To begin the game the player starts with an office/depo and a sawmill.
From the office the logging team leaves each day to cut down trees. They travel quickly along the road to their destination and begin their job. For every day a team works they have to be payed, to increase productivity more team would have to be hired so more tress could be cut down.
After a period of time the loggers will finish a block and move on to the next. Loggers can only move 2 squares away from a road tile as if they move any further they cannot get help in an emergency. While I have not planned to add a case where there is an emergency the rule is there to limit and challenge the player.
After the player has gone through learning how to use the loggers the player will receive an order from Big Co. The order will give the number of wood units wanted, price for completion and the time the order has to be done by in order to earn money.
In order to complete the order the player must move the cut logs from the logging site to the wood mill to be processed and sent which requires logging trucks. Logging truck are sent out from the office and can only travel on roads. They are able to carry a certain number of logs per trip(in my example I made it three) before they have to drop off their load. They can only pick up logs from squares adjacent to the road, diagonal included. After the truck has dropped of it load it can return to the office or go out and collect more logs.
In order to collect wood from further locations roads must be built so the logging trucks can collect cut logs. The cost is that road take up space which could be used to grow more trees, but allow access to more trees to log.
In order to make the company sustainable tress must be replanted in order to have a future harvest after all the original trees have been cut down. I am not sure whether to have a separate team that replants trees or use the loggers, but either way you will have to pay them in order to replant, which would cost about the same as paying a logging team to log. The choice is then whether to spend money on logging more trees and earning money or planting them so you will be able to continue making money.
I believe that by trying to run this company that the player will learn how important it is to manage our natural
resources so that they don't run out and possible how big companies can be pressured into making bad decisions in order to make money faster.
The mechanics of the game will be:
-Time based goals: the player will have to complete orders to make money and stay in the game.
-Play till you're dead: the player can continue to play the game until the point at which they run out of money and 'die'.
-Increasing difficulty: the game will get increasingly harder as orders become larger and require less time per unit to complete. This of course means the player has to spend more money on logging teams an trucks in order to complete orders in time and make a profit.
-Day/Night cycle: during the day the workers work but at night they go home and rest. The game will give a overview of the day when night arrives and then skip to dawn. The player must realize that the further away a starting site is the longer it take the loggers before they start work, also the further away a end site the sooner they must end work in order to return home in time for dinner.
Things I have considered adding are upgrades for logging teams, trucks and roads which make the process of outputting units of wood quicker, such as upgrading from gravel road to asphalt to allow trucks to travel faster, although I am not sure how this would affect the game play I have in mind and won't make it a certainty until I do.
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