RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

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Strong rec ecdavis · 2022-06 · on “Citybound – A city building game using actor-based distributed simulation”

It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: [this video] Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.

Recommends jameshart · 2021-09 · on “Games that emphasize emergent narrative”

Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of player-provided narrative reasoning. [this video]

Cites DonHopkins · 2020-01 · on “Reverse engineering course”

Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulato

Cites DonHopkins · 2022-07 · on “Magnasanti – The largest and most terrible city of SimCity”

You can check out the original SimCity Classic source code here, which I cleaned up, refactored and renamed for consistency and readability, documented, and translated to C++, but it still retains the original behavior and intent: [LINK] This is also an earlier version which that code was derived from, that I started from the Mac version, ported to Unix, cleaned up and translated old C and 68k assembly to ANSI C, and made a user interface with the TCL/Tk scripting language and X11 GUI toolkit: [LINK] The one little "modernization" I made to the simulation was to copy the radar dish tile animation from the airport, and make it individually placeable as a "high speed network connection" that l

Cites DonHopkins · 2023-08 · on “Striking the Right Balance: Over-Engineering vs. Under-Engineering Software”

Earlier I wrote about the "Simulator Effect" aka "apophenia", and "Reverse Over Engineering": [LINK] DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what g

Cites DonHopkins · 2025-08 · on “Citybound: City building game, microscopic models to vividly simulate organism”

Trying to simulate every microscopic detail doesn't necessarily translate to a fun game (or even a realistic simulation). After working with Will on SimCity and The Sims, I've written about what he calls "the simulator effect" aka apophenia (delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations), and what I call "Reverse Over-Engineering": [LINK] DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shou

Cites DonHopkins · 2025-09 · on “Magical systems thinking”

Will Wright credits Jay Forrester for inspiring him to simulate a city on the computer: [LINK] >How did the leap from Raid's world editor, to SimCity with its urban design theories, happen? >WW: First, it was just a toy for me. I was just making my editor more and more elaborate. I thought it would be cool to have the world come to life. So I started researching books on urban dynamics, and traffic, and things like that. I came across the work of Jay Forrester, who was kind of the father of system dynamics. He was actually one of the first people I found that actually simulated a city on a computer. Except in his simulation, there was no map; it was just numbers. It was like population level

Cites DonHopkins · 2025-09 · on “Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently”

[LINK] >Everyone notices the obvious built-in political bias, whatever that is. But everyone sees it from a different perspective, so nobody agrees what its real political agenda actually is. I don’t think it’s all that important, since SimCity’s political agenda pales in comparison to the political agenda in the eye of the beholder. >Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for gam