Cityscape Demo Released This is a 2D demo of game mechanics. We also have a 3D engine in the works. http://www.cityscapegame.com/cityscape-5-6.zip 17.4MB Please give us your impressions! Kirby
I'll provide a little more info about the game. The difference from SimCity is the amount of detail. We represent the income, spending, and happiness of each and every sim. Firms produce goods, which trucks carry to their points of sale. The entire city is built up piece by piece by your workers, using the appropriate materials, which you can buy or make on your own. In this respect we're more akin to Tropico. But we use trucks and roads to move things around the map, and travel distance is not *the* dominant factor to your city's productivity the way it is in Tropico. We are also trying to do a "closed" economy, where money is transferred always between two agents in the game -- instead of vaporizing $1000 to build a fire station, you pay a construction yard to do it, which in turn pays its workers, suppliers, owners -- these agents in turn spend it on things they desire, and so on. In the demo imports and exports are not closed in this sense. In a future version all trade will be with other players, or with a mega-distributor such as a game-master. The demo comes with a tutorial, with great voice-acting by an 18 year old kid! Kirby
Did you mean the demo was challenging or making the game would be challenging? Probably both are true We're doing a lot of experimentation with the design using the simple 2D engine. I would like to hear what people think (but do try the demo first)!
Like I said, the demo is reasonably challenging. I ran out of money 3 or 4 times before I figure out what I was doing wrong. The 2D format is bit ... urr ... flat (I know ... ... <groan> ) so without knowing much about what is supposed to happen the primitive graphics are somewhat of a handicap to understanding what is going on. That said, the movie files of the 3D version look rather cool and with the concept of a realistic economy and individual sims citizens you appear to working on something that I would wholeheartedly want to play. The Maxisian Sim City franchise always seemed to labour under a plethora of oddnesses ... like free electricity and water and cities that have to pay large sums of money just to zone land. I am sure that there can never be one single design for a city simulation that can satisfy all possible tastes (and prejudices). I remember playing around idly with Transport Tycoon (Sawyer wasn't it?) and I liked the way cities grew up around industry that grew up around the transport infrastructure ... but the sheer stupity of the AI players in that franchise stopped me from actually wanting to spend serious time playing it. Anway, please keep us appraised of developments!
