I already mentioned I take part in Get Noticed 2017 (PL). I like the idea; it may let me finally finish the project I was taking up about three times in the past four years.

I was on a two-week trip to London to brace myself for coding. It let me do quite many valuable observations about the city and how it works. I made a logo for the game (yay!). Here we are:

As you can see I decided to go with plain colors and so-called flat design what should match low poly world nicely. After a thought, there is not much design in this picture 🙂

The project

Every project needs a plan. This one below is a loose one, but it will do for some time.

I use some libraries, but the majority of things are built from the ground up. Particularly challenging (or time-consuming) are the renderer (basically everything from data to an image on screen), and the simulation (that’s where the city grows). Regarding the latter, I will keep things simple and try to decouple code as much as possible so that I can create proper engine later.

I want to make a playable game in this short timespan (by the end of May), so the list of functionalities to implement got shorter:

• Infinite terrain in chunks
• Zoning, generating buildings inside the zones, randomizing some parameters to differ buildings visually
• Roads: placing roads, generating road network graph
• Electricity: plants, power lines, power consumption, power shortages
• Park tiles
• Simulation: passing the time, land value, zone demand
• Budget: calculating budget summary, different tax levels (fixed)
• Data views: zones, energy grid, land value

Not in this list are game saves. I’m not sure if it will make sense to develop bigger cities having quite simple mechanics of simulation. I don’t have time nor knowledge how to create a plausible model of computations. This thought leads me to the conclusion that saves are not needed yet.

I consider some other features, with no specifics so far. I may add them to my roadmap, we will see.

Taking in mind that I need to write a 3D engine, the whole of UI, handle input, etc. that’s quite a challenge. I plan to revisit those ideas after a month or so.

The schedule

I’m going to post three times a week:

• Friday is for week summary; it will be a short note with changelog and screenshots. I hope to release x64 builds starting from next week.
• On Sunday: technical article about anything that caught my thoughts recently.
• Every Wednesday I explain a feature I wrote the previous week.

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