Daly Homes Inc

Date:

2009

Contributors:

Mike Daly

Download:

/downloads/games/dalyhomesinc_090807.zip

I created this game based off of the career of my dad, John E Daly. Over the course of his career he was a builder, contractor, developer, and eventually invested in real-estate. I wanted to create a game that embodied a few aspects of his experience:

• Dealing with the mistakes of stupid workers
• Dealing with needy homeowners
• Realizing the exponential payoff of reinvestment
• The goal of retiring as early as possible
• Balancing the use of time and money against each other
• Balancing money now and money later
• The difficulty and cost of scaling up to a large organization
• Probably some other things that I can’t think of off the top of my head

Depending on how you manage things, problems occasionally occur. The problems that pop up are chosen randomly from a bank of things that have actually happened for the most part. I also wanted to poke fun at how he made me work for him as my summer job and how much I complained about it.

I had a very tight schedule to get the game done. I ended up working on it a total of 29 hours over the course of 8 days. Unfortunately, a how to play screen didn’t make it in time. Instead of a how to play screen, here are a couple of useful things to know:

• The game is turn-based and you only have so much time per turn
• You choose how to spend your time by selecting things from the choices menu
• Once you choose something it doesn’t instantly happen, it gets added to your TO DO list which gets executed all at once when you end your turn
• You loose if you don’t have any money left after the turn resolves (after income)
• You win if you can either build 20 townhouses or accumulate 1000 moneys
• Your goal is to retire as early as possible, which is based off of the number of turns you take
• I think the rest of the stuff can be figured out without too much trouble using the info dialog that is always visible
• The game uses keyboard or 360 controller; it doesn’t support mouse

Requirements:

• Shader Model 2.0+ capable graphics hardware
• Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.0
• .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package
• DirectX 9.0c Redistributable