Hello all! It's Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>.
On December, we have updated <Ratropols>, exhibied in a game show called Burning Beaver,
and went to a team picnic to look back the year of 2022 and encourage togetherness of the team.
Thanks for all who came to Burning Beaver and left comments for the game!
On the last DevDiary, I've talked about the systems to make the citizens richer.
For this time, let's talk about the exact opposite side.
No, not making them poorer, but how the player could get back the riches flew to the citizens.
Tax
In <Ratopia>, citizens earn their money by following the player's orders.
Whenever they gather, transport, construct, demolish or whatever they do as ordered,
they get certain amount of money from the player as the price,
meaning that the currency is flowing from the government to the citizens.
They do pay for buying consumer goods, but since those products are also produced by the other citizens with certain prices,
the money anyway flows continuously to the citizens.
When the government savings ran out and the player cannot pay the citizens any longer,
the citizens stop to work and the whole city will be paralyzed.
Thus the player has to manufacture money at the mint or to trade with the other cities,
and collect tax from the citizens to make enough money circulate in the city.
Everything seems not gonna be okay
In order to impose taxes to the citizens, laws must be set before.
This system's intention was to make the players able to create their own idea tax laws.
The laws could be like the ones in the real world, such as taxes based on their income or living standard.
But more than that, as a game, the possibilities of making weird laws such as tax on beard, number of sleeps,
or number of their walking area, could give a great fun.
Still, to make this happen, basic function of imposing taxes at a certain time,
and how will the imposed taxes could be collected had to be considered and programmed first.
To collect the imposed taxes, various ideas followed up;
make the player to visit citizen by citizen and collect directly,
make citizens working in tax office to visit others and collect taxes,
make citizens to pay their taxes by visiting tax office,
and make taxes to be collected automatically when the day ends...
We have decided to go with the easiest-to-make one: make the player to visit citizen by citizen.
This method had a beneficial point that the player can be aware of how much they have collected
and that the taxes are actually imposed.
However, how much the citizens are holding as taxes was not easy to notice,
so that the player cannot distinguish whom to visit and not.
Even if they are possible to be distinguished, it was quite a boring job to visit all the citizens.
So the testers began to collect taxes while the citizens are sleeping or in toilet,
and felt that there needs to be some other methods.
By the name of authority, I collect your taxes!
So the structure to help gathering taxes was designed.
At first, we were thinking that the tax accountant to visit a citizen and collect taxes.
But sometimes the tax payer was faster than the accountant,
and in addition, when the tax payer works way too far,
the accountant took all day long to collect a single rat's tax.
This clearly showed that even the AI was having hard time collecting all the taxes by visiting.
Eventually, we've make tax officers to work at the office and collect taxes remotely.
This made it possible to measure the time required for collecting taxes,
resulting that the player could be built tax office fit with the number in need,
and lessened chance of miscalculated taxation created.
In the game, in the real, tax accountant works hard
As the tax office began to work as intended, money in the city finally began to circulate flexibly.
However, beware that if the tax law is too harsh, then there could be revolt.
Things must be flow without hurry.
Policies
As mentioned above, <Ratopia> was designed to make the player to set various laws.
Thus, there had to be functions to diverse the tax options,
such as to affect on low classes, they house owners, daily bases or every other day, and etc.
Within the boundary, the system was structuralized to make all the possible options.
So that 'Tax on middle class with 10% of their wealth every other day' kind of laws could be created.
Many are to be put to improve the system
The structuralized system could also be used to make new policies.
These policies include commercial laws to enable or disable usability of items,
or welfare laws to improve standard of living of the low-income classes.
However, this flexible system also has caused other problems.
The first was the high entry barriers.
Since there were too many set from the beginning,
this could look really complicated if not aware of the functions.
The solutions for this was to put the limit on possible settings in the early game,
or to put presets that do not require detailed settings.
so that the players can get used to the system step by step.
Early model of policies page
However, how will the limit to be distinguished with what standard,
or how will the UIs for preset to be implemented are still under discussion.
The second problem was that the consequence of the policies is not shown when setting the policy.
Since the player cannot check the data at the moment,
all the results such as how much taxes would be collected or how much would the citizens' happiness might fall,
had to be measured through trials and errors.
At first, I would like to put an expected values of the possible outcome.
But the measuring was impossible to be accurate enough.
The value could not be measured since there is time gap between the imposing and collecting of the tax,
and since the citizens are keep doing their consuming activities and income-generating activities,
the errors could only be enlarged.
Fluctuating wealth of a citizen daily bases and early tax system model
In the end, we concluded to let the players to calculate the possibilities and set the policies themselves,
and only after the consequences, it is natural to modify the policies, as in the real world.
But I still wonder if there could be a better possible options.
This got a bit long again!
When think back every day than I am having, I always feel a shame that I could have done better.
Time runs faster day by day, and more works are coming up every time.
I feel the needs to buckle up and do my works with more efficiency.
Anyways, happy new year!
Hope you all have a great new year of 2023,
and hope you all have the best of luck.
Homepage: https://www.CasselGames.com/
Steam Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2244130/Ratopia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CasselGames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CasselGames
Hello all! It's Cassel, developer of <Ratopia>.
On December, we have updated <Ratropols>, exhibied in a game show called Burning Beaver,
and went to a team picnic to look back the year of 2022 and encourage togetherness of the team.
Thanks for all who came to Burning Beaver and left comments for the game!
On the last DevDiary, I've talked about the systems to make the citizens richer.
For this time, let's talk about the exact opposite side.
No, not making them poorer, but how the player could get back the riches flew to the citizens.
Tax
In <Ratopia>, citizens earn their money by following the player's orders.
Whenever they gather, transport, construct, demolish or whatever they do as ordered,
they get certain amount of money from the player as the price,
meaning that the currency is flowing from the government to the citizens.
They do pay for buying consumer goods, but since those products are also produced by the other citizens with certain prices,
the money anyway flows continuously to the citizens.
When the government savings ran out and the player cannot pay the citizens any longer,
the citizens stop to work and the whole city will be paralyzed.
Thus the player has to manufacture money at the mint or to trade with the other cities,
and collect tax from the citizens to make enough money circulate in the city.
Everything seems not gonna be okay
In order to impose taxes to the citizens, laws must be set before.
This system's intention was to make the players able to create their own idea tax laws.
The laws could be like the ones in the real world, such as taxes based on their income or living standard.
But more than that, as a game, the possibilities of making weird laws such as tax on beard, number of sleeps,
or number of their walking area, could give a great fun.
Still, to make this happen, basic function of imposing taxes at a certain time,
and how will the imposed taxes could be collected had to be considered and programmed first.
To collect the imposed taxes, various ideas followed up;
make the player to visit citizen by citizen and collect directly,
make citizens working in tax office to visit others and collect taxes,
make citizens to pay their taxes by visiting tax office,
and make taxes to be collected automatically when the day ends...
We have decided to go with the easiest-to-make one: make the player to visit citizen by citizen.
This method had a beneficial point that the player can be aware of how much they have collected
and that the taxes are actually imposed.
However, how much the citizens are holding as taxes was not easy to notice,
so that the player cannot distinguish whom to visit and not.
Even if they are possible to be distinguished, it was quite a boring job to visit all the citizens.
So the testers began to collect taxes while the citizens are sleeping or in toilet,
and felt that there needs to be some other methods.
By the name of authority, I collect your taxes!
So the structure to help gathering taxes was designed.
At first, we were thinking that the tax accountant to visit a citizen and collect taxes.
But sometimes the tax payer was faster than the accountant,
and in addition, when the tax payer works way too far,
the accountant took all day long to collect a single rat's tax.
This clearly showed that even the AI was having hard time collecting all the taxes by visiting.
Eventually, we've make tax officers to work at the office and collect taxes remotely.
This made it possible to measure the time required for collecting taxes,
resulting that the player could be built tax office fit with the number in need,
and lessened chance of miscalculated taxation created.
In the game, in the real, tax accountant works hard
As the tax office began to work as intended, money in the city finally began to circulate flexibly.
However, beware that if the tax law is too harsh, then there could be revolt.
Things must be flow without hurry.
Policies
As mentioned above, <Ratopia> was designed to make the player to set various laws.
Thus, there had to be functions to diverse the tax options,
such as to affect on low classes, they house owners, daily bases or every other day, and etc.
Within the boundary, the system was structuralized to make all the possible options.
So that 'Tax on middle class with 10% of their wealth every other day' kind of laws could be created.
Many are to be put to improve the system
The structuralized system could also be used to make new policies.
These policies include commercial laws to enable or disable usability of items,
or welfare laws to improve standard of living of the low-income classes.
However, this flexible system also has caused other problems.
The first was the high entry barriers.
Since there were too many set from the beginning,
this could look really complicated if not aware of the functions.
The solutions for this was to put the limit on possible settings in the early game,
or to put presets that do not require detailed settings.
so that the players can get used to the system step by step.
Early model of policies page
However, how will the limit to be distinguished with what standard,
or how will the UIs for preset to be implemented are still under discussion.
The second problem was that the consequence of the policies is not shown when setting the policy.
Since the player cannot check the data at the moment,
all the results such as how much taxes would be collected or how much would the citizens' happiness might fall,
had to be measured through trials and errors.
At first, I would like to put an expected values of the possible outcome.
But the measuring was impossible to be accurate enough.
The value could not be measured since there is time gap between the imposing and collecting of the tax,
and since the citizens are keep doing their consuming activities and income-generating activities,
the errors could only be enlarged.
Fluctuating wealth of a citizen daily bases and early tax system model
In the end, we concluded to let the players to calculate the possibilities and set the policies themselves,
and only after the consequences, it is natural to modify the policies, as in the real world.
But I still wonder if there could be a better possible options.
This got a bit long again!
When think back every day than I am having, I always feel a shame that I could have done better.
Time runs faster day by day, and more works are coming up every time.
I feel the needs to buckle up and do my works with more efficiency.
Anyways, happy new year!
Hope you all have a great new year of 2023,
and hope you all have the best of luck.
Homepage: https://www.CasselGames.com/
Steam Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2244130/Ratopia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CasselGames/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CasselGames