Smooth Operators

[Mr. Analog]

You know what doesn't sound like fun? Running a call centre, you know what is actually a LOT of fun? Running a call centre.

"Smooth Operators" is a single player indie game that takes a lot of inspiration from more classic sim games (SimTower comes to mind), but with people/resource management and goals/rewards for expanding your business.

You start the game with some money, a client and a few basic building types you can add. You grow your business both in size and complexity by hiring employees, managing them, managing accounts, managing maintenance and designing a building that facilitates all this stuff together.

From there it's a balancing act between meeting client obligations, keeping workers happy and growing your business to meet goals (milestone/achievement type things).

To meet the client needs you need to hire employees to field inbound and outbound calls and do back office work, you need to build offices for them, facilities to keep them productive, managers, operations coaches, etc. There is a tech tree for upgrading offices and equipment that is unlocked by hiring project managers. Designing an office space that works to maximise how effective your employees work time by making sure there are enough restrooms, break rooms and a building layout that lets people get around quickly is important.

As time goes on you need start dealing with things like increasing call volumes, people getting sick or going on vacation. Eventually you get to the point where your business is stable and you can hire an account manager who will find new clients for you and you can start expanding your business to handle multiple clients.

It sounds kind of boring but it's really engrossing, you need to manage money coming in vs money going out, you need to start upgrading things and researching new things just to stay balanced, it starts off simple enough but gains complexity quickly. Building an effective business means managing everything from the building layout, how good your support staff is, how quickly you grow your business and how you manage the people you have and how happy they are.

As you can imagine the larger your company gets the more complex the problems become, you can grow very quickly early on and start a massive call center that will gain cash very quickly but leads to a lot of problems for growth. For example; you can't get enough janitors to get through the whole office every night which starts making people sick which means a loss of income due to resources being off work. You get stat bonuses by putting people doing the same work together in a room, but if one gets sick the others do as well. I had this happen in one of my first offices, all the people doing back office work were in one room, one got sick because the janitors couldn't get up to their place every night then my BO work started to suffer and the client started offering less work, which meant I had less income. All because the janitors couldn't get up there fast enough. I had to both hire more janitors AND build a second elevator (I had flow problems as well) but this meant several days of gathering income and having to ignore other requests until I could solve it.

Like I say, it looks like a simple game on the surface but when you start to get in to it you find a wealth of challenges.

I played this game for about 6 hours yesterday before I realized what time it was.

It is available on Desura for just over $6
http://www.desura.com/games/smooth-operators-call-center-chaos

It is also available on XBox Live Arcade and is on Steam Greenlight (if you buy it on Desura you will be able to activate it on Steam if it gets Greenlit)

Very cool, very fun, very challenging!

[Darren Dirt]

Although starting off with a unique flavor, does the gameplay over time convergys into pretty much a sim-city type of mindless grind?

[Mr. Analog]

Well like I say it seems to grow in complexity over time so you focus less on some things and more on others. Like when you go from one client to two (or more) some operational things matter less (like an individual call centre employee being unhappy and quitting) when things are smaller having one less employee hurts and of course making the money back that it costs to get another one sets you back a little, but when you have a lot of employees it hurts less so you don't worry about it as much.

You also kind of learn why growing fast at the start carries penalties later on in the future. Like I could hire an account manager in the first few days and get more than one client off the bat but I guarantee I won't be able to scale their business as increased call volumes are offered.

I like that there few parameters but a lot of complexity based on decisions I make (or don't make!)

The first call centre I created grew very rapidly and I had a multi-story building before I knew what was happening, but it faced a lot of challenges as it grew and I basically ended up creating a hellhole that paid the price for focusing solely on customer demands instead of trying to even out employee needs. I had more than 10 people quit after 35 days (which was very painful when I started getting higher than normal call volumes [which is a cyclical timed event I think]).

The next office I created grew slower and more deliberately, in fact I kept to just a single client over 50+ days and made sure to add certain features deliberately. Even then I found challenges making sure my staff was supported with IT people, janitors, coaches, managers, facilities...

It was easy to lose 6+ hours I can tell you!!

[Tom]

OT: Am I the only one who can't help reading the topic title as Smooth Criminals?

[Thorin]

thanks, THIS IS NOW STUCK IN MY BRAIN

[Tom]

Ayup

[Mags]

Come on -

This what jumped to my mind. Course i used to use Sade to score with chicks all the time in my youth.


Tried it a liitle bit. Was liking it till i got to having to modify your employees work hours and i started to picture doing this for every employee that comes and goes.. Blah.. Maybe a little too high on the micromanagement scale for me. And, i generally like these type of games.

[Mr. Analog]

I tried it on hard mode and man, it was even better (after a few false starts) because I really had to think about how to grow. I'm at 30+ days now with my hard mode call centre, everyone is happy and I'm getting all the bonuses and I'm climbing the tech tree faster (apparently project managers add some kind of efficiency bonus as well as research the tech tree). I also learnt that things like operations coaches should be placed so that their office is adjacent to as many other operations offices as possible (so plonk them in the middle square of a 3x3 block of offices).

Now that I've hit a balance with one customer I'm saving up the cash I know I will need to expand into another client (should be between 5 and 10k to really get started).

I haven't adjusted peoples schedules yet but I have organized what floors IB and OB calls are as they start and end at different times.

I usually dislike micromanagement games but this has really grabbed me... (for HOURS at a time)

The only thing I've found is that there are some bugs, one of the other games I had started was doing strange things, like notifying me of one person quitting and then looking at stats and seeing 5 people quit. One at a time I can handle, but 5? I have to re-hire and then place those people in the right seats to maximise their effectiveness.

[Darren Dirt]

does the gameplay over time convergys into pretty much a sim-city type of mindless grind?

Bolded pun needs more love imo... especially considering your choice of verbiage here:

The first call centre I created grew very rapidly and I had a multi-story building before I knew what was happening, but it faced a lot of challenges as it grew and I basically ended up creating a hellhole that paid the price for focusing solely on customer demands instead of trying to even out employee needs. I had more than 10 people quit after 35 days (which was very painful when I started getting higher than normal call volumes [which is a cyclical timed event I think]).

[Mr. Analog]

does the gameplay over time convergys into pretty much a sim-city type of mindless grind?

Bolded pun needs more love imo...

I saw it when it was all-caps before you changed it

I'll say this much, it's not a very realistic sim but you learn a few things along the way

It makes you think