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In 2010 with the public release of Minecraft games based on construction rose in popularity dramatically. Products like Terraria and Besiege were shipped out and with each new year innovations and new ideas were brought to the table. Come 2018 and there are a plethora of new types of construction games, each with their own uses, advantages and disadvantages that I am going to talk about.
A quick clarification, construction games or games with construction elements are games which allow the player to interact with the world by creating artificial terrain, such as houses (although they don't necessarily have to be a sort of recognisable structure, it could just are easily be a stack of boxes meant to get you up a ledge). These constructs have to interact with the world around it. This interaction can
Voxel Based Construction Sandboxes:
Voxel Based Construction Sandboxes or VBCSs as I will call them (because that is really long to write out) are probably the first type of game to come to your mind when someone mentions "construction games" but is not the most common. However, VBCSs are difficult analyse for gameplay advantages if we don't understand some of the key words that make up the acronym. The VB or voxel based part of the word is what makes up the building blocks of the games. Games are often sorted into three distinct categories based on their visuals: pixel, voxel and vector based. We won't discuss pixels and vectors but voxels based games are 3 dimensional games that are set on a grid. Every element (I.E. character) has to fit a certain size on the grid and is hand drawn. However unlike pixel based games, voxel based characters (animals, the player, etc) can move outside of the grid. Voxels work very well with large scale games like Minecraft thats world's are generated by the computer, as grids can easily fit into mathematical systems as the grid points can only contain a certain number of results (IE 1:dirt 2:stone 3:water). Having already discussed construction we will move on to Sandbox. Sandbox games are games that are open world with no clear goal. Usually the worlds are randomly generated and allow you a large degree of intractability hence sandbox.
Voxel based game Minecraft allows for massive constructions, like this rendition of castle Winterfell from Game of Thrones
VBCSs have key advantages. They are easy to build in, any construction that is static can just fit into the grid, that way the developers don't have to deal with clipping (objects appearing inside one another). These games are also easily understandable by players. Returning to Minecraft (easily the most well designed VBCS), almost any player can pick up the controller and after a couple seconds of tinkering understand all of the key mechanics of building. These games do carry their own disadvantages. Usually voxel based games don't look that good, Trove is a good example of this. In Trove the areas look flat and slightly dull, textures for objects (the way an object looks) have to be repeated for adjacent blocks of the same type. With VBCSs it is nearly impossible to achieve a sense of visual realism found in games like Call of Duty or Spiderman.
Screenshot of Trove gameplay
City development:
City development games or city builders are construction games in which the player is given an overhead view and able to construct predesigned objects in locations to fabricate a civilisation. City builders like City Skylines or Clash of Clans are usually on the macro scale with you developing the city without overseeing small details like the layout of a kitchen in an apartment. City builders usually have no outlined final goal, instead giving the players creativity to run with their constructs and make them economically viable. In this vein of economics city builders are made up in large part by simulators of some kind.
The skyline of a city in City Skylines
Advantages of city development games are their simulation of macro construction. Most building games make you construct each building piece by piece, In city builders entire blocks can be built, moved and demolished with a few clicks. The game also provides a sense of power seen mostly in war games. Disadvantages of these come again with their visuals. With so many small pieces all being view at once composing the image of a large city a computer can slow down. To fix this artists create low render images that pose little strain to the system. However this means that further inspection will reveal how the game truly looks. And with the focus on macro micro has to pay. The ability to design your own buildings has be restricted to make way for the development of more pressing features. Small stories are lost and the character can become detached due to his sense of scale and power.
Premodelled Construction Games:
PCGs are games in which the parts you build with have been created to speed up the process. This can mean that walls or windows require one click to build instead of several minute spent placing each log on top of one another. Examples of these games include Subnautica with its underwater base building where you construct a large pipe of several varieties then seal it off. Or Unturned where large parts of buildings are built with a single click. The constructions, unlike VBCSs, take place in full worlds that look fairly realistic. These games are very conventional in terms of their concepts of building and are by far the most common due to their simplicity in the design process.
Metal building assets of Unturned, used to construct bases
A view of a constructed base in Subnautica
Some benefits of construction in this design is its simplicity of development as previously stated. Creating a system by which players use large constructs that you have hand crafted can mean that you don't have to worry about strange issues with interlocking voxels. Additionally, most game engines aren't designed to program with voxels so common systems like Unity can be used and easily learned to make these games. Visually are where these games shine though. As seen above these games have a scale of detail and art that can't be seen in the previous two, with realistic visuals.
Physics Based Construction Games
PBCGs are games in which your constructions abide by all of the laws of physics. The force of gravity, laws of inertia, centripetal movement caused by rotation, All of it applies. PBCGs are games like Besiege and Crossout that have object that are constantly in motion or preforming some sort of task. Usually these objects are vehicles. PBCGs are often more contained and goal oriented to prevent the physics engine from using to much power or interacting in the world in weird ways.
Example of physics on catapults and puzzles that must be solved
Advantages of PBCGs are their abilities to simulate interactions as a puzzle. The unique spin that players can put on to a construction offers a high level of replayability and can be enjoyable and humorous. These games have a wide range of visual elegance, and can be either simple or complex. The is a plethora of disadvantages that PBCGs bare though, most of which are do not give bad products but simply make it more difficult to produce. Finding a physics engine that mixes with construction can be difficult and you may have to edit one or create your own. Physics engines can be intense for computers to handle, especially if there are lots of moving parts. Physics based games can be hard to grasp and often boil down to trial and error over constructive thinking.
Construction games have a large variety of unique forms. Pick which one is best suited to you for either play or development. And remember that these are generalised categories, voxel games can still have impressive visuals and you can have a city builder that is physics based.