Eco Spreadsheet Game Design

Elevator pitch: Eco, but distilled in to a spreadsheet format without the graphics or pretense of being an educational game about the climate.

Currency

• Can issue unlimited amounts of personal credit

• Everyone can see how much of your credit is in circulation

• Can trade other people’s credit if you have it

• Can trade backed currencies if you have them

• Can mint official currencies and issue them

◦ TBD how exactly this works

Market

• Deals with buy and sell orders of a particular kind of item for various currencies

• Post a buy order to indicate you want some items and how much you are willing to pay

• Post a sell order to indicate you want to dump some items and how much you are willing to receive

• Market will automatically fulfill orders

◦ TBD if there is a way we should make being the market maker an actual part of the game instead

• TBD if only one currency is allowed or if we will allow setting a price for each currency

Storefront:

• A dedicated inventory where a list of items have particular values. Put items from the left to buy and items on the left to sell and if the values are compatible perform the trade. Deficits are resolved by picking a currency to resolve it with. Probably actually done by making them an item you can also put in the list and each allowed currency would be set a point value by the store’s owner.

Landscape

• Zones

◦ A particular circle which can hold a building or a natural resource.

◦ Can be built on

◦ Can have its resources extracted

◦ Will turn in to a blank zone if overharvested (or deliberately destroyed)

◦ TBD if deeds can exist for particular zones for the purpose of leasing them out to people

• Territory

◦ A rectangle which contains some zones.

◦ Can be taken over with a claim deed which then becomes a deed for the particular territory.

Contracts:

• TBD if we’re going to attempt Eco’s whole smart contract system

◦ We would have to code up a law editor so something like Gdevelop rules

◦ How would AI players cope with this kind of thing?

◦ Would allow leasing territories and zones though

◦ Important to allow weaponizing the state to protect monopolies

Licenses

• basically eco’s shitty skill specialization system

• not allowed to do higher level jobs unless you have the skill star

• TBD if we will keep the “no XP gain without star” rule. It might be nicer if the XP is simply banked such that any previous work done was not simply voided.

• Basically specialization points that allow you to do things within a particular skill line. Higher grades of license make the process more efficient.

• Consists of a track which confers some bonuses at given milestones.

• Has some obnoxious cost to be allowed to get the license before you can do any of the work.

• License-less “pleb” jobs exist at the bottom but are severely penalized since having the license gives exclusive recipes and high license levels grant efficiencies.

Actual skill list and product production cycles TBD but probably just some big tree of “takes X number of Y’s and gives N number of Z’s over T seconds.”

Time

• Could do some unnecessarily silly shit like using Beats for time and

TBD if we can have some kind of rental agreement/contracts for zones or a whole territory

TBD: Tetris inventory or just use a basic list/grid format with a cell count?