[phaser]

I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going.

The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that).

Sure, there's something great about Cities Skylines that (at least with very powerful hardware) can look and feel like reality. But at the same time the game engine, in order to make this photorealism of terrain elevations with infinite possible shapes of infrastructure, is so complex that the actual simulation is sloppy, and feels to me like a big downgrade from SC3000.

Traffic, economics, zoning, crime, pollution. are so much practical to simulate (both in the computer, and in our mind models) in this classic isometric style.

* https://microlandia.city

edit: spelling

[HeckFeck]

Looks pretty cool. Reminds me also of Metropolis 1998, which is also going for the isometric style - with a lot more detail, i.e. you can design individual homes and see the lives of "sims" too, something like if SimCity and The Sims were merged.

https://yesboxstudios.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZHI2bCCpl0

It has a demo on Steam now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/ It's quite playable already, and it's a very small 100Mb download.

[raddan]

Awesome! I am going to try this when I have some time next week. Fantasizing about how to make a better SimCity 25 years ago is what inspired me to pursue a computer science degree. I got sidetracked by a PhD and never returned to making games. Maybe your version is the one I always wanted!

[uproarchat]

This looks great, I just bought a copy. While it's downloading I'm perusing the listing, and I'm curious if this supports generating a large image/print of your finished city, like you could in SCURK (SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, which shipped with SC2K).

One thing I particularly loved was printing out very large maps of my city to go on the wall :)

Edit: I like the music a lot, and the little tutorial guy is endearing. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I tried scroll click drag, mouse button drag, arrow keys.

[phaser]

That's a super cool idea. Actually we have an internal thingy to export your city to blender, then we can have nice images like this one: https://microlandia.city/assets/press/keyart/t21.jpeg

Maybe we manage to make something that doesn't need blender (though it probably won't look as cool) or we just stop dev-gatekeeping the function that exports the 3d file. Consider it done for the next point release :)

[uproarchat]

Beautiful, yes, that's what I am looking for. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I've tried various click drags and arrow keys. Pan/zoom/tilt works great.

[phaser]

Up and down arrow keys will change the tilt. left right to rotate in 90 degree steps. WASD to pan.

(the keys can be changed in control settings)

If you're looking for a free-angle view we don't have it, the game is designed to be looked like a isometric game. Having said that, I'm working on a "photo mode" that frees the camera and lets you choose a lens (with depth of field) and a film but so far it's only for shooting pictures and not for actually playing the game.

[uproarchat]

Thank you, WASD is what I was looking for. I just want to take a moment and say I find the music very nostalgic, it's great. Can you tell me more about the soundtrack? Is this tracker music?

In other news, I was on track to win re-election and lost. I lost while having the selector for building a structure enabled, and that was stuck on the placing-a-tile, even though I'd lost and the game ended. Very fun game nonetheless!

[phaser]

The compositions are by Pablo Rubio, a long time collaborator. Originally it's inspired in the soundtrack of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The music is not tracker music but we made the artistic decision to use similar limitations (small number of channels, sample-based instruments) to get the aesthetics of tracker music (actually SNES music but practically the same principles). The soundtrack is still getting expanded. Every month we add a new track to the playlist.

[danielheath]

Spent a bit of time with it.

Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.

"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.

Other than that, I'm really enjoying it.

[phaser]

I see. I'm adding an option to "disable" a building, so you'll be able to suspend a city service due to budget constraints or any other reason.

[danielheath]

I more meant "I had 200m in the bank and accidentally spent 170m of it to start constructing a police HQ".

If you bulldoze a building when it's only 2% of the way through being constructed, you should probably be able to get 98% of the resources spent back - whether housing demand, money, whatever you spent.

Possibly 100% back until you hit 5%, just to allow for those mis-clicks.

[HerbManic]

> The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia

That would be a real challenge to achieve simply because most of us are constantly surrounded by cities, but it is something that we should strive for.

For instance, game designer Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian) said that I never wants to visit any old castles or ruins for fear that it would ruin his imagination on how game worlds should be built. It is a fair point, none of his games have had any focus on reality in terms of scale and that is what makes them so special.

Also looking at your game... can I get a copy of Microslop Excellence? ;)

[Sohcahtoa82]

Your simulation sounds incredible!

How big can cities get, though? One of the things I love about Cities Skylines is how massive the land plots are, and the tiny plots of SimCity 2013 was a bigger turnoff than anything else in its disastrous launch.

[phaser]

At this moment, not so big but lately I've done some interesting technical breakthroughs that will enable large maps :D ... or at least a lot larger than SimCity 2013

[bombcar]

The real key will be to discover how to run a city simulation such that it doesn't all have to be "active" at the same time (e.g, the opposite of the Factorio simulation).

[albertzeyer]

I think the simulation in Cities Skylines is also quite advanced, or not? The simulation is much more the reason why it requires powerful hardware to run on, much less the graphics.

[herdymerzbow]

Can't speak on how demanding the simulation is/was. But on launch Cities Skylines 2 was extremely demanding in respect of its graphics due to very poor optimisation. This PC Gamer article summarises a more technical analysis, which is linked through

https://www.pcgamer.com/a-tech-analysis-of-cities-skylines-2...

[paavohtl]

I'm the author of said technical analysis! (https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/)

But yes, at launch Cities Skylines 2 was very heavily GPU bound, due to very unoptimized meshes and a poor culling implementation. I haven't profiled it afterwards, but from what I've read they've optimized it enough that on most systems the limiting factor is now the CPU.

[herdymerzbow]

Thank you for your analysis! Apologies for not linking to you by name but I thought I'd keep it light and refer to the PC Gamer summary, which does link through to you as well for those who would be interested.

[bombcar]

Cities Skylines has pretty decent simulation and it uses quite a bit of raw CPU horsepower, but it only really shines with tonnes of mods (just like SimCity 4 before it).

Realistic traffic is always the bane of these simulators.

[turtlesdown11]

its honestly only palatable with dozens of mods, which is disqualifying to me

[john_strinlai]

>https://microlandia.city

thanks for sharing that. i'm a big city builder fan, but this one slipped by me. looks cool, and i'll be picking it up!

[shevy-java]

Although I don't have the same focus, I also came to the same conclusion: the actual game and gameplay itself got worse over the years. Same with civilization and many other games. Modern game designers don't understand this or don't care. But I spoke to some of them, and while I initially thought they understand but don't care, most of them really do not UNDERSTAND the problem domain. In particular younger ones; many of them have not played old games.

[delichon]

> I don't like where the genre is going.

Got an opinion on Timberborn? I think it's a great city builder, plus a fluid dynamics simulator where if you guess wrong everyone dies.

[Fabricio20]

Not the same genre (at least for me). Timberborn is more like a colony builder (think Rimworld) than a city builder (SimCity/Cities Skylines). Its the micromanaging vs macromanaging, in a colony builder you are micromanaging what each creature does (such as timberborn or rimworld) while on a city builder you manage the city itself and invididual pawns are alot less important! Plus the survival aspect in that sense doesnt really add up when I'd like to play with the simulation aspects - education, traffic, crime, etc..!

[mathgeek]

100% agree here. City builders for me eschew individual citizens in favor of group statistics, to oversimplify it.

[8note]

timberborn doesnt have the beavers figuring out for themselves what to do, and operate with agents pulling jobs you the player put on a queue rather than statistics.

its a lot more like dwarf fortress than sim city

[yreg]

To me it got boring quite quickly. But maybe so would Sim City at my current age, I can't know.

[mrguyorama]

Timberborn is a good idea, terrible execution, and feels unfinished. At least as a "City builder". It feels closer to a sandbox or "casual" game.

You can build robots to take over work, but the robots use the exact same fuel as the normal beavers (food and water) so the benefit is their lack of need to sleep, but that's just not that great a benefit for how much they cost? Also you have to micromanage them, choosing which buildings use robot labor and the setting is exclusive which makes them a pain in the ass to use. Not a very rewarding endgame system. It really should be automatically preferring robot labor and require zero settings changes.

The research/science section of the game makes itself completely redundant extremely quickly, and then you have no reason to run the science buildings. The progression of it also means you start and it's a serious pain to unlock any new buildings, but after you get your first 1000 science points you can unlock the science building that will generate more science than you ever need really quickly. So the pacing is utterly broken.

The UI has odd choices. Why do I have to go back and forth between different menus for building the tree planting shack, and then a separate menu that lets you set up which tree to plant where? And the "select which tree to plant" menu also plants "Bushes" which for some reason includes "dandelions", which are not at all a bush. Because of this, you cannot see the size of the area the planting shack can reach at the same time you can actually place tree planting plots.

The two "Blocks" you can build, the levee and dirt block, are in different menus than the path and stair building menu, so any nontrivial amount of bridge or scaffolding to get anywhere requires you to go back and forth between those two menus constantly. This sucks, because you need to do this kind of nontrivial building because your beavers cannot build anything that is more than two tiles from a connected path. Your beavers are also dumb enough to trap themselves.

You constantly have to build paths through resource zones, but as far as I can tell, there's no option to allow you to automatically build paths over a resource, so you constantly have to mark resources for destruction manually while expanding.

The "Districts" feature used to be way way worse, because it was required. You could only build within a certain range of each district. It was so terrible they dummied it out, and now districts just kind of exist as this barely useful appendage.

Waterwheels, to extract power from the main point of the game, function on water flow rate in a way that kind of disconnects from gravity potential energy, so half the point of really engineering a big damn or something is gone.

Water soaks into the ground so fast that artificial lakes are useless. I was hoping to build a big one to be able to weather a long, end game drought or badwater, but even a huge one would drain so fast you could maybe last an extra cycle before dying.

IIRC, there used to be a building to revitalize the land around it so you could plant, like a water sprayer, but I guess it was removed? I don't understand why. The maps were not updated, so there are large plains that were meant to be watered for crop growth but now you have to channel rivers through them instead.

Also, it takes absolutely forever to load for zero reason. There's a button to click to see the "wellness" of all your citizens, which freezes the entire game for 10 seconds and that also seems absurd.

Like it's still fun at what it is, and I've played hours lately, but it is bad in weird ways otherwise.

[yreg]

I've commented this many times, but I definitely want to see more isometric grid games like SC3k, RC2 or TTD.

They were less-realistic, yes, but is so pleasant how everything ties together and you can neatly fill out the whole map.

Meanwhile, while I like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, it is always incredibly awkward to build roads and paths to the point where I find it frustrating.

[98codes]

Isometric sims make it easy to build something that looks good. CS & PZ can make things look incredible, but it's a PITA to get there.

[fendy3002]

it's so frustrating in Cities Skylines without mods, that it's so common difference in height causing so much placement issues

[simondotau]

Looks great. For accuracy, when you build something, occasionally construction should stop half way through. You're then told that costs have doubled, and you'll need to pay again to complete the construction.

[sowbug]

On Steam Deck, I am having a rough time with the road that the paperclip wants me to place. Holding down the physical A button (of the ABXY group) and wiggling around the left joystick (as well as every other control I can think of), both pressed and not pressed. Sometimes I'll see the green highlight appear, and I can stretch it out into a road path, but when I release A, it just vanishes.

[phaser]

I’m taking a look at that right now. Thanks for flagging this

[sowbug]

After today's update, I'm able to build roads. Thank you.

[scruple]

This is fabulous and I'm going to buy a copy to play on my SteamDeck. Will be sure to leave a review after I've put some hours into it!

[izietto]

You got me , enjoy your 8,99 €

[hutattedonmyarm]

This sounds super interesting, but I'd much rather buy it on GOG than on Steam or itch.io. Any chance on releasing it there?

[phaser]

I love GOG and I would publish there in a heartbeat but I never hear back from them :(

[cassianoleal]

May I bother you to expand on why GOG over itch.io?

I also prefer to use GOG whenever I can, but I really don’t know enough about itch.io to judge it. I’m hoping you can help bridge that knowledge gap.

[taneq]

I’m not them, but games from GOG don’t (AFAIK) have any DRM. So you can play them forever without having to log on to Steam etc.

[cassianoleal]

Thanks but note that I wasn't asking for a comparison between GOG and Steam. I know both of those pretty well.

[hutattedonmyarm]

Mainly, so that I don't have my games spread out over too many platforms :)

[keeganpoppen]

whoa that game looks very cool— love it. also loved SC3k… the soundtrack was amazing. game was kinda lowkey hard, though. or maybe it was because i was just a kid haha.

[nkrisc]

The thing is, I’d actually rather play a game that is basically a virtual modeling hobby than a deep city simulation.

I think Cities Skylines scratched that itch for a lot of people.

[nprateem]

I wish someone would do this for a modern TTD but with railroad tycoon stock market/economy dynamics

[hdgvhicv]

Which RT? The first was my first PC game I played, on CGA and keyboard only (5,1,2)

RT2 (which I played on Linux through Loki) was very different.

[butlike]

Your game looks good. A special 'thank you' for porting it (building it?) for macOS.

[indemnity]

I know macOS is not considered a gamer platform, but I appreciate enough that he built for macOS too that I purchased a copy!

(Speaking as someone who also owns a Windows 11 RTX 4090/9950X3D gaming monster… sometimes I like gaming on my MBP!)

[LASR]

Incredible. Since you’re the dev, please please please isometric camera.

[phaser]

The camera is very very close to isometric but as you've noticed, it's not an ortographic projection. During early access I decided against it but tbh I can't recall why. I'll go back to the drawing board on this one (or at least allow it to be enabled in settings)

[RobKohr]

Do you have water and ports on the roadmap. I'd love some boats :)

[phaser]

There's plans for: river map, island map, peninsula map, port zone, (with docks and containers), industrial fishing.

All in different stages of development. Can't say for sure when it's gonna be live but it's locked in.

[JMiao]

you had me at apophenia

[deadbabe]

Indeed, never heard this word but it’s so useful.

[pixel_popping]

I'll buy it if you add crypto payment + a tip.