Barchok Blog

Now that I have the basic engine coded, the next step is adding elevators, stairs, and pathfinding. Once complete, the game should be close to the game play of Sim Tower, and ready for a more wide spread release, as it were.
Figuring out how transportation was going to work has been a major hurdle, since it had to feel ‘right’ in relation to Sim Tower, but had to work on what is effectively a 3d cube instead of a simple 2d plane. I’ve decided to keep things fairly simple, and just require the player to maintain some empty floor on a path to an elevator, similar to how roads work in the Sim City games. As long as a room is connected to an elevator or set of stairs via empty floor, then movement from the room to the stairs or line waiting for the elevator will be instant. If that ends up being too unrealistic, then I might have a delay based on distance, or similar. Elevators will generally work the same as they did in Sim Tower, though hopefully I can make them work a bit smoother, and make the interface for controlling them fairly easy to use. The elevator control window was too complex, and you had to change the settings for each elevator one at a time, resulting in too much wasted effort to achieve a slight increase in efficiency.
One final thing: I intend to allow something other than the lobby to be built on the ground floor. However, the lobby must exist and must be connected to the outside edges of the map. This way, it gives players more flexibility to build a tower with variety, or just build a single floor motel if they want to.