quote:Original post by cliffski

How anyone can say these kind of games arent popular any more is beyond me. They sell by the bucket load, and always will.

They must use small buckets in your part of the country

They are certainly one of the least popular genres right now. Championship Manager sells well. Others don''t, by comparison.

quote:
They allow people to manage and control things, something missing from most peoples lives...

As someone who plays, and has written, such games before, I will say now that I love them. I wasn''t saying they weren''t any good. Just that they are simply not as popular as they used to be, relative to the games market as a whole.

quote:I think the reason there arent many websites dedicated to their coding, is that there is very little ''generic'' coding involved, unlike a straight forward RTS or FPS which can be done by-the-numbers and is why we are swamped by badly done versions of them...

I disagree. I think that since they are less visually appealing, fewer people are actually interested in making (or buying) them. See how many people say "I want to make a 3d shooter - how do I do it." Those people are going for what they like, not for what they find easy - at that stage, they don''t yet know what is easy or hard.

I think management games are actually very easy to write, providing you have a good understanding of probabilities and other basic mathematics. They are easy to make modular, due to the limited interactions between entities. They also tend to be very linear (choose options from a menu, then proceed to a game, show results, repeat). As opposed to real times games which often have to have many tasks running concurrently and often synchronised. No line of sight or pathfinding algortihms needed in management games, either. I found them very simple back in my BASIC days, and to be honest, now I know C++, I could probably get something decent running in a week, I am sure. But it will have to join the back of the queue behind my wargame, my RTS, my MUD, my graphical MUD, and my 3D RPG

quote:Original post by Eternal Chrono

You could have something up and running in a week, but that''s all you''ll have. If you only spend a week doing it, then updating it and adding features would be a nightmare.

This all comes down to coding style, a little forethought, and where game balance is concerned, your skill with stats and probabilities. Ease of adding new features is down to how modular you code your basic engine. Most of my management games have been menu based, so adding a whole new screen is just a case of adding an extra enum value and a corresponding cpp file. I use an extensible file format so adding new stats to my database (or removing unwanted ones) doesn''t break anything. Could you give me an example of what extra features would be hard to add?

quote:I''ve done a few management games in the past, and beleive me, they are much harder then you think. The hardest part is to produce realistic statistics. It could take weeks to get the mathematic algorythms just right to produce correct stats.

Taking his racing sim into consideration. He could put together something in a week that is very basic but the racers finish the race in 4 hours according to the stats.

If the racers finish in 4 hrs, then add a * 0.5 or * 0.25 in there I maintain that making equations to approximate ''realistic'' stats is far easier than has been implied so far. Certainly, top selling games have had barely realistic algorithms ''under the hood'', but the results seemed realistic and the game was playable.

Some basic knowledge of statistics comes in handy. If you know the mean/median/mode values, maximum and minimum values, standard deviation (etc) that you are aiming for with your data (which you can find out if you are doing research for your game) then making an equation to fit that is trivial if your math skills are good.

quote:It could take him days just to bring that down to realism. THEN, he has to make everything else realistic. It''s much harder then you may think to make a _realistic_ simulation.

I have to disagree, based on my own experiences with balancing equations to make them realistic. Given knowledge about the input variables and the target outputs, I have always been able to get something workable in a day, and looking good in 2 days. Then again, I concede that I am perhaps more experienced at statistics and algebra than most.

The key is not to necessarily have a perfect simulation of the way it all works. The key is for the player to both believe it is a perfect simulation (things act like they should), and to have control over the simulation (they can alter inputs and see corresponding changes in the output). You can abstract a large simulation down into smaller sections with perhaps no loss of simulation quality (in a manner very similar to MP3 encoding). Example as taken from my game mentioned above - a racetrack can easily be categorized by (a) the number of straights, and (b) the number of corners. Correlate (a) to top speed, and (b) to cornering/acceleration, and you have something playable already. Of course, that is way too high level for a modern game, so you would add detail from there. Add a random factor. Measure the distance of each straight and use that as a multiplier against top speed. Record positions of all cars and recalculate each lap - if a change of position is detected, consider whether they could have succeeded in the overtaking manouevre and if not, return them to the original position. Etc etc. It''s not difficult to make something very fun, and very accurate-looking in no time. And if you did it well, with accurate inputs in the first place, substituting that ''game engine'' for progressively more ''realistic'' ones as you go will not be difficult.

quote:And others besides CM has sold. Look at Baseball Mogul and Front Office Football to name a few. The FPS: Football Pro was basically a management game with the added feature of being able to play the games. Just go out and look and you''ll find a good number of sports mamangement games that do well.

I can''t comment on US titles (neither of the above have made it across the Atlantic to my local stores). But I do know that for every management game on the shelves here, there are about 10 FPSs, 8 RTSs, 8 -action- sports sims, 5 flight sims, 5 driving games, 4 ''realistic team-based 3d strategy games'' (Rogue Spear etc - wtf is that genre called? ). A good management game, like any good game, can do well. But my point was that they are not really popular enough for many people to want to either make them or write tutorials about making them.

quote:Original post by cliffski

If we broaden away slightly from sports sims, then I can quote SimCity3000 and Rollercoaster Tycoon as games that sold big buckets, even US buckets :-).

Well, yes. I was thinking more stat-crunching games, especially sports ones where you control a squad of players, rather than the above, which I''d class as ''world builder'' games I guess, but there is obviously a large overlap, especially in deciding what works and what doesn''t in terms of player input. The formula for calculation the success of say, a residential block, based on other nearby blocks and facilities, is going to be similar to measuring the success of a sports team member based on the ability of those around him or her.

quote:I cant comment on Championship Manager style games, but with the wider sim type games there is a LOT involved. Try telling Chris Sawyer (coder of Rollercoaster Tycoon) that he should have been able to knock it up in a week :-)

Didn''t Chris Sawyer do all the programming himself? Maybe if he''d had a well-organized team of coders, it could have been done in a week

Maybe I have been misunderstood I wouldn''t think I could have anything near sellable in a week. (My exact words were "get something decent running" I believe.) But it would be playable, and perhaps fun if eye candy isn''t your thing. The core engine could be there, with a routine that takes your input data and feeds you realistic results, whether they be football matches, Formula 1 races, or whatever. It just takes a little study of the data and some good ideas of how to manipulate it to get what you want. I must stress that I don''t consider ''management game'' to mean ''simulation''. As far as I''m concerned, if the user can see a direct and realistic correlation between inputs and outputs, it doesn''t really matter how you did the processing.

quote:Good management games have a lot more variables than the half dozen you seem to be implying.

Championship Manager 1 had, if I remember correctly, Pace, Passing, Tackling, Creativity, Flair, and Stamina Half a dozen for each player. There were, admittedly, hidden stats too, and a personality type (which was dumped for CM2, I believe). I was not, however, implying most management games have minimal stats. More that you don''t need a lot of stats to get something playable. (Hell, Football Director on my Amstrad CPC only had a Skill variable for each player, and that was still fun!) I was just saying that you can start off with just a few stats, and then add extra stats into the equation as you go along (if you know what you''re doing). Again, it''s just a case of being able to deal with probabilities and statistics.

quote:Also im not sure that everyone who trys to write games wants to do a first person shooter. You just heaar about these people a lot more, maybe because of the nature of the game (Deatmatch people tend to be more gregarious and outgoing compared to the introverts who enjoy sim games).

Well, that demographic information is of course possible
But I think that, even bearing that in mind, these games just don''t have as large a following, either in players, or in developers. Which is a shame, as I like games regardless of graphical ability. (I''ve been playing management games in some form for almost 15 years now, and now I am heavily involved in MUDs... still just text on a black background And full of stats, too )

These days, there are high expectations on having background info, realistic team/player histories, etc. Compiling that may be the hardest part for many games. But there is always more incentive to keep going when you already have something playable!