Project: Project Hotelier
| Project Started: |
25th September, 2010 |
Last Update: |
7th March, 2012 |
| Project Owner: |
 MJK |
Project Members: |
NeoMonkey NE |
| Project Type: |
Lightweight simulation |
Project Progress: |
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About the concept and gameplay
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Posted 30th Sep 10, by MJK
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Ah, a devlog. Last time I wrote one of these was in November 2008. About the time then. 
Just thought to describe the game a bit more in-detail and what you can do in it. As mentioned previously, the main game mode will be built around missions or "business goals" through which the player step-by-step progresses in building his or her own hotel. It starts small with easy goals to simply get the first visitors in or reach the first star in the quality rating, for example. By completing these missions, the hotel and the business expand. The secondary game mode is the sandbox which is the same but removes the missions and goals.
There are four main focus areas for player to manage: hotel building, exterior/yard, interior and staff. Building consists of number of floors (anything from 2 floors to something like 40-storey skyscraper), building materials (9 different, from wood to pure gold with diamonds) and doors/entrances (again, from simple low quality doors to red carpets and stuff). The yard can be decorated with many sort of trees, bushes, fountains, swimming pools - you name it. Furnishing the interior doesn't have too big focus in the game but you will obviously need to buy the beds, tables, TVs, showers, air conditioners and so on to make and keep your guests happy. Finally, the staff is a really important part of a successful hotel business. In order to ensure high service level, you'll need to hire people to customer service, security, catering and cleaning. Obviously there will be many types of employees available at different salary requests, skills and motivation, so there's a bit of analyzing to do before hiring.
This concept could obviously be used to build a really complex simulation, but that's not quite what we are after with Project Hotelier. The game, which is hopefully released in flash, aims to be relatively casual despite its genre, easy to play and learn. As much as the game is a simulation and a manager game, it's also a straightforward "dress-up" game. You're just not dressing up any character but a hotel. The Mission mode will of course offer also a real challenge for the best players.
The better your hotel is in those four areas, the more guests you will get, the more rich guests you will get, the happier they will be and the more nights they will stay at your hotel. So improving quality improves also your incoment statement. Even though the difficulty level is intentionally rather easy in general, it's definitely possible to end up in bankruptcy if you make a lot of wrong decisions.
In addition to the usual gameplay, i.e. adding items, watching guests arriving, completing missions, etc, you can also view many type of useful and less useful stats on the performance. You can click on the guests and find out what are they thinking right now, what's their mood, how much money they have and so forth. In fact, you may find many TDC members as guests if you search carefully. One funny feature that I'm planning to have is the ability to save your hotel view also for other players to see. So basically everyone could browse through a catalog of hotels and see what sort of creations the other players have built and how much money they are generating.
Alright, maybe that gives you a little bit better idea on what to expect. A lot of text is boring without any pictures, so I have to include one to make this devlog interesting. Woman on a roof. If I would be she, I'd try out that telescope and enjoy the view. Oh, but maybe the local greedy hotelier has over-priced this little extra service...
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