Development work continues on the financial side of the game. Last month I talked about ticket and merchandise revenue, and those systems have been further fleshed out this month. It’s also now possible to purchase various types of marketing, which will boost revenue of one particular type or another (ignore the empty blank space, it will be filled in with some graphics eventually).
I’ve also started adding a new visual element to the game - charts! These will let you view your promotion’s financial history at a glance.
But enough about the financial systems. For the rest of this month’s devlog I’m going to talk about a system I’ve never been able to get working, because I think it will provide some good insight into how the game is structured and what some of my design goals are.
INTERFERENCE
Interference is a staple of wrestling matches. Two wrestlers fight in the ring, but a third runs down and interrupts the match to cause chaos. No wrestling booking game would feel complete without the ability to make wrestlers interfere in each others’ matches. But finding a way to make that work in Championship Wrestling Promoter has been a challenge. Let me explain some of the systems in more detail in order to make it clear why this is so challenging.
As a general rule there are five things that players need to balance when booking a match:
How popular wrestlers are with the audience; winning causes Popularity to increase, while losing causes it to decrease.
How much Heat there is between wrestlers. Heat is a resource used to buy Stipulations like special match types that will increase a match’s rating.
How much revenue the match generates, which is based on things like how popular wrestlers are, whether they hold a championship, and so forth.
How long the match runs for. Longer matches typically earn higher ratings from the audience, but they reduce the time available to feature other wrestlers on a show. Which leads to the last item:
Morale. Wrestlers expect to appear on TV a certain amount each month based on their salary and role in the company.
As you can see, there are a lot of things to think about when booking a card. Individually the systems are all straight-forward, but balancing them all against each other will require careful planning.
There is essentially a kind of economy for each of these five resources. If it’s too easy to build Heat between wrestlers then Stipulations would become something that you add to every match for a free bonus, rather than something you have to strategise towards. If Morale targets are too low, then every wrestler can easily hit them, and there’s never a risk of having wrestlers with low Morale hurting your shows. Those outcomes are boring. The fun of a strategy game comes from having to make trade-offs among different resources.
This brings us back to interference. Why is interference so hard to make work with these systems? Because it throws off the balance of resources. If interference builds Heat between wrestlers, then it’s a free boost to a resource that is supposed to be scarce, which means players will add interference to every match just to get free Heat points. Ditto for Morale; if the amount of TV time each week is limited, but you can get free Morale by making wrestlers interfere, then you will always do that. To quote Sid Meier, “A game is a series of interesting decisions,” so anything that provides resources for free makes for a boring game.
The closest I’ve come to solving the resource balance problem was the idea of transferring all the resources that would have been gained by one of the non-interfering wrestlers to the interfering wrestler. An example should make this more clear:
A match is taking place between Mr. Cool and The Bodybuilder. Mr. Cool is set to win the match, which would gain him 2 Popularity. The match would normally build 1 Heat between Mr. Cool and The Bodybuilder. The player has chosen to have a third wrestler, King Sparta, interfere. Now the Popularity and Heat transfer from Mr. Cool to King Sparta, so The Bodybuilder gets all the same stat boosts he would normally get, but only Mr. Cool doesn’t receive anything. This keeps Heat and Popularity in balance because there is no free bonus to them for having a wrestler interfere.
There are two main problems with this approach, however:
You’re still getting free Morale, unless one wrestler arbitrarily does not receive any Morale for appearing on the show.
The player is incentivized to use this as a way to try to build feuds for wrestlers with bad statistics by leaving them out of matches and then getting a free Popularity boost at the end, so players would tend to put wrestlers with good wrestling stats in matches to get a good Audience rating, and then have a wrestler with bad wrestling stats interfere in order to get a boost to Popularity and Morale that they would normally have a harder time getting. Min/maxing like this is in my opinion almost always a symptom of a game design problem that should have been solved before getting to the player.
So this is a problem I’m going to continue trying to resolve, and I don’t want to ship the game without some kind of way to add interference to matches. But at the moment it remains an unsolved design problem.