Hi gamers and fellow game developers,

I would like to get your feedback the following city builder concept:

Think of a typical city builder like e.g. Anno or Banished. You need resources for building, the population needs housing, food, drink and firewood etc. . As usual you build roads and houses and specific buildings that fulfill the resource needs like e.g. a bakery. The city founder also has to win qualified people for his project e.g. a baker to operate the bakery.

Additionally - and this is the new part I am thinking about - the player switches into the role of those leading citizen and organizes their business, e.g. orders raw materials and sets production rates. If the player fails to keep a business profitable the citizen will leave the island and e.g. the bakery will not operate until a new baker is found.

I am thinking of this icon to represent citizens: Would you unterstand it?

When clicking on the icon you get a list of citizen on your island with some overview data:

Your citizens have a "play" button which allows you to play as them. You get to see their inventory, you get their skill tree in school, can take a loan at the bank for them and you can set their monthly purchases and production. There will also be a separate help screens per character. Do you know any games where you switch from playing one person to playing anther like that? What do you think of the idea?

As you can imagine the well-being of your citizens requires multiple characters to do their job successfully. What do you think? Nice idea or way to complex for the player?

Considering the number of jobs which might be available in a city, this could be too complex for player. I can't imagine switching from mayor, baker, fisherman, tailor, alchemist  etc just to ensure their business survives.

My second concern is depth of each job. How deep do you want each job to be? I'm afraid you might ended up making shallow experience for each job.

Naturally I will limit the number of jobs to the essential at first because of cause it's a lot of work. I was thinking more of abstraction than of shallow.  Baker, tailor and alchemist all buy materials, have production chains and skill trees. 

Of course there are a few special cases, like the mayor. What the major does - acquiring people, designating areas for logging, mining or building - would be a screen in a city builder anyway.  Employees of the city, like the teacher or the priest won't have much to do. They just can look at their finances. And if the cost of living will make the teacher likely to leave the major will better give them a pay rise.

In theory, it sounds like it could be a fun challenge, but logistically, how would the game characters interact with each other? 

For example, let's say, I'm the mayor and raise taxes. Now the baker, fisher, and lumberjack must increase their prices, or reduce their production costs, but they don't have autonomy. I must now go and be each character and adjust all the prices. This now affects what the teacher can afford. That means I have to increase the teacher's salary, but then I might have to raise taxes again to do so...  In the meantime, are people going to leave before I've had a chance to "play them" or are you going to pause all interactions to give the player a chance to make the rounds? And what else must the player do to keep the city going? 

Yes, your icon does look like people.  

What you describe is  what happens in real life. It's called inflation. Maybe you want to be careful raising taxes in the first place. Not more than your citizen can afford. But I see your point, one must be able to pause the game to process the ripples some actions might cause.

So far I didn't plan interactions. Every citizen decides on his screen. If the baker raises the price of bread the other citizen have to pay. Obviously playing an excessively greedy baker will not make your settlement thrive as a whole.