Hollywood Mogul 4 - SEPTEMBER 2023
Sept 12, 2023 9:59:57 GMT -8
King James, Rick Arnold, and 4 more like this
Post by HMdesigner on Sept 12, 2023 9:59:57 GMT -8
Here's where I'm at, Moguls ...
Hollywood Mogul 4 will be a game about running a Hollywood movie studio. There will be no television shows, no cable TV, no streaming channels ... nothing else. Just movies.
I tried for two years, every combination of things I could think of ... and I could not make TV or cable TV production any fun at all. Yes, it's fun to set up that first big limited series episode ... but then it just becomes a monotony of the same thing over and over. And it was even worse with TV broadcast shows. 22 episodes. It just becomes about numbers-management with few or no choices ... and it was tedious and boring.
So I tried making a game turn 1 week instead of 1 month. Disaster. Make a TV show ... each week go into the project, make sure everything is what it should be ... but the worst part ... with movies ... make a giant Sci-Fi epic that takes 18 months... that's 75 game turns at one week each. And most of those 75 game turns there's nothing to do on a movie. It was absolutely no fun at all.
So I dropped everything except movies. Hollywood Mogul 4 is about making movies.
With a talent database that currently has 8,000 names. The talent database includes Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers. That way you can hire one person to do every job if you want. It's also more manageable as one database . And you can merge databases now. So you can create a small talent database with your favorite 30 actors, and merge it into the default game database ... or anyone else's talent database. And there's no limit, you can have 50,000 or 100,000 names in the talent database.
The same is true for the source material. You can create a small personal database and merge it with others. This way, if the community wanted to create a Comic Book database, or a Graphic Novel database, anyone who is interested can get involved, and at the end, one of you just merges them all together. One person doesn't have to do all the work anymore.
Also, I backed away from 'genres' as a way to determine what a movie is about. You can still choose a genre, but it's mostly just for your own satisfaction. The real 'genre elements' are now attributes that you choose, things like Adventure, Suspense, Mystery, Jump Scares.
Now when you look at the story attributes you can tell exactly what the movie is about. And that is fun. And I broadened the talent attributes to reflect the new story attributes (especially for Writers). And when you match talent with roles, you have to worry about chemistry and director attribute differences ... opening the door for Production Problems.
Action, Comedy, and Drama ... those are now Talent Role attributes ... the talent determine the rating for a movie's Action, Comedy, and Drama. And a few other things (Heroice, Brave ... you'll see). As well as Character Role Nuances like is the character Optimistic? Forgiving? Honest?
I did away with things that aren't fun. Like Sound Stages. There are a million sound stages in Los Angeles. You can always find one. It's a meaningless choice. I got rid of all the stuff that doesn't matter what you choose. All that remains are the choices that determine the box office result.
And I tightened up the Casting functions. I pared Agent Negotiation down to the bare minimum. I hated that part of the game. And once the contract is in place, it didn't really add anything to game play. All of the things that do matter with Agents is handled in a way that gets the job done in a minimum of time.
In the end, for Hollywood Mogul 4 ... I wanted to improve the things I didn't like about HM3 ... and make sure it could be played easily on current PCs for years to come.
In a month or so, those of you that want to get involved with an alpha version will have a chance to do so. You'll get access to a specific Discord channel where you'll be invited to participate in game features.
So that's where I'm at with Hollywood Mogul 4.
Thanks for playing,
HMdesigner