So I’m playing Supermarket simulator. And if you notice TCG Simulator looks VERY similar. That’s because it uses the same assets. It looks like it’s actually the same shop location, on the same street. But in one game, it’s a supermarket, and in another game, it’s a card game similator.
But if you look, the neighborhood outside of your walls of your shop all looks very dead. Like you’re in a movie set, where the rest of the town is actually just wooden building backdrops.
So I figure, what if each “shop” could be a real shop? You play online, and when you log on, your shop has an individual save data. It gets played on a server, and each server has a different set of shops.
So if you’re a retro game shop, you’re playing in the lot of land number 14. So when you log on, you’re looking for a server that doesn’t have anyone playing on land lot 14. That’s the retro game shop.
When you log on, you can’t have infinate time, since time needs to always be moving for everybody else at the same pace…but time also doesn’t stop at 9pm, and the deliveries don’t stop either. So at 9pm-8am, you restock your shelves. You order backstock for your storage room.
And the shop right next to your retro games shop? Maybe that’s the supermarket. That’s land plot 13. And you can go into the supermarket, and you can buy things. Just like real life people can come into your retro games shop and buy things.
There’s also NPCs obviously, who would be the bulk of the customers.
But the neighborhood would actually look busy, and alive rather than one guy hanging out on a movie set.
And so, you could play supermarket simulator, and someone else could play TCG simulator, and someone else could play gas station simulator, and someone else could play retro games shop simulator, and when you you play online, you’re all on the same server, on the same street, and there could be an actual economy. Customers come in, spend their money on you, you spend some of your money at the gas station. There could be a wholesale simulator, where you play the shop the other shops are ordering from on the market. So like when you order furnature, or things to stock your shop, they have to be in stock at the wholesale simulator. Which means the guy who plays that role, affects ALL the stores on the server. Because if he just lets shit go out of stock, you use the competitor, which is automated, and always in stock, but at higher prices.
Let’s add powerwash simulator to the mix 🤔
Sounds like the metaverse, neat concept!
But like a really boring version of it without any kind of gameplay mechanics and it’s just basically life.
If your goal is to achieve realistic looking city streets the best way to do that isn’t an expensive online infrastructure and much more advanced simulation.
If the developers had the skills and time to do that they could more easily have more dense NPC crowds and richer local simulation.
The reason the games aren’t already like that is likely just cost, talent, and target performance, which you’d need a lot more of to execute your plan.
This was Second Life around 20 years ago.
Man, I managed to completely forget about that. My dad was really, really into that game. Like, that’s about all he did for most of 4 years and ended up leaving my mom for someone he met in game.
I guess SL wasn’t really any worse about that than any other game, plenty of people meet and get married in MMOs, but I think the raging custom-content sex parties in SL probably didn’t help matters at the time.
Wonder how that game is doing these days. Cursory web search says it’s still alive. I probably would have found it to be pretty interesting if I wasn’t so turned away from it by my family experience.
Pretty sure we’re in that
I’m not having fun or making money.
Who do I send a bug report to?
A therapist
But therapists are expensive :(
And all of those shops are in a SimCity
Stop! Please! I can only get SO erect!
That city is one of many in civilisation 6.
That is on only one Earthlike planet in the Elite Dangerous Milky Way galaxy.
Then you zoom further out to find that the Blokkats have moved into the star system next door, and are eyeing Sol hungrily.
I hate when my card shop gets nuked.
I think you just invented the Metaverse.
“invented”
Let’s see how the metaverse is doing now…oh…
Second Life.
Can we get The Black Sun while we’re at it?
Yeah but good this time. Build it from a gamers perspective.
Add in Thief Simulator and you’ve got the ultimate game
steals your game save
Oh, irony!
All these bargain bin simulators are just flipping the same template anyway so it probably wouldn’t be so hard to actually do
A kind of similar thing has been floating around for decades now. Combining something like Farming Sim with Euro Truck Sim and with flight sim to create an all-in-one logistics simulator
Maxis did something like that once in the 90s with Streets of Simcity, where you can load up a city you created and race around in it.
Sim copter let you load your Sim city saves too! Man I forgot how much fun that was.
…omg that sounds AMAZING!!! I haven’t even played any of those games. But like, your friend playing trucking simulator, and you play farming simulator. You grow corn. He trucks it.
Please add Fishing Barents sea to your megasim please. My Sjarken needs to sell its pollock in your fish market simulator
Nice idea but unfortunately good luck convincing everyone to collaborate into single super-game and integrate each “X simulator” as DLC assuming everyone also adhere guideline and consistent
It is a nice concept in theory. It has a bit of resemblance to the metaverse minus monetary enshittification, but there are some challenges to this.
It would for example end up just as dead if the other players got bored of it and stopped playing. Then there is server costs for something where there really isn’t that much realtime interaction in, and all these metagames would need to be just as fun with a global time at a set flow, or be OK with synching only at the end of the day.
These of course aren’t impossible challenges.
You could leave the “online” part to a simple global api backend and skip the gameserver itself to greatly reduce costs. You wouldn’t see the other players in person but you’d see their shops grow each new day, and there could be an NPC of their owner walking around.
You could bankrupt inactive players and give their lands to new players, and implement import/export costs for distant shops incentivizing local trade. You’d probably still want normal NPCs, but their interactions would have to be predetermined each day if you don’t have a game server running all day, and want to prevent cheating.
The implementation difficulty and cost greatly varies depending on how much interaction and fairness you want, but setting up an API server is fairly easy if you don’t worry about scaling in case the game really takes off.
This is only loosely related to your post but I just came across this project:
This is a cross-game modification system which randomizes different games, then uses the result to build a single unified multi-player game. Items from one game may be present in another, and you will need your fellow players to find items you need in their games to help you complete your own.
It supports a whole shitload of games: https://archipelago.gg/games
I only just started reading about it. So far it seems like insanity.
Ive played in a few of these. It’s an absolute blast once you get your settings dialed in and balanced to everyone else. If they’re not, then the player in the smallest game tends to have a lot of downtime.
The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.
Also, there are a massive number of unsupported games that you can play like this that are not part of the main website. https://multiworld.news/apworlds.html
The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.
Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)
