like walking through a forest. I don’t remember their name but I think it began with “n”.
We need forest areas I have decided and a place for hunting and fishing or just for going for a walk in the park depending of course on the season.
I took my outfit with the skateboard into my city and while most interactive items do not work, the skateboard outfit did. So there I was skateboarding through my city. It’s hard going up the ramps let me tell you.
Which brings up the question Why don’t we have bicycles in addition to cars. And motorcycles too.
I do believe they have a lot of things planned for us in the future.
I’ve gone too long. Sorry.
Great article, and great ideas, thank you!
In some of these cases, I have to admit that you are experiencing bugs, but I am glad you are having fun with it anyway. Bug fixes and a stream of new content will continue to flow in.
Also, don’t forget to submit your cities for our Hellfire Favorites contest! See facebook.com/HomeTycoon for details.
We appreciate all the hard work, Jeff. Something this complex must be a nightmare to test. I hope you don’t mind our constant random suggestions. Thinking about this place is one of the meta-games!