How custom genres might be added

Game Dev Tycoon modding
#1

Regarding custom genres, I thought about how this could be done and have the following ideas.

The main issue is that adding a genre, requires you to define how well every topic in the system and every platform works with this genre. Unless you change the game dramatically this is a requirement and I think best done by adding a customGenreWeightings to topics and platforms that maps genre id to a value.

Obviously with multiple mods adding topics or platforms you could never guarantee that all of them specify such a value.

To get around this I think there are multiple options:

  1. disallow selecting combinations of topic/genre/platform where values are not defined
  2. assume a default (not optimal) value for missing definitions
  3. randomly assign and persist a value, if it’s missing (that could add some interesting gameplay, particularly with platforms but would probably make no sense on topics)
  4. allow defining a genre so that it also says how ‘similar’ it is to existing genres. for example ‘BeatEmUp’ could say that it’s very similar to Action so when a topic doesn’t have a value it defaults back to the one with the most similar genre.

From those I think options 3 and 4 are the most promising.

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#2

I Think The Last is best, but I think that 3rd is faster.

#3

implementation wise, 3 and 4 would be about the same, I think. personally I think 4 is easier since you don’t have to worry about persisting additional data.

#4

Wow! This sounds very interesting. This leads me to the idea that I might consider to implement the possibility to create easily custom genres in UME. It won’t be done for the next update, but I think it is worth to be considered, as it would greatly improve the possibilities of mod writers and designers.

You answered a question I had in mind for a long time :slight_smile:

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#5

It depends on how much there is that data.

#6

In my opinion this would be the most logical option.
Taken the ‘BeatEmUp’ example, is just a more detailed definition of ‘Action’. This goes for all the five main genres ( excluded Casual, because that could be any of the above )

The custom genres are basically nothing more then an extension of the players imagination.
Of course ‘BeatEmUp’ will make no sense when the ‘Airplane’ topic is used :smile:

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#7

You can BeatEmUp, but on an airplane.

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