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Tycoon City: New York Q&A Feature
Chris Leyton
05/09/2005
Tycoon specialists take a visit to the Big Apple with a title that has mass appeal...
Deep Red, the UK developer of Tycoon City: New York, has built themselves a decent reputation in creation cool strategy âtycoonâ titles with some of their releases including Beach Life and Vagas and soon to be released Heart of Empire from Koch. With their latest foray set around New York City, Derek dela Fuente spoke with Paul Howarth, Development Director at Deep Red Games, about the game and how the team can create new ideas whilst keeping true to the genre.
Deep Red has a great CV of games among them a number of Tycoon titles. For our readers can you tell us what previous games you have worked on and your inspiration, and reasoning for creating this very interesting title?
Our previous games are âRisk 2â for Hasbro Interactive, âMonopoly Tycoonâ for Atari, âBeach Lifeâ for Eidos, âVegas: Make it Bigâ for Empire Interactive, âSeaworld Tycoonâ and âSeaworld Tycoon 2â, both for Activision. In addition to âTycoon City: New Yorkâ we are also currently working on âHeart of Empire: Romeâ for Koch Media.
The inspiration for âTycoon City: New Yorkâ and the reasoning behind its creation are primarily twofold. As a developer we specialize in world building games, so when we were at the brainstorming stage of this project we knew that we wanted it to be an evolution of everything that we had learned from our previous titles, that it had to be the biggest, most sophisticated in terms of AI, graphics and scale, Tycoon game that had ever been made. We also wanted it to be in a real-world location, to be immediately accessible and easy to play to attract a mass-market audience that perhaps hadnât necessarily played games in the past but would easily be able to play and enjoy this. So when it came time to throw around locations of where the game should be set, there was one city in the world that immediately stood out â“ New York. Everybody is familiar with it even if they have never been there, it is massive, and is incredibly diverse in terms of its architecture, its inhabitants and its culture. In short itâs the perfect location for this style of game.
Tycoon games have a history of being very much hit and miss games with usually a number of untold factors presenting a successful title. Why do you feel so many âTycoonâ titles fail to capture gamersâ imagination and what do you see as the one big innovation within Tycoon City?
I think a lot of Tycoon games fall into the trap of forcing the player to become involved in every micromanagement aspect of their game. This can create a sense of bewilderment in the player, of trying to spin a multitude of plates at the same time for what are, quite frankly, very dull tasks to keep the game world running as it is supposed to, of having to navigate a variety of confusing graph-like charts and drop-down menus to make any progress. One of the primary philosophies behind the development of âTycoon City: New Yorkâ was to take away all of this mundane stuff, to let the computer AI handle that for the player allowing him or her to do all the cool, fun stuff, as well as minimising the number of in-game navigation menus to make the game as streamlined and as easy to play as possible.
Secondly, most Tycoon games usually deal with very uninspiring subject matter which donât exactly get the blood coursing through the veins. But in the case of Tycoon City: New York we wanted it to be truly aspirational. Who wouldnât want to turn their hand to being the next Donald Trump in the most exciting city in the world?
And thirdly, most Tycoon games are graphically uninspiring and look pretty dated. We do live in an age of incredibly powerful graphics cards and CPUâs and todayâs gamers demand that their games look beautiful. For whatever reason the Tycoon or world building genre has generally failed to grasp this graphical concept. We wanted our game to be the most beautiful Tycoon game out there, whether it is viewed from a birds eye view over the buildings and skyscrapers of New York with all of Manhattan Island in view, or whether it is down at street level, eye to eye with New Yorkers going about their daily lives. Iâm confident that when the game is released players will agree that we have succeeded and that there is no other game out there which comes close to achieving what we have achieved.
How deep and detailed do you hope Tycoon City will be? Are all the buildings for instance based on the real thing and will there being a number of ways to achieve success?
The game is incredibly deep and detailed. 12 distinct and separate districts over a massive playing area, each one a faithful virtual recreation of its real-life counterpart including all of the famous New York landmarks. Approximately 64,000 inhabitants, each with their own names, personalities, needs and desires. There are around 500 different buildings each with a multitude of upgrades and customisations available to them to create tens of thousands of variations, all of them architecturally distinct to their district and again, reflective of their real-life counterpart. Thousands of vehicles on the streets at any one time including the iconic yellow cabs, fire engines, paramedic vehicles, etc. You can lay on major events such as the New Yearâs celebrations in Times Square, the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, the Chinese New Year in Chinatown, a rock concert in Central Park, this game is simply huge!
In terms of style of play and how you go about achieving success, there are two game modes. There is the Sandbox mode which just allows you to build and play around in New York, creating your own version of Manhattan Island with no time or mission constraints, allowing you to create your own buildings, neighbourhoods and districts which is unique to you as a player. Then there is the Mission mode, where you start off in Greenwich Village and need to complete a set series of objectives before you can progress to the next district, SoHo and TriBeca and so on. The player can take as much time as they like to complete these objectives and do them in the way that they think is best. There is no right way or wrong way but the objective must be achieved before the player is allowed to progress. As to whether the player can focus solely on the running of a few smaller businesses or has to be a full entrepreneur, you can manage those few businesses if you so desire and just stay in that one district, building it up and running it as you see fit. However, the nature of the game and the way that is has been developed means that to enjoy it to its fullest in the Mission mode you should really look at the bigger picture and the overall objective of being the biggest businessperson in all of Manhattan.
Could you tell us a little about the structure of the game and what challenges are presented to the player; what are the various influences at work?
The game does run in a semblance of real-time, albeit somewhat faster, with full day and night cycles. You also have the ability to speed the game up if you so choose at any time.
The player competes against 99 other AI entrepreneurs in New York although the âleague tableâ only visibly lists the top 10, with the objective to obviously make your way up the ranks in to the top 10 and eventually the coveted number one spot.
What does the player start with and will the game offer missions or objectives, is there a strong progression line to the challenge and how do you gauge success?
The player starts off in Greenwich Village with only a few buildings already constructed by the gameâs AI. You are then led though a brief tutorial which explains how to navigate within the game world and the basic objectives of the game starting with building a coffee house and upgrading it. From there you are given your first few simple objectives; get the student population up to 300 by constructing appropriate dwellings and raise their overall happiness to 55% by building the relevant businesses that will appeal to them, followed by upgrading Washington Park and getting the recreation rating up to 75%.
Success to these objectives is very easily gauged as from the outset you know what you need to achieve and each objective is easily monitored as you are doing them to determine whether you are on the right track or not. Once you have successfully completed these objectives additional ones are then introduced. Once all of the objectives for a particular district have been successfully completed the next district is then unlocked for you to progress to. As each district is completed, New York progressively becomes more and more built up.
Could you give us details on some of the businesses you can run and the different parameters for them or are they all pretty generic?
There are literally hundreds of different businesses to run, far too many to list here. From coffee shops, restaurants and delicatessens, to cab companies, bus tour operators and roller-rinks, to jazz clubs, cinemas and art-house theatres to name but a tiny few, there is a huge amount of variety in there. Each of them has their own parameters based on their location and the make-up of their clientele.
Many games have research elements, tech-trees, etc; so what will Tycoon similarly offer and in creating the game what kind of research have you undertaken?
Tycoon City: New York doesnât have any form of in-game research element traditional in most strategy games. We wanted to keep the interface as simple as possible and not bog players down with research trees or micro-management. It goes back to our primary philosophy of letting the game AI handle all of that stuff in the background to allow the player to concentrate on all of the cool, fun stuff. There is an advisory element however in the form of various scripted AI characters that appear throughout the game who give the player clues and advice as to how to approach certain objectives.
In terms of research for the game itself, we sent the development team on a number of fact finding trips to New York. We felt that it was important that they experienced the city first-hand if they were going to work on a game that was set there. They took thousands upon thousands of photographs as reference guides to ensure that everything built in the game was an accurate representation of its real-life counterpart. We also recognized very early on that we not only wanted the game to be accurate visually but to also contain the flavour and nuances of New York too to enhance the realism, to make the player believe they are really playing in New York. To achieve this we realized that we needed to hire native New Yorkers to work on certain aspects of the game. So we hired a New York sitcom writer to write the script and New York actors to do the voiceovers for all of the in-game characters. The end result is a city that not only looks like the real thing but also has its inhabitants talking and behaving as real New Yorkers do.
How important is technology in the creation of the game? Do you strive for cutting-edge visuals and perhaps you could give us a few details on the 3D engine you are using?
To realize the vision of the games that we want to create technology is vitally important, which is why we created our own game engine, the Actualityengineâ¢. Actualityengine came about as a result of the vast scale and complexity of the worlds we were creating and the realization that no other game engine which was available to license would enable us to do that as effectively and in the way that we wanted.
From the outset our technology was designed to deliver the features required in world building and social simulation games, but to a level that far exceeds any other technology in the genre, because the games we are creating are beginning to model the scale and scope of everyday real life and Tycoon City: New York is the most sophisticated example of that to date. Actualityengine gives us a competitive edge through allowing us to deliver a game that has the ability to model towns encompassing up to one hundred thousand inhabitants each of which is a living and breathing character in the game world, each with a place to live, work and play. Tenâs of thousands of vehicles all following logical traffic patterns. Thousands of unique buildings, each of which is placeable in the game world with a multitude of interchangeable facades and accessories. To my knowledge there is no other game that is yet able to do this. All of this makes for a technology that is very specific, powerful and proprietary to Deep Red.
The game is all about business and management so how important is the AI and how does it work to challenge the player?
The AI is vitally important to create the Illusion of a working city with living, breathing inhabitants with independent thought processes. Which brings us back to the technology of the Actualityengine and how it has been specifically designed to handle these complex processes in order to convince the player that what they are seeing and experiencing has sentient intelligence behind it, exemplified by the other AI controlled entrepreneurs in the game. As the player progresses and gradually makes their way up the league table of New York tycoons they will really feel as if they are going up against living, breathing competitors. These businesspeople are smart and ruthless, much as they would have to be in real life to have got where they have!
What would you say is the most challenging aspect to the game and what new angles have you come up with that you believe strategy fans will enjoy?
I would say the most challenging aspect to the game is trying to keep all of the inhabitants happy. When the game world is really built up and you have 50,000 people milling around with individual needs, wants and desires, satisfying all of them or even just most of them is difficult.
In terms of new angles, just the fact that the game is on such an unprecedented scale with fantastic technology behind it, with beautiful graphics, sophisticated and believable AI, an intuitive and easy to use interface and camera, and that it takes place in the most vibrant and cosmopolitan city in the world makes it an incredibly fresh and exciting game that anyone will enjoy.
TVG would like to thank Paul Howarth for taking the time to answer our questions; Tycoon City: New York is slated for release during Q4 2005, weâll have further coverage soon.
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