Populating The Map

For the first This Grand Life game (TGL1), a large portion of player suggestions was for more jobs and career types. I was reluctant to add too many of these that played the same and were only cosmetically different. It would also have cluttered the world with too many things that the player didn't care about in their current playthrough.

In TGL2, there are several improvements to mitigate these problems and allow for adding a ton of activities that behave differently from game to game. As previously discussed, the preferences system makes activities more or less attractive depending on your individual characters. The industry inflation system makes activities more or less lucrative depending on economic conditions.

To avoid cluttering the map, a fresh game only starts with several key sites like the town hall and shopping mall. To find more sites and things to do, your characters need to spend time searching for them.

For example, let's say your character enjoys paperwork and being social. The education industry is booming as well, making teaching a perfect career path for them. After getting the prerequisite education and qualifications, you would use the "Find Job" action to look for teaching jobs. This will spawn sites where job openings might occur. For a teaching career, this would be the grade school.

You could also search for the grade school directly if you have school age children in your household. If you don't want to be a teacher and have no children, then you never have to see the grade school at all in your playthrough.

You might be wondering, "won't the map become filled up anyway after a long enough playtime?" That's where the economy helps us. When the economy is doing poorly, there is a chance that some sites will close down and be removed from the map. It will only happen to sites you don't have a major interaction with, so don't worry about your home being demolished unexpectedly.

Map Density - A Look Behind The Scenes

The spawn locations for sites like the grade school are random but follow a few rules based on each map's features.

Above is the density map for Sydney, Australia which is auto-generated based on available transport links. It actually matches the city density in real life quite well! In general, a greener value means more sites (and more types of sites) are able to spawn there. 

You'll tend to have banks, shopping malls and other such places clustering around these high density areas. However it will also be more expensive to live there, so you have to consider whether the trade-off in travel time is worth it.

Side Note: The density and transport maps can be edited, but that's a topic for another time.