Fernweh

Wander a day, a first milestone

Pun intended.

As some of you know, we are building a camping tycoon (Fernweh). A cozy/relaxing ‘tycoon’ game with an emphasis on planning and simulation. These contradict each other but we will make it work. And that requires a lot of thinking, researching, testing and prototyping.

Our first milestone: timing and beats

We are working on one of the most crucial parts of the game: how do we make a game interesting where building, growing and maintaining is organically and may take hours, days or even years in game to complete? This is very controversial in modern tycoon games where moving a tree or a building is a matter of a few clicks.

So one of our initial thoughts was: let’s have an option to increase the game speed, like RimWorld, where you can toggle between 0–5 different speeds. This solves the issue that you can now quickly grow (and chop down) trees and build buildings. But let’s be real here. If fast forwarding a game is a solution to a boring game, the foundation is broken.

Let’s step back (pun intended). First, some facts:

  • The game has days (including nights). Workers and visitors need to be able to do a couple of things: sleep, wake up and do an X amount of activities.
  • Visitors come and go for multiple days in which they need to reach a certain happiness (one of the goals).
  • The game has seasons (unlike some tycoon games, we have all 4, all with different challenges).
  • The year consists of 4 seasons.
  • A map size is between 200×200 m and 2×2 km.

So, unless you put one toilet in the corner of a 2 km² map (don’t do it Josh), a guest should do roughly the following:

  • sleep (rest)
  • eat/drink (hunger)
  • toilet (bladder)
  • shower (hygiene)
  • 1 or 2 activities (enjoyment)

So around 4–5 things during the day.

Currently we are thinking of around 6 minutes of real time per day, that would give us around 4 minutes of wake time for activities. So each activity may take up to one minute (include walk time) to complete.

If we do some quick math (these are examples, not final numbers) we can end up with 11 hours of real time for one year (at speed 1).

  • 28 days per season (28 × 6 minutes = 168 minutes = 2.8 hours)
  • 4 seasons per year (4 × 2.8 hours = 11.2 hours)

If a year is a beat, 11 hours is too long for a game session.

Shorten the year?

28 days per season might be too much, what about 20, 10? Or what about having the low seasons have fewer days? Maybe.

Shorten the day?

Risky. If the goal is to have a good ranking of your camping, we can’t have guests only use the toilet before going to sleep again. Not an option.

Remove the winter?

RollerCoaster Tycoon has no low seasons, it is skipped. Our game idea is that planning ahead is one of the pillars. I strongly believe that a low season can not only be beautiful to watch (careful, this should not be the gameplay) but also be a real gameplay. While you might have winter campers and heated housing, a winter should give you time to build, maintain and recover facilities and foliage after a high season of travelers. No, not removing the winter.

Let’s take a look at a few other games.

  • Against the Storm: 1 year = 10–12 minutes
  • Two Point Hospital: 27 minutes at normal speed
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: 55 minutes at normal speed
  • Timberborn: 3 hours per cycle
  • RimWorld: 16 hours at base speed
  • Stardew Valley: 26 hours without speed controls

I want to zoom in on RimWorld. It is a game many of our inspiration is coming from: the worker schedule is neat, the worker/building timing seems nice and I never had real moments that I was bored. But, I used the speed controls often, especially the second or third time I played the game. When you speed up the game two things happen: building is faster, story beat is more cramped.

The difference, that we believe, between RimWorld and Fernweh is that we may attract different types of players to the same game: one who loves to build and manage, and some who like to enjoy planning and making everything beautiful. The decorating player might play the game on speed 1 during the whole session. Beats come at a minimum pace and there is plenty to beautify. Do we need to torture the builder in this case, or is speeding up a tool to serve both?

Walk speed, map size, the number of activities per day, the goal and game beats all depend on each other and that is one of the wonderful things of game design.

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