The Flow of Time in Raising Simulation Games

For the last few days, I have been battling one of the central issues in any raising simulation game: The Calendar. The flow of in-game time has always been one of the most fascinating topics in game design for me. Unlike many other types of simulation games, raising sims tend to have a rather realistic flow of time with a fixed end. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Wonder Project J, but most raising sims present the player with a protege to raise from childhood to adulthood or at least from some less sophisticated state to a more mature one and end at an arbitrary point in time – when the protagonist reaches “maturity”. Consequently, the flow of time tends to be presented rather realistically – no imaginary seasons with 30 days each like in Harvest Moon or years and decades flying by with nothing much changing in the outside world like in some early business sims.

An interesting problem presents itself if the player is allowed to select their character’s birthday – in a raising sim that ends after a certain number of (character) years, like Princess Maker 2, the selection of birthday affects the amount of “preparation time” the player has before the first calendar event / festival so some dates are more desirable than others. In a raising sim set in a modern environment, like Happy Memories: Azalea Town, the game’s beginning and end are tied to school year, not calendar year or “character year” (from one birthday to another) so the player’s choice of birthday only affects the character’s age for each school year and what birthday celebrations will actually be seen ingame.

There are basically three layers of “time” in a modern-school-setting raising simulation game running in parallel:

• calendar year
• school year
• story timeline (some events are independent of both school and calendar years and occur when certain conditions are met)

The “calendar year” in Azalea Town is up and running, next step: school year.