House Wars – Dev. Post 01
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I’ve started working on the serious game House Wars (name not final) a game about banks, loans, house prices and how all of those are connected.
Before I start talking about the work I’ve done I’ll talk about what the game is about. First of all: This is a serious game which means that its primary purpose is to teach and provoke people, not necessarily being fun.
Basic Premise:
Why are houses and apartments so expensive? That’s a question a lot of us ask ourselves these days. There always seems to be news about the low amount of available homes or just how expensive it is to buy one, but why is that? According to most people there is a problem of supply and demand but according to studies by the organization Positive Money (http://positivemoney.org/) there are other reasons, namely the fact that we have no actual limit on how much money the banks can create so to speak (if you want more information about how this stuff work visit Positive Money’s web site (above) or check out their youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC82By0y-2ZdjigNu5bWY4LQ) because I’m not going to do a complete description on how it works in a short blog post).
Long story short: Because banks have no limit on how much they can loan people the prices of homes depends largely on the moodswings of a select few bankers worldwide. That’s… a rather interesting way to manage the economy in, and by interesting I mean impractical. Even so, there are not a lot of people aware of these facts, this includes economics students.
Our game is a way to easily look at a simplified version of the economic system and how the liquidity ratio that normally would be around (nowadays it isn’t) affects house prices.
The System:
Since House Wars (name not final) is a serious game the mechanics are inspired by real-life economy. The basic idea is that you will have an interface that shows a person who wants to have a loan of a certain amount at which point you as a player gets to set the amount they actually get to take, an interest rate and the time they have to pay it off. As you accept loan requests you will gain more interest and your total amount of bank cash will increase alongside the house prices.
There are still a few things that need to be ironed out in the design of the system but the basic idea of how money is earned and how customers should act are fairly laid out. The amount of money that the player can lend is determined by how much money they have, as well as the liquidity ratio. Normally the liquidity ratio will start out high (meaning small loans) and eventually end up low (meaning bigger loans) and then disappear completely (meaning limitless loans).
Progress so far:
As of right now I’ve made a simple loan creator with a UI for the game. It allows the player to set amount of $s to loan, the interest rate and the time the customer has to pay back. The setup is very simple and allows for easy modification. The three sliders that allow the player to control money lent, interest and time are all handled by a loan manager that uses all of these values in order to change how much money in total should go into the bank from the resulting loan, both per year and in total.
For next week:
There’s quite a lot of things that has to be done come next week.
First of all, the Customer Object has to be complete. The Customer Object is supposed to control what customers have asked for a loan, how much they want to loan, their income and how big the chance of them being unable to pay back is.
Next, there’s the liquidity ratio and how the game should be handled when it disappears completely (you can’t set the sliders to infinity).
Finally, there’s the how the player gain profit after accepting a loan and the interest that it generates.
In conclusion:
I’m working on House Wars (name not final) a serious game about banks, loans and house prices. The player chooses to accept or decline loans depending on their own judgement and gets to see the changes that the liquidity ratio has on loans and house prices.
For this week I’ve mainly been setting up the scene and the loan manager UI. For next week I will start to work on the actual process of accepting loans and how much interest they generate.
~♪
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