Decisions, decisions...

There are a number of decisions that I've recently had to address:

o How would the game be priced?

Given the rising exposure of the game, it's probably I could have gotten away with charging a monthly fee and it was considered. However, fundamentally I realise that many of the people who would like to play Grand Prix Tycoon will not have access to any form of funds regardless of whether they'd be prepared or not. So the question becomes: Do I sell the game to a small audience in order to pay for servers or do I continue to suffer large server debt and provide the game free to everyone?

The answer to an ethical decision like this would be obvious to a major corporation. To please shareholders and to ensure figures were met the company would gladly sell out. When it comes to Quasit-Rushyo Games however, we take ethical considerations as a foremost regard. Why? We don't suffer from shareholders (whose only concerns are their dividends) and are only beholden to ourselves. In that sense I have two duties to perform. To look after myself and to consider the moral ramifications of any action I take. The latter obviously urges me to release the game for free, but the former is important as well. Grand Prix Tycoon has placed (and increasing do so) a very tough strain on my financial resources. I am, after all, still a student with no work income.

So the decision to release the game for completely free was not an immediately obvious one to make, but one which I hope (and hope is the fundamental factor) will increase Grand Prix Tycoon's appeal and community.

o Will we include graphical representations of racing?

The original design document for GPT called for a game with no representation of racing. This decision has been reviewed recently.

You see, the engine I am using (which is bespoke and written from scratch, by the way) has no real-time capabilities. This is a limitation of making the game friendly for use in all types of browsers. Without a radical redesign, the game would not even be capable of anything vaguely real time and using something such as flash would be not only tacky but a great deal of undue effort.

However, the current race system works by considering events from lap to lap and using them to calculate overall race times and events. By splitting each lap up so they occur at certain intervals, a player could view the grid of a race lap-by-lap as it occurs. PHP's GD library is more than capable of creating static images representating the relative position of cars on a straight piece of track.

What does this add? Other than the excellent advertising factor it also allows players to get more involved in the races. Watching the race go on lap-by-lap whilst on a messenger with friends or gloating on the forum mid-race is possible. It increases the community factor of the game, something I'm always very keen to promote.

o Should I have player-created news content?

I have been considering letting players post their own news content, but couldn't decide how to implement it. I have decided to come up with two seperate player-driven news services. One for press releases that any team or supplier can make and a second for 'officially sanctioned' Grand Prix Tycoon reporters to use.

The first allows players to feel integrated into the world and adds to the believability of the game. The second not only adds to the believability of the game but is also a potential reward for the most active community members. If a player is dedicated to the game, in-game news reports are a perfect way to put their dedication to use both for their own personal writing enjoyment and for the purpose of improving the game.