The CS190 version of SimsU is a stripped-down combination of the popular computer games The Sims by Maxis (see http://www.thesims.com/) and SimCity 4 by Maxis (see http://www.simcity.com/). However, instead of allowing the user to create and run a neighborhood with people performing the daily tasks of life, SimsU will allow the user to create and run a university with students and faculty who will go to classes, run errands, and socialize.

The object of The Sims and SimCity is to create a world and to ensure the well-being of its populace. In SimsU, the object will be to create a university that students will be interested in enrolling. When students enroll, they will pay tuition, which will give the player money to spend in upgrading the school. As the player builds better facilities and acquires better professors (which the player can also control), more people will want to attend. When students finally graduate, students which who are happy with their experiences at the university will give back to the university, giving the player even more money to spend.

To build a university, the player will be given the option to purchase building contracts to build dorms, libraries, greens, lecture halls, offices, dining halls, frat houses, athletic facilities, and campus bars. Because this is the Brown University version, these buildings will look similar to ones on the Brown University campus. The player can place these buildings (which will be pre-made so the user does not need to build one) anywhere he would like. Students will begin enrolling in the college once the user “opens” the university to the public.

On the more detailed level, the player will be able to control what type of students he wants to accept into the university, the general priorities of the students. He will have the ability to choose how much they study, how much they have fun, and how much they sleep. The player also chooses which professors to hire, which affects how the students learn. These factors combine to determine how the student body is doing. As the president of the university, your goal is to establish and run a school with strong academics and content students. Have fun and good luck!

When the game begins, the main window opens up and you will see your workspace, and the lay of the land for a new Brown University, all ready to be built by YOU!

To load a saved game, either go to the File menu and choose Load, or click the Load a game button from the Management Options panel. You will then be prompted to specify the game file you would like to open. This will abort your current game, so make sure you have saved what you are working on before you load another game.

To begin a new game, at any time go to the File menu and choose New. A fresh university campus will appear in your workspace. This will abort your current game, so make sure you have saved what you are working on before you start a new game.

When you open the game for the first time or start a new game, your university won't look like much, but you have the foundation on which to build a prestigious educational institution.

There will be a network of roads already in place for you to build your university around. You can bulldoze these roads and build new roads as you see fit.

Your univeristy starts out with an endowment of $100,000 for you to work with. You will use this to build buildings and hire professors. It may seem like a lot, but building a university is costly, so don't spend it all in one place!

The window that pops up when you open the game is your workspace, containing all the tools you will need to develop and run a successful school. The main window in the middle of the screen is the Viewing Window, your view of the university. This is where you see the roads you begin with, all the buildings you build, beautiful birds, and even a few students. To the right is a panel of buttons containing all the Management Controls used to build and control elements of your univeristy. The bottom three buttons are your Viewing Controls and are used to change the view you have of your campus. Just below those is a help button to remind you of the functions of all the buttons. Above the Viewing Window is the Menu Bar with options to begin and end games. On the bottom left are the Statistics, boxes that show current statistics for your university, and on the bottom right is the panel of Speed Control buttons which you use to control the speed of passing time. While you are viewing your campus, the cursor is a little red square, but it will change when you begin to build things.

To change your view of the campus, you use the middle mouse button and the Viewing Control buttons. The top button is for zooming in and out, the middle button is for panning left, right, forward, and back, and the bottom button is for rotating the camera angle. Select one of these options, hold down the middle mouse button, and move the mouse around to change your view.

The majority of your time (other than time spent admiring your campus and chatting with students) will be spent constructing buildings and managing the campus in such a way that the students will be happy.

After you have built a building, your cursor will remain the size of that building, so if you click in another spot another one of those buildings will be constructed. To go back to your regular one-square cursor, right click the mouse button. With this cursor you can query any building by clicking on it and this will bring up the building's information window:


Here you will see the name of the building that was given to it upon construction. To change the name of your building, simply type a new name into the text box and when you are satisfied, click the check button . The building information window for certain buildings also contains other types of information. For instance, for dorms it shows the total capacity of the dorm and how full it is currently, so that you know when you need more dorms.

There are a few other things you can build besides buildings, which will give your campus a more friendly atmosphere. These things are built in the same way as the buildings, and are found by clicking the Build other things button which brings up a window similar to the building construction options window. Follow the same procedure to make your campus a more beautiful place. Unlike buildings, these things do not have to align with the grid or be built at right angles - you can place them as close together or far apart as you see fit.

Once your school has some students and faculty members, they will need ways to get around campus, so you will want to build some roads. To do this, click on the Build road button . Your cursor will still be one red square, because a section of road takes up one square. Choose where you want to build the road, and click to lay down the pavement. Do this many times in a line to build a road that goes somewhere.

After you've built some buildings and some roads, you may want to reorganize some parts of your campus or make room for bigger better facilities. To do this, click on the Bulldoze button . Your cursor will still be one red square because you can only bulldoze one thing at a time. To bulldoze something, place the red square over what you want to get rid of and click on it. If you click anywhere on a building, the entire building will be destroyed. On a road however, only that one section of road will be destroyed. The Brown construction crew is so efficient that they clean up the rubble before you can even notice it.

Each year, your university undergoes many financial transactions. Click on the Review Budget button to review and adjust your yearly budget with the Budget Window:


With this window, you can balance the different parts of your budget as well as hire and fire professors. The Budget section displays everything you pay and earn, and shows you the Total Change at the bottom of the list on the left. When you are done with your budget and hiring changes, click the Close button on the bottom right. Balance your budget carefully because you have bad credit and no banks will lend you money, so if you go into debt, your school will go down the drain.

There are two types of Expenditures that you must pay each year:

Maintenace Fees
Buildings are great, but they don't maintain themselves, especially when they're hundreds of years old. Luckily, the maintenance staff give you a yearly estimate of how much the upkeep of all the buildings on campus will cost. This estimate is displayed in the Budget Window under Maintenance Fee Required. The next line, Maintenace Fee Paid, lets you decide how well to treat your buildings. To specify how much you spend on maintenance each year, type the amount you want to spend in the text box to the right. Then click the Set Budget button at the bottom of the window to update your modifications.

Professor Salaries
As you hire more professors, you will obviously have to pay their salaries, so keep that in mind when you decide who to hire. The Total Professor Salaries line tells you the sum total of every professor's salary and is subtracted from your funds as you pay your profs each year.

There are two types of income for your university:

Alumni Donations
You receive donations from alumni when students graduate from your school, go on to be successful, and have such fond memories of their time there that they decide to give back to the university.

Tuition
The other, main type of income is Tuition, which students pay when your school seems good enough that they decide to come. In a new game, tuition starts out at $10. To change the tuition, simply write the new amount into the text box to the right of the Tuition line and click Set Budget to see your newly balanced budget. Because of inflation, you may not have a good sense of the value of a dollar back in the old days, but $100 was regarded as a pretty high tuition. Be careful not to raise your tuition too high or no students will be able to afford it.

Hiring
Your students won't learn much in college if they don't have professors, so you are in charge of hiring (and firing) them. To do this, click on the Hire Faculty button from the Budget Window. That will give you this interface for selecting professors:


At the top is your applicant pool - a list of professors available for hire. Selecting one of the professors' names displays a list of their credentials below. This is what you know about the professor:

Salary - how much you will have to pay him/her each year
Likeability - how much students will like him/her, on a scale of 1 to 5
Subject - which department that professor will teach in
Experience - number of years of teaching experience he/she has
Ranking - what the professor is ranked, out of 1000

Based on this information, your financial situation, and your university's needs, you can choose which professors you want to hire. To hire a professor, select his/her name from the list and click the Hire button at the bottom.

Firing
Sometimes professors don't live up to your expectations, or they simply go insane and you just have to let them go. To do this, click on the Fire Faculty button from the Budget Window or the Hiring Window (they're really sections of the same window). The firing section has the same parts as the hiring window. The box at the top lists all the professors currently employed at your university, and if you select one you can see all of their statistics. When you decide which one you are giving the boot, just select his/her name and click the Fire button at the bottom.

When you are done hiring and firing, you can go back and check your budget by clicking on the Budget button at the right, or you can click Close to go back to building your campus.

A new Brown starts with nothing but roads, and as the president you must begin by building the necessary buildings. When there is enough to open school, students will begin to come and pay tuition. The students will need professors and more facilities to keep them smart and happy, and it is your job to provide these things.

When a new school is opened, it starts in September 1764, the year Brown was founded. Time passes from there, month by month. You can change the speed of the simulated time to affect your game play. This is useful when you want to do a lot of things or when you have nothing you need to work on for a few years. Change the speed by using the Speed Control buttons at the bottom right of the main window.
The different speeds are:
Pause - time does not pass but you can still build things
Sloth - slowest time setting
Llama - medium time setting
Cheetah - fastest time setting

As your school gets more and better resources, more students will want to come. Naturally, you would like to have a well-liked and desireable school. In order to achieve this, you must keep your students happy while simultaneously encouraging their good study habits. The number of students you see walking around your campus is proportionate to the actual number of students enrolled in your univeristy - for every 100 students enrolled, you see one student roaming the campus.

More students come at the beginning of each school year in September. It is up to you how big to make your school - a small liberal arts college, or an expansive university?

At the end of each school year in June, the seniors will graduate and go off into the real world. If your university has prepared them well, they will be successful and make lots of money which your development office will try to coax back from them. If they had a good time at your university and look upon their days there fondly, they just might give you some donations to go towards further school improvements.

Your goal as president is to create a successful and prestigious institution, but how do you know how good your school is? Thats where the University Statistics come in handy. At the bottom left corner of the main window, you can see all the relevant information about the current state of your school:


Rank - U.S. News & World Reports ranking of your school, out of all the colleges in the country
Student Body - the number of students currently enrolled at your school
Funds - how much money you currently have available for you to use
Date - the current month and year
GPA - the average GPA of all students at your university
Food Quality - how good the food in your dining hall is, on a scale of 1 to 100
Crime - how bad the crime on campus is, on a scale of 1 to 100

All Brown students get their news from the Brown Daily Herald and from time to time, you will get important updates from the BDH too. When there is some extreme situation, whether it be good or bad, you will receive a copy of the campus newspaper notifying you of the news. You should pay attention to the articles because the paper is written by students and it is your most reliable source of information on their opinions of the school. To close the newspaper window, click anywhere on it. To unsubscribe to the Herald, select the News button and you won't be bothered with annoying news. To subscribe again, deselect the News button.

Of course, a successful university will hopefully continue educating its students forever. But you might well get tired of taking care of it. If this happens, you have two options. You can save your game which preserves the state of the university and keeps it at the current point in time, or you can just quit, essentially shutting down your university.

To save a game, either go to the File menu and choose Save, or click the Save a game button from the Management Options panel. You will then be prompted to specify the location where you would like to keep the saved game file. SimsU game files must use the file type ending .sims.

To quit the game at any time, go to the File menu and choose Quit. Make sure you have saved your current game first if you want to work on it later, otherwise it will be demolished.

The main component of the state of the university is the buildings that have been built. Students are lazy, so all buildings are only effective based on their distance from the dorm. Building distance is either short, long, or too far away to count at all. A building's effectiveness is diminished with each successive category. Each dorm is compared with every other building, and calculated independently.

Dorm
A dorm can hold up to 200 students. If there are too few dorms to hold all the students who wish to attend, the user is warned. Except for allowing students, dorms have no positive effect. For each student living in a dorm, crime for that dorm goes up.

Library
Libraries increase GPA for students in each dorm that can reach it. Libraries do not effect crime. If there are too few of them, student GPA will drop considerably, and the user will be warned. Libraries do not affect crime.

Police Station
A Police station decreases crime for dorms that can reach it. If crime is too high, the user is warned.

Dining Hall
Dining Halls increase food quality for students that can reach it. If the students in a dorm cannot reach any dining hall, the user is warned.

Gym
Gyms increase student happiness, but decrease GPA because they encourage jocks who don't like to study to enroll in the school. They have no effect on crime.

Parks
Parks increase student happiness because they're great places for students to hang out and study, but they also increase crime because they tend to be dangerous at night. They have no effect on GPA.

Department
Departments increase the effectiveness of professors.

Professors
Professors increase both student happiness and GPA, but they are expensive.