Dope Wars, the legacy lives on

Dope Wars is the follow-up to the 1984 DOS game Drug Wars. Originally released in 1984 as a high school project by John E. Dell, it was re-released under the name Dope Wars for Windows in 1998. The legacy for the game can be dated back even further, being inspired by the 1979 game Taipan! Modern adaptations of the game have been tackled by many, including Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

In Dope Wars, the goal is to build a fortune through arbitrage. Players travel between locations, buying low and selling high in a constantly shifting market. To succeed, they must take calculated risks, plan ahead, and manage limited inventory space in order to pay off their loan shark and finish with a profit.

I was exposed to Dope Wars at an impressionable age. Thinking back, it was the first game I modded. Changing the drugs in the game to be cans of baked beans from each of the major UK supermarket chains of the time. I don't think a build of this has survived the old internet.

When thinking about how a spiritual successor to Jalopy might work, I often found myself considering what the endgame would look like in a game that, fundamentally, is focused on logistics.

What Dope Wars does so well with its design is that it's a stripped down system of opportunism: success comes from reading volatile markets, managing scarcity, and exploiting inefficiencies under pressure. Whilst there's no driving, It’s a game where logistics is the gameplay.

New Trade Goods

To make arbitrage work in Honcho, There are now 12 Trade Goods separated into 4 categories. Keep in mind, the yen pricing of these goods is undergoing review and subject to change.

• Generic Type

  • Still Water (¥20 Wholesale Price)

  • Sparkling Water (¥30 Wholesale Price)

  • Orenji Fresh (¥40 Wholesale Price)

• Food Type

  • Corn Soup (¥60 Wholesale Price)

  • Onigiri (¥110 Wholesale Price)

  • Deluxe Fruit Sando (¥180 Wholesale Price)

• Caffeine

  • Green Tea (¥140 Wholesale Price)

  • Coffee (¥220 Wholesale Price)

  • Health Tonic (¥320 Wholesale Price)

• Alcohol

  • Beer (¥260 Wholesale Price)

  • Best Zero (¥420 Wholesale Price)

  • Sake (¥650 Wholesale Price)

Each category contains 3 trade goods of increasing value. Categories except for Generic Type are affected by economic events of the area (more on this below). The wholesale price of each good also affects the base spawn rate of the good along trade routes.

Spawn Rate Testing

As each produce has a base spawn chance tied to their value, I've enabled economic events to influence the Trade Goods found along routes in an area. The aim of this system is to make the Trade Good spawns dynamic, allowing players some level of targeted farming for goods. Here's the results of some test.

Each test generates 100 Trade Goods for routes along the Wadashima area with differing economic events. As you can see, there's some fluctuation in the distribution depending on each event. Let's look into some of these and better explain what's happening.

There are concerns about the safety of packaged meals after reports of consumers finding spoiled meals under their packaging. Consumers are less likely to be buying Food products. This means a reduction in wholesale pricing, likeliness of vending sales of that product, but also an increase in finding abandoned Food goods along trade routes.

Consumers are working overtime in the area, which sees demand and increase to wholesale pricing for Caffeine products. Caffeine products are less likely to be found along the trade routes of the area, but that aids in the weighting of other products, such as the rarer Alcohol goods.

A company-wide holiday means that there are very few workers in the area. With so many people relaxing, Caffeine demand and wholesale pricing has taken a huge hit. There is a lot of Caffeine found along the trade routes, though it will be a struggle to sell it. It would be best for players to store the goods for a better day, or transport them to a new region with a more favourable economic event.

Hopefully with this you can see the influence Dope Wars has had on the design intention. I'm looking forward to getting this update out to players to see what needs tweaking, whether players can capitalise on economic events effectively and what could be changed.

Graphical Improvements

Last time we looked at the vender character art improvements. Recently, I've been spending time on improving some old assets, such as the Repair Bench and the Car Jack.

I've also taken care to improve the final on-screen image of the game. Shadows have been tweaked so they appear much sharper close up, and Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) has been removed entirely as it muddied the image too much. SSAO is a post-processing effect that mocks the effect of soft shadows in corners and creases. For more realistic games this effect works quite well, but with Honcho it muddies the clean, sharp aesthetic. Here's an example of what I mean.

With how much AAA games are intent on muddying the final image of their games with TSAA and frame gen, I think a more reductive approach to this makes sense. Much like a lot of the indie PSX revival stuff, Landlord's Super fell foul of using post-processing as a crutch to emulate nostalgia. It's a cheap win that's only really useful for grabbing attention on social platforms, and with the amount of work I'm putting into this, Honcho deserves better.

I'm keen to get 0.3 out as soon as possible. Once I'm happy with how the new vending system works, and I've polished up the AI a bit I'll get it out to you all. This feels like a couple more weeks, so stay tuned.

Thanks again for all the continued support and stay tuned for news of 0.3 soon!