Planning the Perfect Citybuilder

[Zoose 0]

    With the latest Citybuilders, Citylife, and CitiesXL, it seems as if the Citybuilder Genre is being pushed in the right direction, but no game has emerged to take the genre forward. And with Monte Cristo closing, it only seems as if the genre is on death's door. However, I intend to fix this. I hope an active group of modders, or perhaps even a good, fan-serving game developing company will see this, and pick up the idea. This thread, I hope, can form some sort of plan for the perfect citybuilding game, to finally move the genre out of the Dark Age that has been the 2000's. First, let's go over a bit of history. (Feel free to skip this.)

 1. HISTORY OF CITYBUILDERS

   The first citybuilder, as we know it, came to be in 1989. With the release of SimCity, the city-building genre was created. Will Wright's brainchild would spark an explosion of city-building games. Perhaps the most famous (other than the SimCity series itself.), would be Impressions Games' "City-Building Series", a series of games that revolved around constructing and managing not only the city, but also maintaining defensive forces and conducting trade and diplomacy with nearby cities. The first game in this series would come 3 years after the release of SimCity. It's name was Caesar - it added a military force to the fledgling genre. Two games would follow, Caesar 2 in 1995, and Caesar 3 in 1998. Caesar 3 and it's successors would be some of the first games I played. Pharaoh and Cleopatra would come the following year, and at the turn of the millennium, Zeus and Poseidon followed. These ancient city-builders do not follow the SimCity ideal, but do have some interesting components that could be tweaked and added into a modern citybuilder. 

  Now, SimCity was also progressing, with SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4 coming out over the course of the years. SimCity 4 remains widely played today, due to unsatisfaction with more recent games by Monte Cristo, which had good intentions, but ultimately fell below expectations.

2. Planning the Game

   We shall call the game, for now, Millennium Cities. If anyone has a better name for the project, feel free to suggest it. This is not my idea, but the entire City-Building Community's. 

  Now, first comes the integration of ideas.

For a base idea of the game, the features of Sim City 4 could be implemented. But CitiesXL provides a huge opportunity. The "Planet Offer" is a well despised thing, but the planet itself, is another thing entirely. My idea, in essence, is to use a system similar to that of SPORE's. Cities will be uploaded to planets based on Difficulty Setting and Location, but when players are playing, the game's AI will create a stance for the city. Prices will be set for trading, the mayor will have a certain approach to you based on the player's actions in that game, and the game will be perfectly able to be filled with large amounts of content, while maintaining a fully singleplayer aspect. 

Complexity is another thing to consider, but I have an idea to manage this aswell. There will be 4 difficulties:

-Sandbox: Unlimited resources, used for designing dream-cities.

-Easy: Low complexity, recommended for new players.

-Medium: Average complexity, recommended for average-skilled players.

-Hard: Super-complex. All Resources require entire systems build for them. Water pipes MUST be placed for water coverage, and power lines must be placed for power coverage. Recommended for skilled players and long-time city-builders.

-------------------------

That's all I've got for now, but hopefully we can draw on ideas and expand our so called "project" over the coming months.

[Tysons4 68]

i dont get it. it's not that we despised the planet offer we; we didnt want to pay a fee to play a builder under construction

and everybody has their own idea what a city builder should be... are you just imagining a new game?

[Ryan123220 18]

I think your intentions are good but there is no "Perfect city-builder" if everybody got what they wanted put into one game it would be unplayable and impossible to code it all.

But with that aside my "perfect city-builder" would visually almost be the same as simcity4 but the current system of how things run would be trashed and made a lot more efficient and with a lot of new content. The biggest thing id like to see is the communitys years of work on simcity 4, not go to waste. I personally like the simcity graphics but it could use a touch-up. If it were possible it would be great to have all the content we made usable in the new game. Yes 3d graphics are great but a lot of people still do not have computers capable of playing resource sucking games.

[JayStimson 211]

Regardless of what functional specifications are suggested for the "perfect" game ....

1. Who is going to write all the code ?

2. Who is going to define all the standards ?

3. Who is going to handle the database design ?

4. Who is going to handle the marketing and distribution ?

....etc, etc, etc.

Developing a game like SC4 takes years and lots of money. So unless you have lots of funding, you're just wasting time, storage space, and bandwidth with this thread.

[Zoose 0]

@Tysons4: Indeed. I'm a visionary more than an inventor. But visions are the first step towards progress.

@Ryan: True, but my plan isn't to throw all the features of all the recent City-builders into one abomination of a game. And the "perfect" city-builder was just an expression. This is more of a thread designed for shaping our ideas into a game that the city-building community would like to see as a whole. 

@JayStimson: I did not call this thread "Making, designing and creating the perfect citybuilder". If someone suggests we actually make a city-building game, then we will attempt it, but as I've said this is intended to be a thread where we shape our ideas into a plan for a game.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Would you rather this: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=365.0

OR this: http://themetropolisproject.org/forum ?

[Tysons4 68]

i have visions all the time but what you are saying is here it comes and here are the difficulty levels...

and i wouldn't have separate worlds for different difficulties i would have one world for everything.. its not like we have another earth where everything is set to easy... what does that make our world?? hard? if we are going for realistic it would all be one world

. but yeah this is a waste so space... unless you are going to do it...

[ScaryMonkey 0]

Originally posted by: Ilikeseattle

Would you rather this: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=365.0

OR this: http://themetropolisproject.org/forum ?quote>

Haha, thanks ilikeseattle, you beat me to it

[kalbo1313 0]

i'm on your side Zoros. actually im currently studying how to program then study open gl maybe direct x because of the reason to create not the best but a good city building game, let just say a combination of CXL and SC4... haha..

[quazardous 0]

hi,

 

I'm trying to define what could the perfect city builder be :

 

http://the-perfect-city-builder.wikia.com

 

Help me !