Herding Cats...

Perhaps the most important question you can answer when designing a game is "how does the player interact with the game?"

This creates spades of answers for other questions you might have thought were the most important, like "how does the game play" and so forth. It also leads to a bunch of important questions such as "how do we provide the juiciest feedback" and "what kind of limits does this create".

In the case of Her Majesty's Hackers, the main interaction will be through a desaturated map of the facility. This is important, because the map changes as you add new laboratories and other such changes. The scientists and visitors would be represented on this map, and their actions would be represented with little effects and animations. Their representation is an important choice. For example:



In this example, I'm using iconic representations of their faces. However, this kind of gives it a goofy, childish feel - and it also puts some strain on the artist, as he has to create iconic representations distinguishable at small sizes. If you want to change those representations by emotion, suddenly your image requirements are ramping up.

On the other hand, you could represent them with colored shapes which can be set by the user:



This requires only a few graphics and also looks sharper and more professional. Or, rather, it will, with real graphics. Obviously, the sketches are not the final product.

Of course, the shapes are not exactly human-y. Therefore, we'll splash humans in your face at every opportunity. Not just visually: the end game will require a bunch of "non-talk" human sounds, like you might hear in the Sims. However, these sounds would be overlayable, to create an impression of multiple humans socializing, rather than the regimented, inhuman feel of evenly distributed turns. People don't act like that.

Graphic humans are important, too. If you click in a room, small representations appear off to the side - faces layed over the shape that represents them, along with names and action/thought summaries. Clicking on a particular shape (or on the representation to the left) will highlight a single character, enlarging and giving more detail.

The actions these humans take will be represented in a clear but cartoony way using vibrant graphics and lively effects. These will give a feeling of life to the otherwise rather inhuman colored blocks.

As to a limit, the use of colored blocks limits how many humans we can have. Really, any iconic representation does, but it becomes very clear with colored shapes. People will only be able to associate so many shapes before they start losing track of who is who.

This plays into my hands, actually, as I want to keep numbers down in order to keep the player feeling "close" to the characters. By continuously raising the chance of an experiment going haywire, I plan to have the number of characters max out at about a dozen: any more than that, and you simply can never get any work done. The point of peak efficiency will scale up and down depending on the difficulty - as low as six (hard) to as high as ten (easy).

Interactions will be done by popping a menu up when you right-click on a person, their representation, or their dossiere. Then you can select all kinds of actions, often by clicking elsewhere on the map to assign them or move them.

The map scales in and out as you see fit, of course, and there's a minimap in the corner, above whatever sidebar info you have pulled up. (There's sidebars for non-personal info, such as income and project progress as well as the sidebars for personal info.)

It's kind of an RTS feel, but very room-centric.

I think I'll also let you "unmount" sidebars from the main sidebar. For example, dragging someone's dossiere out onto the screen will create a semipermanent window that monitors where they are, what they are doing, etc. You could do the same thing for project tracking. Leave them open until you don't need to.

Also, the speed at which time passes will be very settable. Unlike The Sims, you aren't managing these people's time so closely as to tell them when to eat and where to go to the bathroom. You can, I suppose, but the game isn't really built for that, and there's no real time pressure for those kinds of things. Really, they are there mostly for the social reasons.

By describing the interface, I can see the limits of the game. :)