Good, Fast, Cheap: pick 2

Game Mechanic

I’m not sure where the term first originated (engineering?) but there’s a saying:
“Good, Fast, Cheap: pick 2.”

If you want a GOOD product done FAST, it won’t be CHEAP.
If you want a CHEAP product delivered FAST, it won’t be GOOD.
If you want a GOOD product at a CHEAP price, you won’t get it FAST.

A lot of games (particularly strategy games) embody this sort of mechanic in indirect ways without making it explicit: in a game like StarCraft you can build a bunch of cheap units very quickly, but they won’t be very strong and are easily defended against.

Example: Research & Engineering in strategy games

Tons of games feature a “research” mechanic where you can unlock new technology by investing in research, and a separate “engineering” or “construction” mechanic where you take previously-unlocked technology and produce concrete instances of it. E.g., you research the concept of e.g. a water purifier first, and then you can build water purifiers.

This is a suitable abstraction for many games, but I think it would be cool to build an entire game around this real-life tradeoff, but make it front and center to your decision making, not as a buried implicit consequence of other choices.

Okay, say I’m Emperor Larsius Prime CLXVII of Planet Lars, home of the Lartians. The foul earthlings are invading our sacred homeland under the foul banner of some dude named “Musk.” There’s only one thing to do – deploy the Cybernetic Attack Elephants!

This is one way we could go. The Elephants will be ready tomorrow, and it’ll only cost a 1/2 million bucks. But, there’s no guarantee that The Elephants won’t spontaneously explode during mobilization, start randomly trampling our own troops, or just generally fail to live up to the hype of our defense contractors.

Okay, fine, let’s insist on GOOD.

Alright, now I can sleep better at night. The Elephants are going to perform as close to spec as possible, so I can focus on probing the enemy’s weaknesses rather than worrying about my own. But these Elephants will do me no good if I can’t get them across the Tartarus Montes in time to keep the earthlings from seizing our capital

Sigh… let’s go with FAST. What’s the damage?

Okay, so we’ll have top-quality Cybernetic Attack Elephants AND they’ll be ready to go tomorrow to give Mr. Musk and his terran hordes what-for. But it’s gonna cost us a full million bucks, and wouldn’t you know it, with the terrestrial war in full blast we’re gonna have a hard time getting our hands on any more male deer anytime soon. Time for some deficit spending I guess, the motherland is worth it!

Okay, so what?

The whole point of this idea is to build an entire game around the Good/Fast/Cheap triangle, AND to make that relationship explicit so that this tradeoff is always at the forefront of what the player is deciding about.

This sort of game would de-emphasize decisions like “I guess Zerglings are the best choice here,” and “I’ll invest in double-plated starship hulls even though it makes the ships heavier and cost more”. Instead, the focus will be on a smaller number of overall choices, any and all of which can come in GOOD/FAST/CHEAP varieties, and make you always think about which two modifiers you want in which situations.