/ga/ - Games

>>12123
There are coding games, that require that you make, lets call it, deployable patterns. In a manner of speaking you would play the micromanagement once, record it and then it gets abstracted away from the game-play.

For coding games this is easy because it's like declaring a function. For a UI driven game where players are not expected to enter code, designing player input would be a challenge. I would try to record player actions, analogous to old-school desktop automation software. But you have to somehow shoe-horn that into a set of instructions that can be run in a loop. And you probably want more than one loop, so that the abstracted micromanagement patterns can be switched based on event triggers. Which means now we're making the player record different micromanagement instruction loops. Abstraction does have overhead.

Another option would be to design for constant gameplay complexity. That means you just stop simulating the low level gameplay elements once enough high-level gameplay interaction happens. After-all games don't have to be realistic.

>>12124
Although it doesn't relate to the current phase of the game at all, Freeciv does this to a certain extent with its auto-governor system. It allows the player to program certain priorities in how they want their city managed, and then the optimizer will figure out exactly the best way to arrange citizens for any given city. This massively reduces the tedious city-by-city citizen management that was a characteristic of early Civilization games.

One way of relating something like this to game progression I think is to unlock this stuff as a technology or event, making it unavailable to the player until they've passed a certain progression threshold.

>>12125
>One way of relating something like this to game progression I think is to unlock this stuff as a technology or event, making it unavailable to the player until they've passed a certain progression threshold.
That's actually kinda brilliant, it stops being UI and it becomes game content. But you really do have to nudge players hard to activate it, so they don't get stuck playing in first gear.