Simulating an entire village in real-time seems challenging enough. But in the same way, developers Last Day of Work managed to create a wholly satisfying experience for strategy and simulation fans with Virtual Villagers. Researching, farming and procreating are just some of things players will have control over in managing their villagers. Resources, food and housing can also be controlled or motivated by a player's decision. Arthur Humphrey from Last Day of Work took time out to answer some questions regarding Virtual Villagers. Check it out below.

[William Usher] For games like Fish Tycoon and Virtual Villagers, amongst others, is an engine utilizing real time the cornerstone of the development team?

[Arthur Humphrey] The real time engine is certainly important and has evolved from title to title (Plant Tycoon, then Fish Tycoon, then Virtual Villagers). It is not the most reusable bit of code in our framework, however. The parts of the framework that handle screen navigation, buttons, save slots, and other
'casual game best practices' are much more reusable. We find that the real time parts have to be drastically altered from game to game as we struggle to achieve a good balance and game flow.

How long did it take to design Virtual Villagers?

The first version of the game (Mobile/PDA) took about 6 months to design and implement, then while it was on the market we optimized the balance for several more months (eventually issuing a patch). When we finally brought it to desktop (Mac/PC) it was quite well balanced, fortunately. Still, it took another 6 months to enhance it and bring it up to the standards of desktop indie/casual games.

What was the biggest difference between the Mobile version of Virtual Villagers, and the desktop versions?

There were two main differences between the handheld version of the game, and the desktop version. 1) The Graphics. You can always reduce graphics from a desktop version to a handheld version, but when you design the game on a handheld version, there is not much you can do to reuse any of the graphic assets. That goes the same for sound and music more or less. A complete new set of all assets was required. 2) The usage models. When people were able to bring the game around with them, they could check in for 2 minutes, and keep a close watch on their tribe. When we started testing the desktop version we started to see 'weekend death syndrome' on the tribes. People would be playing at work, they would go home and come back on Monday morning to find a village full of skeletons and corpses. We had to make significant changes to the real time engine to accommodate these changes in usage.

[William Usher] Was it more challenging designing Virtual Villagers or Fish Tycoon?

[Arthur Humphrey] Virtual Villagers was much more difficult to design. Fish Tycoon uses a pretty familiar 'tycoon' lying model underneath all the breeding and real time elements. That allowed us to have a point of reference which helped us stay on target. In contrast, Virtual Villagers was always intended to be much more 'sandbox' a very open ended, play how you want game. It made it a great challenge to balance that kind of game with a story that progresses in a more or less linear manner.

How did you decide to go from simulating virtual fish and plants, to villagers?

It was evolution, both figuratively and literally.

The game is not an easy walk in the park. Simulating the growth of the villagers requires actual strategy. Was that always the intent of the game's design, to break away from the arcade like qualities of The Sims?

Actually it has been observed that many of the elements of Virtual Villagers are closer to a number of games besides the Sims. For example, Black and White, Sim City, and Age of Empires. The game deals more with resource management, human and otherwise, rather than the motivations and concerns of the individual villagers. We do think it is important to bring out the individuality of each villager, however, and we are enhancing and emphasizing that in the upcoming follow up to Virtual Villagers. We are also very excited about the story behind the game, the story of this magic island called Isola, which permeates all of our recent releases. Just like in the movies, glitz and bling can leave an expensive movie feeling 'soulless', can't it? Maybe it's all about the story, and the characters, and that's what we are trying to focus on.

[William Usher] With the ability to constantly expand the growth of the village population, is there a limit on how many villagers can fit into the play area?

[Arthur Humphrey] The population limit in Virtual Villagers is roughly 90. I say roughly because it can be exceeded by a pregnancy with twins or triplets as you fill up tribe. During testing we did stress tests on older machines using several hundred villagers, so it was never really a hardware problem. Once you have around 100 villagers, the game really changes and becomes a bit too much of a 'people aquarium'. They manage pretty fine without the player at a certain point (by design), but having too many villagers makes the game hard to manage and harder to interact with. In VV2 we are addressing some of these emergent qualities of the game, and trying to nudge the players' experiences into slightly different areas.

Will Virtual Villagers 2 be a bigger game, in terms of play area and population, or will it be a more refined game, focusing more on what was already there and just giving players more options?

Virtual Villagers 2 (which will actually be not called Virtual Villagers 2, but rather Virtual Villagers: ) is set on another part of the same island. It will be bigger in terms of the number of toys in the game, the number of things to do with your villagers, and the number of challenges. The map size will be fairly close to VV1.

How difficult is it to design a game that takes advantage of real time events, and why don't we see more developers implementing this feature into different genres?

Short answer: it's a nightmare. Testing and debugging would obviously be much more challenging when you have a game that has to run for _days_ before you can fully and honestly test certain elements. Even more challenging, however, is that the game opens itself up to a much wider potential usage: some players will leave it running all day, others will check in from time to time, still others will check in maybe once a day or even less. This makes it very difficult to create a fun experience for all of these different play styles. This is the part that we tweaked and tuned during many months of the game's early release, so it looks like we just 'got it right' in the desktop version but in fact it took a very long time.

Given the amount of time and effort required to tweak an engine utilizing real-time events, would you ever consider focusing purely on making the engine part of a software development kit, and licensing it out as third-party support to other developers?

I have certainly toyed with the idea of selling the framework as middleware. I shopped around a great deal for a middleware solution that had everything I wanted, including mac/pc support. With our casual game framework on top of our rendering layers and hardware abstraction layers, we have a very pleasant, streamlined framework now. The problem with selling it is that it would shift our focus...now we would have to support it, document it better, and we are just having too much fun making these games to consider that kind of move.

[William Usher] Virtual Villagers is the sort of game that requires patience, but can be played over a very long period of time. So I'm quite curious, what has been the general feedback from the public regarding Virtual Villagers?

[Arthur Humphrey] Virtual Villagers is not for everyone. We have seen many players who just 'don't get it'. Fortunately, many players do 'get it', and the ones that do seem quite enthralled. Our most consistent feedback is relating to the game's ending, and we hope that some of that is simply that the players want more they want the story to continue, and it will very soon. There were also some design concerns with the ending that we looked very closely at and we hope to improve on. Overall, though, we are thrilled that so many people have gotten so invested in the game, and in the story, and we are very very thankful of the support and enthusiasm that we get from the game's fans. We are progressing very quickly now on the follow up, mainly because we have gotten the framework and other elements to a stage where it is very fun (and technically very streamlined) to work on the game, and we feel compelled to continue telling the story of Isola in an interactive and dynamic way.

Is it possible Isola could evolve into a video game version of "The Island" from the TV show Lost? And speaking of evolution...would you consider porting Virtual Villagers over onto the next-gen systems' online services, if given the opportunity?

I started watching Lost in season 2. It is a great show, and I immediately saw things that seemed appealing for VV (it was already out on PDA). I try to be careful not to take too much inspiration from a show like that because it can get very easy to get sucked in, and start becoming dependent on these external sources of inspiration. It would be really easy to lean on the brilliant writing of a successful show and get lazy. That's not to say that we refuse to be inspired by it (and other shows and movies) when something strikes us....

[William Usher] Thanks for taking time to answer our questions. Any final comments for independent gamers and developers?

[Arthur Humphrey] Well we are certainly rooting for indies, and the feedback we get when we share our stories seems to be that our example is somewhat encouraging to them. I don't think anyone would argue that the huge budgets of the AAA titles really limit the types of risks and innovations that they can take on, so it shouldn't be surprising that a lot of the really innovative stuff is coming from small, even tiny, developers. Look at some of these recent hits...Darwinia (and Defcon!), The Ship, and now Valve's Portal which apparently was derived from IGF finalists last year. The time is perfect now, as the distribution channels are well established, but the 'door has not closed'...yet for tiny upstarts. Clearly it is getting more competitive, and I personally think a shake out is coming down the road, but the timing has arguably never been better for 'indies'.

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By: William Usher
Posted: Thursday November 23, 2006