PDA

View Full Version : game design help



edg3
31-12-2010, 11:16 AM
So after being away for a week and getting sick I had an idea for a completely awesome game that I would want to play, so I'm going to make it...

Essentially the game draws from monopoly in a sense that you aim to be a successful business/properties owner but more in the style of games like simcity crossed with the tycoon games. Now I've done quite a bit of reading on the topic and there are quite a few things I need to work out before I get down to programming.

Firstly I need input on how I should do the daily artificial city life, now every person has some concept of how a city runs and what takes place, but replicating this is a mission and project in itself. I read an article on how simcity cuts corners in the simulation so in reality it doesn't simulate so much as pretend to simulate and I want to do the same. In my case I plan to build rules for different aspects of the game world, for instance a small bakery might have a ,maximum stock of say R35000 in stock and then sell everything at an average of 20 percent profit so to calculate their earnings for a day I will make a bare minimum they sell (say R1000 in a day) and add on a percentage of what's left in their stock and then pretend they get stock from company Y when their stock goes below 10 percent, and through this method I can build a fairly self controlling economy. Now this I want to apply to every aspect of the cash flow within the city you work in. do you think this would work? What could make it simpler? What should I add? What other considerations should I take?

I will post my next design question after I've gotten more feedback on this aspect.

AndrewJ
31-12-2010, 12:18 PM
Dude, whatever we tell you, get hold of an economics 3rd year student and ask their advice. Treat them to coffee/[alcoholic-beverage-of-their-choice-but-not-enough-to-get-them-completely-wasted] and say that you have this idea, have input from other game designers, ask their advice in general without showing them our input and then show them our input and ask for their advice again.

There are reasons that economists have been employed/contracted by game development companies [citation needed].

edg3
31-12-2010, 12:40 PM
ah, but you see I'm not trying to make a real economic simulation, what I want to do is build a system that from the outside looks like it is one, without it getting complicated if at all possible. The idea is you make a base behaviour that all elements follow and that make them seem connected, then let them flow

Nandrew
31-12-2010, 04:45 PM
That's a pretty broad question to come out of the blue. :P I wouldn't know where to start with regards to adding / removing features until you make a prototype demonstrating the basic sort of stuff you're going for. And if you can't make a prototype that effectively distills stuff to the basics, then maybe that's an indicator that you need to shave things off. :P

Right now, the question seems to be along the lines of, "I want to make a game like Sim City, can it be done?" The answer is yes, but I still don't *really* know what your game is all about until you can demonstrate the concept.

BlackShipsFillt
31-12-2010, 05:16 PM
Tycoon games rarely, if ever, implement sincerely accurate economies... I think they mostly work similarly you've laid out Edg3, the player starts with a little money and purchases money-generators with it, and also accrues money-losers (usually operational costs). There doesn't have to be serious interaction between the entities for this to work.

A decent game can be built around just that... the more money generators the player has the greater the overheads (perhaps because of transportation or organisational costs), so as the game progresses maximising the profit from the money-generators becomes increasingly important/difficult, and it becomes necessary to buy more concentrated money-generators (hotels instead of multiple guest houses for instance) that have lower organisational challenges. For example... I'm not sure what sort of gameplay you are looking for.

I personally like simulation, I'd love to play a game that does a good deep city simulation, where businesses have customers who are employed by other businesses and have homes and families etc, preferably in a slightly unrealistic way (because requiring 200 population to run a city stops the player from having any connection with the entities, while managing a town of 20-50 allows for more involvement in the citizens' lives)...

But if done wrong a complex simulation can amount to unmanageable, unintuitive, unpleasant chaos.

Anyway... those are my thoughts... not sure what you want to find out.

edg3
31-12-2010, 05:17 PM
My question currently is regarding the simulation of a city, so to speak, but not things like cars, people, population movement, etc. rather just the monetary movement between different businesses and households, and whatever else there will be. I think I may have been a bit vague, but what Im trying to work out currently is how I will build a world that looks like a simulation of a real world city for you to take control of, and doing it in a way that it will run speedily on low end computers (being a relative term as I will be developing with w7 phone in mind, and therefore using XNA 4.0 so computers would need shader model 2, but that isnt too important at this point).

Im currently looking at making all the interactions simple to the point that I work out how much a business earns, how much it currently has (stock/capital), and then pretending that the baker buys raw material from farmer X, and that farmer X gets his seed from seed depo Y. Meaning the most complex part of the system will be checking that all the places have enough stock for you to buy stock from them. But this all seems like it could be a lot less complicated to me. I want it to seem like it is a city with real cash flow without making the simulation overly complex.

Nandrew
01-01-2011, 01:39 AM
I think the best suggestion I can make right now is that the simulation itself may well get complicated, but you can help the player along nicely by organising the presentation of information.

Give them the most valuable, frequently changing or emergency-based stuff in the more readily-accessed info panes or dialogs. Players looking for more depth can find it buried just below that. Players who want even more control can go deeper. Etc etc.

I'd recommend trying to find ways to make your project work as a turn-based experience, because a lot of these challenges become easier to overcome.

BlackShipsFillt
01-01-2011, 04:06 AM
Trading between companies doesn't seem to me to be a particularly intensive operation at all.

It can be essentially turn based while still appearing to be playing in real time... if the simulation only iterates say every 30 seconds it'll make the numbers more manageable... like Nandrew said. And you can stagger the transactions so it doesn't all happen at once.

I would structure it with the individual businesses accessing goods exchanges, like in real life. Eg Shop A advertises its flour product (at a price calculated based on its expenses) on the food exchange class... Shop B needs flour for bread so it asks the exchange to give it the best price. Shop B connects to Shop A who is selling flour at the best price, flour and money are exchanged.

Just that simple structure, with hierarchical classes aggregating information and connecting supply and demand, is enough to produce a fairly decent simulation.

It could be made more nuanced still though... If businesses are made aware of competing products on the exchange they could try lower their prices if they are not making sales... this would create a natural price fluctuation that rises and falls with supply and demand.

Also, if you made multiple regional exchanges and a umbrella global exchange, or build in a transportation cost into the pricing, then you will find that compatible industries will clump together and businesses will distribute themselves across the simulation in a natural way (or at least in an interesting way... which is actually what is important here).

I don't think though that Business Y should be able to find Business X without going through a hierarchical structure that precalculates allot of the information. Without a hierarchy it will be very hard for Businesses to make informed decisions without costing a lot of computation.

[edit: I don't know if I'm just stating the obvious]

edg3
01-01-2011, 11:29 AM
Ok, I think I get what you mean.

I asked the Ludum Dare guys aswell and got some interesting thoughts on the whole system and I have a better picture of what I would like to implement (it is slightly more complex then what I was aiming for but I think it will work out better). Also, LegacyChrono pointed me to this (on Economic Sectors) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector) which I think groups things nicely for decent game logic.

These are the four sectors:

* Primary sector of the economy: Involves the extraction and production of raw materials, such as corn, coal, wood and iron. (A coal miner and a fisherman would be workers in the primary sector.)
* Secondary sector of the economy: Involves the transformation of raw or intermediate materials into goods e.g. manufacturing steel into cars, or textiles into clothing. (A builder and a dressmaker would be workers in the secondary sector.)
* Tertiary sector of the economy: Involves the provision of services to consumers and businesses, such as baby-sitting, cinema and banking. (A shopkeeper and an accountant would be workers in the tertiary sector.)
* Quaternary sector of the economy: Involves the research and development needed to produce products from natural resources. (A logging company might research ways to use partially burnt wood to be processed so that the undamaged portions of it can be made into pulp for paper.) Note that education is sometimes included in this sector.

Essentially I will focus on populating the game world with companies that fulfil the needs of the world (within its current context, so if I generate a world with a furniture factory, if a lumber mill doesnt exist by the next generation iteration I will make one somewhere on the world) to try and minimise the need for external (out of world) sources for things.

I have decided I will then split the types of land into 4 groups. Namely primary, secondary and tertiary sectors as described above and then residential. This should make it simpler for me to generate a nicely balanced game world business wide (and giving the player a lot of options to go for, as well as giving me the room to add win conditions like "take control of 25% of the primary sector in this region" or "grow your net value to R1 250 000 within the next 3 years" that are easy to understand, but that I will look at in more detail later).

The next thought on this topic is the idea of doing a turn based system. I was thinking that a turn based system would work well, and I would work with simple controls and "abstraction" where a day is a day and night cycleb(some businesses only make money at night :P) and then when the player is happy with what he has done he can advance 1 day, 7 days, or to the end of the month. The simulation then will tick through each day, and if anything bad (or helpful) occurs (like if your empire is nearing bankruptcy, or someone wants to buy your property, or offer you something) it will give you the option to ignore it and continue till the date that you wanted to advance to, or you can stop advancing on the current day and sort out whatever you need to. This means players that prefer to take time considering everything carefully and taking bigger risks but at the same time watch their properties carefully can do so, or people that prefer to not spend too much time managing the small things and just want to play it safe (get a steady income and slowly advance till you can afford something new/better) can play with a steady income skipping larger periods of time for ease.

The next thought is a lot simpler and quicker to explain, as it is the date/time system, because of the aim to work with the same idea of a fixed board style game world (although it wont be fixed per se, you can buy something and renovate/change the store/business, etc) I will make the date/time system easy to understand, it will be the same as in IRL, where a single "turn" is a day-night cycle.

My final thought at the moment is to do with the monetary gains, at the end of the turn it would do the following, it would work out first the sales for the tertiary sector (faked of course, more on this in a moment), afterwhich money from the teriary sector will be transfered through to the secondary sector, and then stock gained on the tertiary sector out of the holdings from the secondary, and so on for secondary-primary aswell. Then finally a note on the faking of sales, I thought it would be nice to make a supply-demand "graph" where things like food/necesities would peak at the end of the month when people get paid (and therefore those shops/businesses make killings), and then where in winter more people would get sick, on holidays people would go visit hotels/themeparks more, etc.

How is that sounding so far?

edg3
05-01-2011, 03:13 PM
Seeing as I didnt get much response I will assume the people that did read it didnt have much to say, now my next question will require quite a lot of listing, what all are the businesses (business types) that should be part of the simulation? Off the top of my head I can think along the lines of the following:

Essentials:


Doctors
Dentists
Schools
Grocery Stores


Non-essentials:

Theme parks
Cinemas


etc, any ideas? Or rather, what are all the businesses you would like to be able to choose between?

AndrewJ
05-01-2011, 04:37 PM
These are the four sectors: tl;dr? Think Settlers II. Well, that's what sprung up in my mind anyway.

Put this way, and now that I understand you better, it sounds like a reasonable system.

BlackShipsFillt
05-01-2011, 07:08 PM
Aaahh... I wrote a long reply and then my internet died :(

Basically I was concerned about the faking of sales. You said there may be supply/demand graph, which is nice, but you didn't say that the supply/demand was going to be based off of the apparent supply and demand.

I mean, if there are a whole lot of grocery stores next to each other the supply of groceries would be high and the shops would be unprofitable, and this would provide both some sense of real economics as well as a little bit of strategy.

But I don't know if whether the player would be affected by that sort of thing (you've said there is some sort of set board). If the player has not control over the sort of businesses run at locations then it really doesn't matter.

Essential Businesses Suggestions : Clothing Store, Textile Mill, Butchery, Appliance Store, Factory, Bank

Non-Essential : Accountants, Software Developers, Research Laboratory, Vehicle Store, Mechanic, Marketing Firm, Laundromat, Pizza Restaurant, Super Market

Wishlist : Casino, Escort Agency, Meth-Lab, Chop-Shop, Arms Manufacturer, Mafia Front

Also... Do hospitals and police stations have any effect in the game. eg. There may be less crime where there is a high concentration of police. There may be wealthier people living near Theme Parks and Restaurants... or is it the other way round... Restaurants and Vehicle shops make more money when they are situated in affluent areas (which are laid out at the start).

herman.tulleken
05-01-2011, 07:45 PM
edg3, I think it is a very cool idea - simulation games are quite cool and interesting to implement.

But they are difficultto implement; even putting gameplay aside.

If you have not implemented a simulation game before, I suggest you ignore all gameplay considerations (just for a moment!) and build a micro-technical prototype (with only two sectors).

Issues that you might run into:

It is difficult to have clean and clear dependencies between classes / game objects.
It is difficult to set up a closed system (no money in, no money out) that does not die down. Ideally, you should be able to set up a simulation that does not require interference that can go on forever. (This is a type of math-debug mode - see next point).
It is tricky to make a system that _can_ go on forever, not _make_ go on forever so that there is something fun for the player to do.
It might be difficult to get everything nice and fast. Turn-based will help, but with a big city you might still run into problems.


Building a technical prototype will help you resolve dependencies issues, and give you a framework in which you can construct rules for an interesting game. (Your design is already somewhat scary to implement, for me at least!)

One more thing to look at, implementation-wise, is statistical simulation, where you don't keep track of individuals, but only groups. (This makes the implementation much simpler, faster, and more robust).

For example, if manufacturers have $1000 in total, and the cost of their resource is $10 per unit, then they can only buy 100 units. Say, based on a game rule, they spend all of it, then you know $1000 has been transfered to the producers. If there are 100 producers, and they need $20 income per turn to survive, you know that at least some of them will "die" - between all of them and half of them. You can use a fancy-pantsy method to calculate a percentage, or just choose one based on a game rule (say, halfway between all and half = 75%). Then you simply let 75% of the producers die (chosen perhaps randomly, or with some fancier scheme). And so on.

I hope this is somewhat helpful :)

ht

SC(+)PE
06-01-2011, 05:01 AM
Reading through this thread I'm completely out of my depth, so I'll make this post short:

Banking

Our economy works almost entirely based on loans and debt. I don't know how you'd begin to model this, or if you'd even want to, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Without any simulated banking and loan system I assume you could just force inflation to make it seem realistic? Just thought I'd mention it, I wouldn't know details, but as a player I'd look for that sort of thing.

AndrewJ
06-01-2011, 08:47 AM
If you chose to prototype to get a sustainable economy that you can just leave and let it run, I think that it would be a good idea to *FIRST* implement a system like Herman suggested, and then - if you decide to go this route - implement rules like specific manufacturers must be within x radius of a producer.

Also, is the economy going to have little (not major?) fluctuations like little growth spurts and dips?

edg3
07-01-2011, 08:53 AM
@BlackShipsFillt:

There will be pseudo-saturation considerations in the code (50 grocery stores means many will end up going bankrupt eventually) that will hopefully after the initial run clear out any bad distributions of goods. Much like other games that generate worlds I will be running through the engine for 5 years prior to the player seeing the world which should clear out the bad distribution of buildings (if there are any), and I will be using the proximity of people to certain businesses for their choice of where they shop, etc. so yeah, the closest shop will win.

As for control of businesses at locations, if you buy a business you can obviously keep it what it is, but if there is say an under-supply of dentists in the world as the player you could change the business to a Dentist (which would take X turns to complete for renovations, moving stuff out then moving stuff in, etc).

Hospitals and police stations will have an effect in the game, but it will be slightly more superficial, well policed areas that have other necesities (like fire stations, hospitals and grocery stores) will have slightly more expensive rent rates, whereas the areas that are barely policed will have lower rents otherwise people wont want to live there. Does that make sense? It is a simple way of handling things but dumbing down helps me with the ways Im cutting corners for the simulation to run nice and fast on Win7 Phone.

@herman.tulleken:

I am building a micro-prototype of the economy (not rushing it though, it currently runs and fizzles out but I havent gotten thenumbers correct yet), but with 3 of the 4 sectors (I didnt include housing). I have a clear idea of how the classes Ive mocked up will translate into the game world for the player and it is actually easier than I initialy thought it would be, every business has an ID and a "type", the ID and type will be used by the game world for the representation of the business in the world for the player, and the map will just be a simple 2D array that contains data representing roads or stands and what that stand contains (business ID and type, or in the case of houses house ID).

The way I plan to populate the world with business should hopefully make it a fairly closed instance, but the "people" in the game that spend their money wont have "jobs" as part of the game, I will just assume they have the money because they are working somewhere in the world, so money will come in form there, and the money that goes out completely (for instance if you buy an empty piece of ground) goes into a state coffer (I may have to in the end track how much money is going in and out and balance it), but with the player interference it doesnt make much difference.

(Case study of Rollercoaster Tycoon 1, the initial park always failed, even the ones with prebuilt rides, it was up to the player to see that the theme parks needed things to make a profit and to put them in, as long as the player fixed the few little niggles with the initial world you could then leave your park to run indefinitely and just rack up the money, rather than the player being able to start the game, put their phone down and earn big bucks, then come back and buy everything on the map).

For speed Im going to work using numbers, every building will have its turn number stored in it, if the building isnt within a certain radius of your view of the world it wont update (it will be forced to update if a random event like "house burns down triggers" on it and it is out of the view) but when your view moves into range of an object the object is checked then updated. I may run into some issues with keeping this from ruining the game for the player, but it can be easily fixed. The other thing is all player properties must get updated. That way any event generated on any property (eg robbery, fires, accidents, etc) will happen as they should at the exact moment they should, and the players bankruptcy of businesses will be known immediately but the parts of the world the player isnt interested in currently wont affect the speed of what he is currently doing (as much).

For the dying out of businesses and such, read parts of what I said to BlackShips and let me know what you think of that method, thanks.

@sc(+)pe:

I was thinking every year I would increase the costs of the base items slowly but surely (like wood, steel, rubber, etc) which hopefully would look like inflation over time and give a sense of pricing going up (as well as property values going up over time). As for loans, I was thinking that I should make a "bank" system, but it only really affects the player as the player takes a loan of say R100000 at the start of the game, where every month interest is added to the loan, and bank charges are taken from the players bank account, and every month you have to pay back a percentage of your loan (so you could go bankrupt if you dont manage your money well). Rollercoaster tycoon this for their "bank" system and it is simple, easy to understand and easy to implement.

@AndrewJ:

That is indeed what Im going to be doing, but I havent yet tweaked some of the ideas and numbers enough for it to run for long, but I will get there :)




TL;DR?
I referenced Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 a lot, talked about stuff, and agreed or disagreed with some of the above things. At times I explained my ideas to get more input.

herman.tulleken
07-01-2011, 10:18 AM
Cool, it sounds like you have a good implementation strategy down already :) (Once done, I hope you'll do a write-upo for Dev.Mag about the how and what of it, in all the gory details!)

If you are using an open system, it should be a little easier to balance (because you can always just pour in more cash...people do get raises, after all :P) (And you can always fake-away super-inflation by "stealing" money from all entities).

I have two questions:

How big will your city be (how many business and people...just ballpark)?
What are the things the player will be able to do? You mentioned switching businesses, buying land, etc.


The idea of pre-simulation sounds good. You might discover such cities have characteristics that makes it possible to generate them directly which might chop off some loading time if needed.

The way you handle turns sounds very interesting. When a business is updated, is it done so that it looks like it has been updating all the time? (For instance, how will it deal with a close-by competitor that goes out of business while it is out of view?)

AndrewJ
07-01-2011, 12:53 PM
For speed Im going to work using numbers, every building will have its turn number stored in it, if the building isnt within a certain radius of your view of the world it wont update (it will be forced to update if a random event like "house burns down triggers" on it and it is out of the view) but when your view moves into range of an object the object is checked then updated. I may run into some issues with keeping this from ruining the game for the player, but it can be easily fixed. The other thing is all player properties must get updated. That way any event generated on any property (eg robbery, fires, accidents, etc) will happen as they should at the exact moment they should, and the players bankruptcy of businesses will be known immediately but the parts of the world the player isnt interested in currently wont affect the speed of what he is currently doing (as much).

I'm assuming that you mean the data for the building won't update. I completely understand the need for not updating gfx needlessly.

Before over-optimising and potentially causing yourself all kinds of needless complications, do some tests. WP7 devices have at least a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Windows_Phone_7#Minimum_requirements). Let's say that from a processing (not GPU) point of view, you only have a crazily small 25% of the processor to play with (because the user has picked up a virus on his/her phone :-) That's still 250 million operations per second. Get yourself a device, plonk down a simulation that is, say, four times as big as you imagine you'll be playing on and TEST.

edg3
07-01-2011, 12:59 PM
(Once done, I hope you'll do a write-upo for Dev.Mag about the how and what of it, in all the gory details!)

I have two questions:

How big will your city be (how many business and people...just ballpark)?
What are the things the player will be able to do? You mentioned switching businesses, buying land, etc.


The way you handle turns sounds very interesting. When a business is updated, is it done so that it looks like it has been updating all the time? (For instance, how will it deal with a close-by competitor that goes out of business while it is out of view?)
Write-up, definitely!

Those are two very good questions! :O :O (two for emphasis)

1) I hadnt really thought of how big the game world would be, but Im thinking of having several difficulties and modes (like multiplayer, I already have a mechanic I can use for that!) and I suppose the size of the world would rely on that (ie. Difficulty choices of "neighbourhood", "small-city", "new-york", neighbourhood would say have 40 pregenerated properties with 10 more to expand (ie. open land) while a small-city would aim at being more growth oriented and have say 150 pregenerated businesses and such and 50~100 open spaces) so the system will most likely rely on the number of businesses rather than the size of the game world.

2) Currently my list of player actions looks something like this (I might miss some things, sorry, but point them out anyway!):

Property Management (Buy/Sell/Manage[ie. set rent if you rent it out, or set markup, or re-"zone" it])
Banking (Loans, Income & Expenses [a list of your transactions and their dates])

So uh, looking at that there are several actions that fall under umbrellas, so the complete list would look more like:

Buy Property
Sell Property
Re-"zone" property
Set property rent
set property markup
Pay back your loan
Take out a loan
View your income and expenses

The rest of the game play will come from competing against other corporate entities, micro-managing (and macro-managing) your funds, and achiving some goal. (Im going to have alerts in that just add to the player experience, which will just be a news ticker of sorts, but I think it would be cool "Your opposition was featured in a Time magazine article titled 'Emerging Competitors' which mentions your company" or whatever just to make the player see things "happen" when they buy/sell things)

As for the instance where a competitor is nearby, if it is part of the goal of the current scenario then the business will also update so that you get the notifications for it, but as an added measure perhaps I will allow a player to put "watches" on (say a maximum of 10) properties and then be notified what happens with them as part of their updates, etc. I need to think some more on those lines though, we'll see where this goes!

edg3
07-01-2011, 01:03 PM
I do have a device to test on, but it is easier to put these things in when implementing the system initially than it will be to try after I have something to run on the phone and then find it is too slow. Also, when designing for something like the w7p you need to use as little of the CPU as possible anyway (within reason), the higher utilisation the higher the heat it generates, and the hotter a CPU uses the more power it consumes, so in an effort to have (even if only slightly) longer battery life will be beneficial.

As for a simulation four times as big as I imagine, I kind of want to build the system in a way that I can try build a mode where a world of businesses and the likes are generated once off and it can become your "sandbox" world, but that isnt part of the initial design as it cant be played in a 10 to 30 minute session.

edg3
23-01-2011, 11:16 AM
Ok, so my simulation works (I need to tweak and adjust, but as it stands I can use it as the underbelly of my game), you can look at some numbers on pastebin. (http://edg3.pastebin.com/qDtJXSi6)

Next thing is minor, I asked for businesses and stuff earlier, and I decided to crowd-source this a bit, so you can submit your ideas (http://goo.gl/ZlePm) and check what there is already (http://goo.gl/l7OKp) to get an idea of what I'm looking for, this will hopefully give a nice variety of businesses to the game.

My next proper question is to do with the UI, more specifically what the player sees. I want to controls to be intuitive and easy to understand, so I thought of this model (please excuse the roughness of the mockup):
http://oi51.tinypic.com/dw9dua.jpg
I thought of ways to do this and finally came down to a simple set of controls to handle all actions of the player, where the red blocks will be "buttons", 1 through 4 are permanently there, and 5 and 6 are for confirmation. The things that players can do will be simpler then what I gave before (more or less).

Button 1 would be the "view" button, when you select a property you can view it (if you own it you can change the properties of it, like what the property is), the dialog would pop up in the middle of the screen to give the property info, button 5 OR 6 would close the window.

Button 2 would be the "buy/sell" button, the property you selected you will try to buy (or sell if you own it) which you will either confirm or cancel using button 5 OR 6.

Button 3 would be the "bank" button, this will list things like your total property value, latest major transactions, monthly income/expense data, your loan amount, button 5 OR 6 would close the window.

Button 4 would be the "end turn" button, this will come up with a choice of 3 "end turn" options (1 day, 7 days, to end of month) and the last used one will be selected automatically, you then can confirm or cancel your choice using button 5 OR 6.

To select something on the map, the player can drag on the map area of the screen till the property wanted is selected, and then to move around on the map the player uses a "flick" which is a fast movement across the screen.

That should cover all the options I wanted to give the player, and I feel it is simple enough but too tedious, I don't want to make it too technical for the player, but at the same time I don't want to make it abstracted to the point that the player doesn't feel in control. Any thoughts, ideas? Criticisms? Am I crazy?

Also a side note, this will be playable by 8th Feb if at all possible (I will be showing it off at the community meet, so that is my target).