micropolis Thoughts on Micropolis

[Radial Pong 0]

Hi guys,

 

So, I recently learned that Micropolis has been ported to Java, which means I'm a little behind. I opened up the package and realized that you could change the graphics, which I was extra excited about.

 

I know it's a weird perspective, and it really isn't all that pretty, but the original Sim City has a certain charm to it that is very endearing. Years ago, I had the incling to download an HD version of the original Sim City called Sim City Enhanced that was released to by Interplay to limited sales. It featured new 256 color graphics and live-action video. I did download it and booted it up with DOSBox and played around with it.

When I heard Micropolis was being released to OLPC, I knew what I had to do. I booted up Sim City Enhanced and collected some of the graphics to play around with in Photoshop and ended up making this concept image that featured extra road types, different lot sizes, and an overall unified look for Micropolis. I submitted this to Don Hopkins in hopes that he might look at them, but he never responded to me. Perhaps I shouldn't have naively thought he would, but that's beside the point.

This was all before I realized that I couldn't even run Micropolis, let alone hope to modify it, so my dreams were dashed. With this Java rendition recently released, my hopes are renewed. I've been back to toying, and I put together some of components of my concept image into the tiles.png file inside the .jar to see if this would actually work. It did, and the results are interesting.

Alright, so I'm not the best artist, it's not done, and it doesn't look all that great, but I think it looks much more playable.

• I changed the dirt texture to grass, because who builds cities only in the middle of a desert?
• I changed the forests to individual groups of trees so when you bulldoze a portion, it doesn't look ugly.
• I rescaled the railroad as the tracks were far too wide.
• I added rail bridges in place of the under-water rail tunnels because bridges are far more likely (the train still dissappears as if going underground, damn)
• I added sidewalks to roads so they blend better with the buildings and girders to the bridges to make them more plausible.
• I've removed borders and identifiers from residential zones to make attractive little neighborhoods.
• I changed the parks to blend in with the grass texture and added park variation, trees, benches, small ponds...
• I even took care of all the tedius stuff like changing all the car colors so they're not all monochrome (not fun as there are literally hundreds of traffic frames).

It's progress, but there are still tons of buildings and tiles that need to be changed to match the textures of the grass and sidewalks to blend into the tileset. The reason I'm posting is to see if anyone is actually interested in seeing this happen.

It would even be nice to see someone with actual pixel-art talent take a stab at the unique perspective or we could even crowdsource the redesign. The art-style isn't hard to learn, and everyone could pick a building, fix it up, and add it to the tiles.png... Some buildings look extra labor intensive, like those with animated smoke stacks or the stadium with animated fans... Regardless, I'd it's a lot of work, and I'd hate to do it alone without a little help or even a little encouragement. Let me know your thoughts.

I've attached my tiles.png so you can download and play around with what I've built so far.