I think buildings should imitate ecological systems. – Ken Yeang
It’s the first Screenshot Saturday for Project Highrise! For the first time, we’re able to share images from the game board of an actual play session of Project Highrise.
In this image are some of the smaller offices that you can create in Project Highrise. Bigger offices will become available as your tower grows (and we finish creating the assets). Let’s look at a couple in more detail.
Here’s an insurance office with an agent sitting at her desk:
She’s got a computer on her desk and she has the lights on. Both of those things need electricity. So as the builder and manager of the tower, you’ll have to make sure that her office is linked up to your power grid and that you’ve got enough capacity and wattage to keep her lights on and computer humming.
The other thing you might notice in her office are those two pretty big filing cabinets and the stack of paper on top of them. Insurance agents do a lot of paperwork. They have contracts and claims and records of each of their clients. So she’s also going to want a service that comes and picks her files and copies them. Sure, she could go outside of the building, but she’ll be a lot happier if there’s a service in the building that can do that for her.
We’ll be covering things like utilities and support services for businesses and residences in greater detail in subsequent posts.
Now let’s look at another one. Here’s a literary agent sitting at his desk:
You can see that his office shares some of the same needs as the insurance agent. He’s got the lights on, he’s got a filing cabinet and some paperwork. But if you look to his right, he’s got a piece of equipment that’s critical for his work – a phone. So in addition to wiring up his office for electricity, you’ll also need to make sure that this office is connected into the building’s phone network and provide enough connectivity so that he can have quite few people on hold at the same time. Also as a literary agent, he’ll be creating fancy proposals and he’ll need nice pens for notes to his clients and other office supplies. So it’s up to you to make sure that this busy agent doesn’t have to leave the building to get the right color Post-It.
In April’s post, we talked a bit about the needs of the individual office workers.
Just like the individual office workers have routines with needs that you need to keep up with, the offices themselves need to be integrated into your building. The key to a successful tower in Project Highrise will be keeping this increasingly complex vertical ecosystem in balance. You’ve got to keep your residents and tenants satisfied and ensure that the offices have the infrastructure they require to function.
