Ratopia DevDiary #38 - Tourism System

It has been a while since our last development diary.

Over the past few updates, we have mainly focused on relatively small-scale changes, so there were not many topics that felt substantial enough to cover in detail through a development diary.

This time, however, we are preparing a slightly larger update, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to share some of our current development progress and the process behind it.

In this development diary, we would like to briefly introduce how we came to plan the tourism content for the next update, as well as give you an overview of what the tourism system currently looks like in development.

Preparing the Update

We have been preparing this update little by little since January to make sure the schedule does not slip too far behind.

Our goal for this update was to prepare content comparable in scale to DLC, encouraging players to return to the game and revisit it, while also making sure the new content could be experienced relatively early in a playthrough so that the early-game experience would feel different as well.

In addition to new content, we also wanted to address various improvements that players have been requesting, such as quality-of-life changes and AI improvements.

To achieve these goals without issue, we first laid out several possible directions for the update, then carefully reviewed which type of content would be the most appropriate for this update.

The ideas we considered at the time were as follows.

1. Navigator Theme: A theme where players build a ship with limited space, similar to the DLCs for Oxygen Not Included, RimWorld, and Factorio, then manage their city by discovering artifacts with various effects across the world map.

2. AddedMercenary Company ThemeA theme similar to Battle Brothers, where individual management elements such as weapons, armor, ammunition, and skills are added to the soldiers in the city, and players manage their city using the funds earned by sending those soldiers on various combat missions.

3. Political Theme: A theme similar to Victoria 3, Europa Universalis V, and Democracy 4, where Ratizens in the city are assigned to political parties, and players manage their city by choosing policies that grant benefits or disadvantages to party members depending on the situation.

4. Tourism Theme: A theme similar to the DLCs for Anno 1800 and Two Point Museum, where players build and decorate tourist districts within the city, attract tourists, and use the tourism revenue they generate to manage the city.

Each of these ideas had its own strengths that suited Ratopia, so at first, it was difficult to rule any of them out.

However, considering our internal schedule and various circumstances, we had to decide by March which idea we would move forward with for full development. Choosing the content that would best help us achieve our goals required careful consideration, as we needed to select something that could realistically be completed within the development time and budget available to us.

After much deliberation, we decided to prepare the tourism theme, as we judged it to involve the least trial and error and to have the highest chance of successful implementation.

That said, we also felt that the tourism theme might feel somewhat lighter in content volume compared to the other ideas, so we decided to make up for that by preparing additional supplementary content alongside it.

Had we chosen the Navigator Theme, perhaps this is what a ship in Ratopia might have looked like?

Tourism System

The Tourism System was designed as an expansion of the diplomacy, construction, economy, and exploration systems that already exist in the game. The general core loop of the Tourism System is as follows.

First, players discover nearby city-states through exploration and diplomacy, then raise Relations with them to attract tourists from those city-states. After checking each city-state’s tourism preferences, players build tourist districts within their city that appeal to those tourists, such as industrial districts or service districts.

Tourists who arrive at the Passenger Terminal move along the tour route designated by the player, and provide income to the city based on the satisfaction they gain during their visit. Players can also discover attractions that tourists enjoy through exploration, then place them strategically to generate additional income.

The key elements that players directly design throughout this process are the placement of Guide Signs and the tour route itself. Tourists who arrive at the Passenger Terminal follow the designated Guide Signs as they move around and enjoy their visit.

Guide Signs are essential Structures in the Tourism System that calculate tourist satisfaction. They check which elements are located within their range, then convert those elements into satisfaction based on the tourists’ preferences.

Example of a Guide Board’s area check

Each tour route is limited to a maximum of three Guide Boards, and tourists are designed to have both preferred and disliked elements. Through this, we wanted to encourage players to optimize each tour route according to the tourists visiting it.

Tourists from the same city-state also share the same preferred and disliked elements. This was intended to create a flow where players manage groups of tourists from each city-state, rather than managing each individual tourist one by one.

Tourists were designed to visit every day and complete their tour within the same day. When finishing their tour, they would pay a tour fee to the city based on the tour satisfaction they had gained, then leave. However, once we created and tested a prototype of this system, several issues emerged.

First, since players only needed to group preferred elements together, there were not many meaningful actions required when designing a tour route, which made the system less engaging. In addition, once a tour route had been optimized, it became too easy to generate continuous profit, causing the economic pressure of the game to be resolved far too quickly.

Basically a money-printing factory

In the end, for the Tourism System to offer deeper gameplay, we needed to add more management elements and adjust its economic benefits to some extent.

Rather than functioning as a guaranteed source of income that simply accumulated money, the Tourism System needed to become another pillar of city management that players would have to oversee alongside the rest of their city.

After some consideration, we changed the direction so that tourists would no longer simply pay a tour fee based on their satisfaction. Instead, they would use food and service Structures within the city and pay for those services afterward.

With this approach, players would need to provide and manage the food and service Structures that tourists consume, while the materials required to provide those foods and services would also be consumed. This allowed tourism to generate economic benefits while also serving as another outlet for resource consumption.

Hope you all enjoy your stay!

However, this approach also came with a few concerns.

The first concern was how we should change the existing satisfaction system.

We wanted to preserve the fun that comes from managing tourist satisfaction, but as the system changed, the role of satisfaction became somewhat unclear. For now, we are planning to try a system where satisfaction affects how much tourists spend. For example, if satisfaction is 100, tourists would pay twice the normal amount, while if satisfaction is -50, they would only pay 50% of the normal amount.

The second concern was the possibility that tourists and Ratizens might get in each other’s way while trying to use the same services.

If a Ratizen is using a service, tourists may not be able to use it, and conversely, there may also be situations where Ratizens cannot use a service because tourists are using it instead.

Because of this concern, we considered adding exception handling so that tourists would not interfere with Ratizens when using services. However, even without adding such exceptions, the game already has ways for players to address these situations. By using features such as doors, schedules, and service range adjustments, players can separate and optimize the movement paths of Ratizens and tourists to some extent.

Of course, configuring these settings can be a little cumbersome. However, if tourism becomes content that requires a deeper level of management, we believe this may also have positive aspects. For this reason, we plan to continue testing this area and see how it feels in practice.

The third concern was whether the tourism theme would still feel appealing enough if its economic benefits were reduced.

In order to attract tourists, players need to build high Relations with multiple city-states, and the cost required to do so is not insignificant. If tourism revenue turns out to be lower than expected after that investment, it could create an unpleasant experience for players. At the same time, we cannot simply increase tourism revenue without limit due to the overall economic balance, so we needed to find other ways to compensate for this.

At the moment, we are considering several possible solutions that could increase the appeal of tourism outside of its economic benefits. These include showing expected revenue in advance so that players do not overinvest, making tourists more enjoyable through their presentation and animations, or providing separate bonuses to Ratizens.

Wouldn’t watching them enjoying the sightseeing be be enough?

There are many more concerns and considerations that we were not able to cover here, but due to length, we will move on for now. We hope that the decisions we make will lead to enjoyable experiences for players.

Artifact System

Artifacts are collectible elements that can be obtained through Explore on the Survey Map.

They are supplementary content being prepared to add more depth to the Tourism System, while also providing benefits even for players who do not engage with tourism.

This was originally backup content that we planned to develop only if the Tourism System progressed smoothly and we had time left over. Fortunately, the Tourism System was being integrated into the game relatively well, which allowed us to begin development on the Artifact System as well.

Artifacts available for Survey are marked with icons on the map, but bringing them back to the city requires Ratizens and resources that meet specific conditions. For example, players might send three Ratizens with the Hunting Lover trait along with eight Ropes to capture a rare creature. We wanted the Ratizens and resources prepared in the city to directly lead to the results of Artifact collection.

Who will be the one to pull Excalibur from the great stone?!

If players go through the effort of raising a specific Ratizen and producing the necessary resources to obtain an Artifact, there should of course be a fitting reward. Artifacts provide special global effects to the city. For example, one Artifact has the effect of preventing the city’s Structures from ever becoming flooded. Taken a bit further, it might even be possible to build an underwater city.

Oh, Ratlantis! Oooooh, Ratlantis!

In fact, the effect we just introduced is the most unusual one, while the other effects are relatively modest due to technical implementation constraints. Effects that are more novel or that could significantly change gameplay turned out to require more development cost and difficulty than we had expected. Since development of the Tourism System is still ongoing, we plan to continue exploring more distinctive effects later if time allows.

The second effect of Artifacts is their display effect, which tourists receive when viewing an Artifact placed on a Display Stand near a Guide Board. Through this effect, we wanted to add a little more depth to the Tourism System and encourage players to design more varied tour routes.

For example, an Artifact might provide a bonus to the satisfaction tourists gain afterward, or amplify the effects provided by that Guide Board. Through this, we wanted players to think about the order in which they should place Artifacts when designing a tour route.

However, this also led to one of the problems we struggle with the most: “How do we explain this to players?” Creating the effect itself was important, but making sure players could understand it clearly, without misunderstanding how it works, was just as important.

The first effect of an Artifact is applied to the city, while the second effect is applied only to tourists within range. Because of this, there was a chance that players might become confused about whether the first effect only applied to Ratizens within range, or whether the second effect applied to all tourists across the city.

After considering several approaches, we changed the first effect of Artifacts, the city effect, into a collection effect that is applied immediately upon discovery. We also made it so that this effect is not displayed on the Display Stand, preventing the two effects from being confused with each other.

This approach also had the advantage of resolving another potential source of confusion: what should happen to the city effect provided by an Artifact if the Display Stand showing it is demolished or destroyed.

Several Artifacts that also appeared in .

We hope players will enjoy collecting and displaying Artifacts, and turning their cities into one giant museum.

Other Details

In addition to the Tourism and Artifact systems introduced above, we have also been working on various improvements alongside them.

In spring, we conducted a full review of the AI-related feedback and complaints players had left for us, and also organized tasks related to optimization and quality-of-life features.

At the moment, AI improvements and optimization work have been completed to some extent, and we have also added features such as diagonal Railroads and sales permissions for Storages.

Could this be used to build a roller coaster?

If our main task, the Tourism System, is completed quickly within the schedule, we hope we may be able to develop additional features as well.

The development content introduced here is currently being prepared with the goal of releasing in the upcoming late-July update.

Many parts are still under development and subject to change, so if you have any fun ideas or suggestions related to these systems, please feel free to leave them in the comments!

We will do our best to prepare an update that helps make your summer more enjoyable. Thank you!