This Grand Life 2 News

Starting your own business is in some ways a culmination of all the other gameplay mechanics. In a business you will have jobs to work, utilities to pay, assets and floorspace to manage, a premises for it to occupy, industry profitability to consider, and so on.



A small business is centered around the "job hour". This is the expected time it takes to complete an hour of work for a given job. Job hours are generated at the start of each month depending on demand for your product or service.



For example, let's say you're running a restaurant and have 75 job hours of chef work this month. If your character or a staff member works at 50% efficiency (due to low skill or not enough cooktops), then they will take 150 actual hours to complete the work. When working for someone else this terrible inefficiency doesn't matter, but when it's your own business then this affects profits!



Jobs in a business work similarly to the normal ones you would do as an employee. Your characters require the same qualifications, gain the same experience, feel the same love/hatred based on their preferences and the asking wages of staff are affected by industry inflation.



Some jobs generate other jobs. A chef produces meals to be served and makes a big mess in the kitchen, so will generate waitperson and janitor jobs.



Some jobs generate income, and these are the most important to complete. They pay for everything else in the business, so if you don't do them then you don't make money! In a small restaurant this would be the waitperson who gives people their bills.



But that's not all, the waitperson also generates bookkeeper jobs! These are unrelated to the food industry, and yet they need to be done to efficiently manage the restaurant. You can start to see how the chain of job generation can become complex and allow for flexibility to accommodate different business types.



There's not enough work to employ a full-time bookkeeper at a small restaurant, so one option is to outsource it. An outsourced job will have its hours completed without requiring you to have the necessary assets, inventory or staff, but it's very expensive. Of course, your character could always do the bookkeeping themselves (assuming they're not allergic to paperwork).

[h3]Hiring Staff[/h3]



When your business gets busy enough, you can hire employees to help complete job hours. Each employee comes with their own experience statement and gain XP as they work, just like your characters.

Naturally, you'll have to pay experienced staff more than junior staff. Some are willing to work full-time while others are looking for part-time work. It's up to you to decide who is the best fit for your business.



Hopefully I've explained this well enough to make sense so far. In the future I'll talk about contract work for businesses, which stacks on top of this job hours system and allows the aspiring entrepreneur to make (or lose) even more money.

For the first This Grand Life game (TGL1), a large portion of player suggestions was for more jobs and career types. I was reluctant to add too many of these that played the same and were only cosmetically different. It would also have cluttered the world with too many things that the player didn't care about in their current playthrough.



In TGL2, there are several improvements to mitigate these problems and allow for adding a ton of activities that behave differently from game to game. As previously discussed, the preferences system makes activities more or less attractive depending on your individual characters. The industry inflation system makes activities more or less lucrative depending on economic conditions.



To avoid cluttering the map, a fresh game only starts with several key sites like the town hall and shopping mall. To find more sites and things to do, your characters need to spend time searching for them.



For example, let's say your character enjoys paperwork and being social. The education industry is booming as well, making teaching a perfect career path for them. After getting the prerequisite education and qualifications​, you would use the "Find Job" action to look for teaching jobs. This will spawn sites where job openings might occur. For a teaching career, this would be the grade school.​



You could also search for the grade school directly if you have school age children in your household. If you don't want to be a teacher and have no children, then you never have to see the grade school at all in your playthrough.



You might be wondering, "won't the map become filled up anyway after a long enough playtime?" That's where the economy helps us. When the economy is doing poorly, there is a chance that some sites will close down and be removed from the map. It will only happen to sites you don't have a major interaction with, so don't worry about your home being demolished unexpectedly.

[h3]Map Density - A Look Behind The Scenes[/h3]

The spawn locations for sites like the grade school are random but follow a few rules based on each map's features.



Above is the density map for Sydney, Australia which is auto-generated based on available transport links. It actually matches the city density in real life quite well! In general, a greener value means more sites (and more types of sites) are able to spawn there.



You'll tend to have banks, shopping malls and other such places clustering around these high density areas. However it will also be more expensive to live there, so you have to consider whether the trade-off in travel time is worth it.

Side Note: The density and transport maps can be edited, but that's a topic for another time.

To qualify for certain activities in This Grand Life 2, you need to pass a threshold of accumulated experience and qualifications. I think the best way to explain how this works is with an example.



Let's say you want to become a Software Developer. To qualify for the position, you can either have 8000 programming XP (about 4 years full-time worth), a Computer Science degree or some combination of both.

You can gain programming XP by coding at home, which is free but takes longer than studying a degree at university (and also has different preferences).



If someone has both 8000 XP and a degree, then they would be 200% qualified for the job and more likely to be successful in a job interview.

The "value" of experience and qualifications decays very slowly each month. This means if you obtained your degree 5 years ago, it would only count about 70% towards becoming a Software Developer. You would have to make up for it with XP to reach the 100% threshold to be considered for the job.



You won't have to do the math yourself, it's all conveniently calculated and displayed in each character's statement and in tooltips.

A side effect of decaying experience is a career-focused character that works as much as possible will become qualified for their next promotion relatively faster than someone who works at a leisurely pace.

From a game design point of view, I can adjust the thresholds so some qualifications are absolutely required to reach 100% qualified for a job. For example, you must have a Doctor Of Medicine to become a General Practitioner.



The above image shows the most you can get from doctoring XP is 95% qualified. The other 5% must come from a medical degree. No one wants to be treated by someone who never graduated medical school!



The same system is applied to children going through school. If you neglect your child character's education and they don't gain enough schooling XP, they might be unable to complete their high school diploma by the time they reach adulthood.



It's not the end of the world though. Once that child becomes an adult, they can always take remedial education classes to make up for missing schooling XP and eventually complete a high school diploma.

The economy in This Grand Life 2 is made up of industries. Each industry keeps track of its own inflation rate, which is how quickly prices are increasing or decreasing over time.



Almost every single price in the game is affected by a subset of these industries. Some examples:

• House sale/rental prices affected by residential property industry
  
• Electricity bills by energy industry
  
• Delivery driver wages by transportation industry
  
• Groceries by agriculture and food service industry
  
• University/trade school fees by education industry
  

Items that perform similar functions can be affected by different industries as well, which plays into your decision-making.

For example, the price of a home fridge is affected by the retail and residential property industry (consumers spending money and buying new homes pushes up the price of fridges). On the other hand, the price of a commercial freezer is affected by the food service industry (more restaurants opening means higher demand for large freezers).



You can buy a commercial freezer for your home or a home fridge for your restaurant if you want, there are no restrictions. However the specific characteristics of each item affects its suitability.

A commercial freezer takes up a lot of space, uses more electricity and is more durable so would be better suited for the restaurant. However if the energy industry inflation rate is high (meaning high electricity bills), maybe you want to start your business with the home fridge until you actually need something bigger.

The inflation system can make for interesting decisions when combined with other gameplay mechanics. Some other choices that might crop up depending on the state of the economy are:

• Do you pursue the career best suited to your character's preferences, or get a job in a booming industry that's currently paying lots of money, even if your character hates the job?
  
• Should you buy a car, or use public transport instead if fuel prices are high?
  
• Should you wait for the education industry to crash before starting that expensive degree?
  
• Interest rates are low but the commercial property market is rising! Should you take out a loan, leverage yourself to the max and hope it all works out?
  

[h3]The central bank's role[/h3]

All the individual inflation rates are combined into an overall inflation. The central bank looks at this overall inflation when deciding whether to raise or lower interest rates every month. In turn, this interest rate affects the cost/return on loans, mortgages or fixed interest investments you might have.



Since the central bank only looks at overall inflation, this means sometimes you'll have situations where a booming industry will get pushed even higher by central bank policy while the rest of the economy is doing poorly. It's just like some of the speculative bubbles we've seen recently in real life!

Last time I talked about the preferences system and how activities affect people differently depending on their likes and dislikes. Today I'd like to talk about status conditions, which stack on top of preferences to create even more powerful feelings.



There are broadly two categories of status conditions:

1. Very low probability but high-damage or permanent changes like arthritis.
2. High probability but temporary changes like getting agitated or getting a hangover.

All conditions have a set of preferences. For example, if you get the agitated condition you'll have a stronger dislike for working or authority but be more receptive to caffeine or alcohol.



An agitated person's dislike for work means their fun would fall faster than normal while working.



On the other hand, someone who might normally dislike alcohol would gain more fun from drinking at the bar while in an agitated state.



This leaves you with a choice - do I force the character to work through the pain and then use alcohol to recover their fun? Or avoid alcohol and accept the penalties that come with having a negative fun need? Or skip work altogether and hope the performance hit doesn't get them fired?

Every status condition will come with its own set of changes that you will have to consider.

[h3]How are status conditions gained?[/h3]

Status conditions are gained or lost at the start of every month and there are a number of sources.

If your fun need goes negative, the risk of gaining the agitated condition starts to increase. If your fun need goes beyond the maximum, the risk decreases.



Some actions can also change the risk of conditions appearing. A run in the park will increase the risk of gaining a body smell, while a shower will reduce it.



Finally, you can gain conditions simply from getting older. Every month that passes increases your risk of things like arthritis or diabetes. Certain activities might increase these risks as well (e.g overeating can lead to diabetes) but everyone has a small chance to randomly gain these conditions over time.



I was planning to talk about how you can mitigate these risks but this is already getting too long, so until next time thanks for reading!