Citybound – A city building game using actor-based distributed simulation
Highly complex, in-depth, system simulation is like a siren song for game developers and players alike.<p>There's this perception that an amazing simulation will be the basis for an amazing game.<p>In practice, high-quality simulations seem to be interesting but not all that fun. See: F.E.A.R.'s Goal-Oriented Action Planning (<a href="https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html" rel="nofollow">https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/goap.html</a>) which had to be modified to broadcast its intent to the player, because play-testers felt the game was unfair and that the A.I. was cheating.<p>And it also seems like players can't really tell the difference between a sophisticated simulation and a handful of heuristics with some calls to random() thrown in. From the perspective of a player who does not know how the simulation works, the latter can _seem_ like the output of a complex system. See: _Designing Games_ by Tynan Sylvester, developer of RimWorld (<a href="https://tynansylvester.com/book/" rel="nofollow">https://tynansylvester.com/book/</a>).<p>Dwarf Fortress, I think, is the exception which proves this rule.<p>Anyway, I think simulations like this are really cool to build, but hard to turn into a fun game.