In the middle of creating my second major webgame, SimDerby, I am finding the challenges to be much different than SimYard. This time around, the balancing act is in creating a schedule of races that has a variation to it that matches as closely as possible the variation of horses. If there are only three 2-year-olds in the game which can run at a mile and a quarter, then there shouldn’t be any of those races on the schedule, for example.
I’m finding that successfully mastering a task like this all comes down to having the right tools. It all seems easy looking at it from the other site now that these tools have been built, but it was rough trying to figure out what they needed to look like before they were built. They tell me which races are being canceled because there aren’t enough horses so I can remove them from the schedule. They tell me a cross-section breakdown of horses which went a whole day without running in a single race so I know to schedule more races of those types. They show me the schedule of races for each track and allow me to fill in the missing races with the types that I need.
Currently, there are seven tracks in the SimDerby universe. Each of these tracks will have a race every five minutes and the schedule will be the same every day. That’s over 2,000 races a day that need to be hand-crafted to match the balance of horses that can run, and there will probably be more tracks added. This seems like a daunting task, but ultimately this schedule will be what horse breeders and owners interact with. More importantly, computer horses running on this schedule will represent the claims pool that owners will choose from to begin breeding.
I expect these numbers to only grow. It’s a good thing I have these great tools to help, because they sure do save time. The schedule is one of the most important parts of the game, and it’s deserving of lots of attention.
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