There’s a few core principles that I want to build into the fundamentals of the classic F1 management game I’m building.
Firstly, it must absolutely not be “pay to win” or microtransaction driven in any way. Your results should come from strategy and skill, and be earned, so that it actually means something! There’s obviously a trend in the other direction; some of the other games in this genre let you do things like buy materials for car development, or buy in-game money, which completely breaks the economy and undermines any sense of balance.
Secondly, the game must be driven by strategy and decision making – not real-time reflexes. A lot of (all?) the F1 management games I know kind of break this, by drifting from being a team principal to being some kind of race engineer. There’s a core tension here:
- If you want to have realistic reliability in races, then the races need to run for a reasonable distance.
- If the races run for a reasonable distance, then they take a significant amount of time.
- If races take a significant amount of time, then you’ll want to compress time and use 2x or 3x speed
- If you’ve sped up the race, then you can no longer respond “in real time” anyway
So, this is a management game, not a “race engineer simulator”. You hire race engineers, they are part of your staff, and you delegate appropriately to them. Maybe, in exceptional circumstances, you might get involved, but this shouldn’t be about timing button clicks.
Thirdly, the game must be realistic, which means imperfect. It drives me nuts that you see information like “your opponent’s tyres are 38% worn”. What does 38% mean? That’s not how even the most cutting edge telemetry works, and even if it did, that information would absolutely not be shared between teams! Sure, you know how many laps the opponents have run since they changed tyres, and you can make assumptions from that, but these assumptions must be drawn from the imperfect information that is actually available. The same kind of thing applies across the board. In a game, precise information does exist, but it shouldn’t necessarily be available; there should be a filter that adds a “fog of war” based on things like the abilities of your staff to interpret the data.
Lastly, there must be room for “sparks of genius”. The thing I dislike intensely about modern F1 is that it has become so prescriptive, and the teams rarely ever “design” anything, they are merely optimizing the template handed down by the FIA. It’s not very interesting, and ironically, it was done to limit costs but has entirely the opposite effect. This is a fairly recent phenomenon though – which is why I’m going back to previous eras! Back in the 70s teams could truly experiment, and the results are iconic. We all know of things like Tyrell’s 6 wheeled car, Lotus and their pioneering aerodynamics work with wings and floor design, Brabham’s infamous fan car, Renault’s breakthroughs in turbochargers, Williams’ amazing 1993 car with its electronics and driver aids. These things didn’t come from optimizing, they came from “sparks of genius”, the ideas that broke the mold in ways that seemed crazy but might just work.
Most of the F1 games I know approach car development in a fairly linear way – maybe that’s a predefined sequence of components that you progress through, or an ever increasing “performance” number. I want to make something that allows and encourages variation, through taking risks and trying things to find the next breakthrough. Not all gambles pay off, but one guy with an idea just might come up with something that means David can beat the Goliaths even with a tiny budget!
So my goal is to bring these principles to life, and my theory is that there’s a huge gap in the market for something like this. What do you think?