TheoTown is a really fun and great game, but it could be even better. This post contains ideas and concepts to make TheoTown much more interesting. So please, hear me out on these ideas.
Concept 1: Advanced Music System
The problem: The music player sucks.
The solution: Overhaul the music player, to allow for a better music experience.
Explanation:
As seen in SimCity from SimCity 2000, all the way to SimCity Societies (even though it also applies, I am not including SimCity 2013 because it’s dead to me), and present in Cities: Skylines, their music players all have one thing in common: they are smart with their music system. Because TheoTown is supposed to be based off games such as SimCity and Cities: Skylines, it would make much more sense to use a music system inspired by such. And here’s how it would function:
Part 1: Better Shuffling System
TheoTown unfortunately takes the lazy route with shuffling, and just picks random music files, even sometimes replaying songs after they finish. TheoTown should shuffle the track list like this:
- Load music files into list.
- Duplicate the music list and shuffle it.
- Play songs one by one on the list until the list runs out.
- Repeat, but make sure the last played song isn’t first on the list. If so, re-shuffle it.
This would make sure that no songs repeat while players enjoy plunging their “perfect society into hell, but why not spice it up and add…
Part 2: Genres
Something that made SimCity Societies so great for me was how it played its music. It mainly played music that fit the tone of my current city, like if it was capitalistic, it would play capitalistic-like music. TheoTown could heavily benefit from such a system, and it’d be easy to build, basically:
- Players would sort their tracks in the music folder by genre.
Small – small town
BigCity – larger cities
Sad – low happiness
Happy – high happiness
Region – when viewing regions
These are only examples; you can choose the genres however you like.
- In-game, TheoTown would select and play music fitting how the town is doing.
Basically, it would work the same way, only that it would create lists for each genre. When making a list of music to play, it would fill the list with music fitting the genre and unsorted music.
- Any unsorted music, basically, any music that is not in folders would be treated as generic music tracks, and would always play, regardless of the state of the town. (unless there is a disaster)
The problem: when playing on a new system, you would have to manually change the settings, install the plugins you want, which can be very time consuming.
The solution: use the platform’s cloud storage (Steam Cloud for Steam, iCloud for iOS, or the user’s TheoTown account for Android), to synchronize settings and plugins.
This is easy: basically, have the platform save the config files, and a list of plugins that user has installed. When the user starts up on a new machine, it would sync the files, and TheoTown would accept the configuration and install new plugins.
Hopefully, these concepts will be taken into consideration. I had these on my mind for a very long time, and seeing these be implemented would bring a smile to my face, and improve the experience of numerous players.
With thanks,
elburg.