Comment by phaser

Comment by phaser 19 hours ago

15 replies

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Microlandia, the brutally honest city builder. Posting this for a second time, because i’ve been working super hard on a steam release.

last month’s “what are you working on” thread impulsed me to upload this game to itch and 1 month later, i’ve got a small community, lots of feedback and iterations. It brought a whole new life to a project that was on the verge of abandoning.

So, I’m really grateful for this thread. https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia

OldOneEye 10 hours ago

I love this! I always enjoy greatly the deep simulations like you aim to. I'll definitely put this into my radar. Good luck for this project!

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vunderba 19 hours ago

Big fan of Dwarf Fortress deep simulations - would love to see a viciously realistic SimCity. Good luck!

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throwaway-0001 12 hours ago

I want to try later when I’m at pc.

https://microlandia.tubatuba.net/simulation_details

Quite interesting details.

I wonder if you simulate at individual level or group? Would be cool at individual level each one making decisions individually and see some emerging behavior.

Also how corruption emerges in gov etc

Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.

Maybe also less money less likely to have kids? Would be nice to show how poverty helps or not population growth. If too poor might have no education and would make kids, if average citizen and can’t save money will avoid kids. That’s why at individual level simulation could find these emerging patterns. But probably too expensive computationally ?

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  • phaser 8 hours ago

    > I wonder if you simulate at individual level or group? Would be cool at individual level each one making decisions individually and see some emerging behavior.

    If you are referring to the citizens, yes, at individual level. However for traffic I'm using a sampling rate.

    > Also if no job maybe they could try uber/food delivery crappy jobs like that or start their own business.

    That's an awesome idea, I added it to my backlog :)

    > less money less likely to have kids?

    This is mega tricky, because it happens very differently across the world. Yes, can be expensive computationally that's why the city is so small (for now) but as I start to distribute the simulation into many cores, players with high core CPU will be able to choose a bigger city size :) I agree that individual level simulation is what makes it interesting and I plan to keep it like that.

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    • chaostheory 3 hours ago

      This is awesome. I can’t wait until it gets big enough where you’ll start distributing the sim between different machines.

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computerdork 19 hours ago

this looks awesome, don't have a lot of extra time for a new game, but such an interesting concept!

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01HNNWZ0MV43FF 15 hours ago

Brutally honest? I hope it shows the huge amount of land needed for parking lots :P

I heard that the SimCity devs have had to fudge that out for gameplay's sake ever since the oldest versions

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  • phaser 8 hours ago

    > Brutally honest? I hope it shows the huge amount of land needed for parking lots :P

    Parking space simulation is coming soon. I feel I will completely miss the point if I leave that out. The idea is to have street parking (with configurable profit for the city) parking lots, and buildings with underground parking, that should conflict, of course, with metro lines.

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  • DanielVZ 15 hours ago

    Either that or reflect the importante of public transport, specially metro.

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    • phaser 9 hours ago

      Public transport is the next thing I wanna work on. Will start with buses, which I have an idea on how it will be implemented, but for metro I will want to start learning about how it can be simulated faithfully.

      This weekend I have plans to start playing a lot Subway Builder (https://www.subwaybuilder.com) which I'm really excited about, and maybe get some books on the subject, in order to get it right

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  • cheriot 14 hours ago

    Cities: Skylines as well. One of the core municipal land use decisions!

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  • abdullahkhalids 14 hours ago

    Question to OP. Can one design a city in your game that is "car free" - meaning most citizens don't own private cars?

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    • phaser 9 hours ago

      That's something I haven't thought about, but I 100% agree that it should be possible! Very soon I want to introduce roads with bicycle lanes, that have less car bandwidth, that will make me refactor the traffic simulation and the idea of a bicycle-only road type will become possible.

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    • jonwinstanley 8 hours ago

      In Venice (the Italian one) - cars, mopeds and bikes are all banned. Most trade goods are transported around by a man moving fast with a sack truck shouting 'Attencion!'

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