Capitalism 2 / Patrician 3 / SimCity 4

Hi,

I'm new to Construct 2 but have some basic Javascript coding knowledge and experience.

I want to make a strategy/business simulation game. If Capitalism 2, Patrician 3 and Sim city 4 were to get together for a wild night of passion, 9 months later you would get my game.

In reality my game is a Real Estate Agent Tycoon game. You start off as a brand new Real Estate Agent, in a small neighborhood, working by yourself out of your home office. Without getting into the specifics of the business, as you run your business and make money and grow you can start hiring assistants, and other agents to work for you. Eventually open your own office. Then open offices in other neighborhood and possibly other cities/countries.

It would resemble the 3 games I mentioned in that it would be very dynamic and play out in real time, as opposed to turn-based, with the possibility to pause, slow and accelerate the passage of time. There is also no character to control on screen. Instead it's all about menus and buttons and different screens and views (a world view, a city view and possibly an office view) and some stats. Like those games it would run on top of a sophisticated economy and market simulation and you would compete against other NPCs that are trying to do the same thing as you.

A few questions for you:

• There are so many aspects to this game, what would you design/code first?

• In fact, if you had to build a game like this, can you give me a rough idea of the order in which you would do things?

• Not 100% new to Javascript and coding but I am new to Construct 2. I've been doing the tutorials, reading the manual and reading the forums for the past week. I have yet to find someone who uses/used Construct 2 to build this type of game, or anything remotely similar. Be honest with me: can it realistically be done in Construct 2? Is it the right tool for the job?

• What advice, specific to building this type of game or in general, can you give me?

Thank you,

Phil

Start with the economic models and the city/map structure/pseudo-structure.

I am a big fan of the agile test-build method, but you need to design everything first. Once you have designs in place you can begin building prototypes, testing, and rebuilding.

In order to build my game, I began by designing everything, from the servers, all of the way up to as many of the game mechanics as I could concretely design early on. Once you have all of your conceptual stuff laid out on paper (or Google docs, or wherever), only then should you begin test/building.

Thanks for your input. Much appreciated. Was wondering if you could recommend any good books or online resources about coding for games, especially simulations. So far, I've used Javascript for simple Web site applications and function. I'm quite familiar with the language and have a basic understanding of coding in general, but would be interested to read about coding architecture for gaming.

I've never had to write much more than a few hundred lines of code at at time and never had to put much thought into code structure. Now I'm looking at building a program (game) that will no doubt require thousands and thousands of lines of code doing very different things that are sometimes quite unrelated. I don't want to end up with a big confusing jumbled mess of code. Any advice on the topic or resources you can point me to will be greatly appreciated.

Also, do you know if and how it would be possible to get my hands on some coding examples of economic models simulation, whether from a game or from an actual business application. I have some ideas of how I would code this but am curious to see how others might have done it and it there are some leaner ways to do it.

Thank you.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711 ... /1713#1713 has a good list.

The books on that list that have been recommended to me by other software engineers include:

Design Patterns by the Gang of Four

Mythical Man Month

Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch