Announcing: Project Highrise (indie game)

[doihaveto 22]

Hi everybody,
 
We're a small indie team from Chicago that loves simulation games. Our first game was 1849, a Gold Rush city builder we released last year. 
 
I just wanted to let you know about our next game, that we've just started working on: Project Highrise.
 
As our website describes it: "In Project Highrise, you build and manage a modern-day skyscraper – a vertical ecosystem of offices, businesses and residences. A skyscraper is an intricate machine of interlocking systems, which depend on each other in their daily function. Tenants will expect everything to just work, and to have all of their needs met under one roof. It’s your job to keep this machine running smoothly and efficiently. Keep your ear to the ground, but your eye to the future."
 
We're very early in development, so we don't have any screenshots yet, but here's some concept art eye candy:
 
- A couple of art concepts that explores the visual style, something very stylized, that hints at mid-century high modernist style (it was, after all, the golden age of glass-and-steel skyscrapers!)
 

 

 
- And here's artist's mock-up of what a single floor might look like - we're going for a flat cut-away view, like something out of old Popular Science issues. We hope this will make it easy to observe how the simulated building is doing, and what needs your attention:
 

 

 

 

Anyway... I just wanted to let you know what we're working on!

If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer here, or on twitter at @somasim_games

 

Oh and one more thing - here's our official website:

http://www.somasim.com/highrise/

 

You can check that out for much more info about the project, get on a mailing list to get progress updates, and so on.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

  Edited October 10, 2015 by doihaveto  
fixed image urls

[Ocram's Razr 964]

That looks really good! I am so glad that there is going to be a high quality tower simulator! I look forward to being one of your first customers!

 

My own project (OcramTower, you can find it on GitHub) never went very far. The main reason is because I do not know ECMAScript and I wanted to make it an open-source online game. Open-source, because I did not want to work on it all by myself (I don't have the time) and I know others can think of things I never will by myself. My art style is very different from yours as well.

 

 

Keep up the great work!

 

--Ocram

[nos.17 5,229]

That looks really good! I am so glad that there is going to be a high quality tower simulator! I look forward to being one of your first customers!

 

Agreed! I LOVE your style so far. I know that concept art rarely transitions exactly to in-game appearance, but I would love to play something with that mid-century modern or even late art-deco look.

 

If it will be anything like Corporation Inc., I'll be hooked - I spent hours in that game, and its just an online flash version.

[GMT 389]

I played and sorta liked 1849...

 

Now you got my attention.

I'm putting really really really much hope into this tower simulator

[doihaveto 22]

Hey, thanks for the kind words!

 

In terms of art style, we're definitely going for a high modern look. There's something very appealing about both architecture and appliance design from that era. I don't know what it is about it, but it seems to match our contemporary internet age very well - eg. even Apple's designs are very clearly inspired by Braun product designs from the 60s... Now the main trick will be making it look good in a 2D cut-away viewpoint style!

 

In terms of gameplay, it's definitely going to be more complicated than either our previous game, or than other tower games I've seen out there. We're going less in the direction of micro-managing individual people, and more in the direction of managing residential, commercial, and other businesses in the building. You can say we're heavily inspired by SimCity, only vertical.

 

Promise to post more details as they become available!

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I greatly look forward to comparing and contrasting your game to the desired feature list of OpenTower. You probably planned things the half dozen of us never thought of (or possibly dreamed of but never shared).

--Ocram

FYI: You seem to be making your art with vectors and no photographs. That is a good thing! SimTower had a resolution of 800x600 back when most monitors were old CRT boxes. Now that 4k monitors and 8k OLED and Quantum Dot flat screen TVs are here, you should probably make your artwork high resolution to begin with and down-scale for distribution as you see fit. Of course, if you design all your art with vectors (line art), that is not an issue at all because you can make an SVG of any size and level of detail then export it to whatever resolution you want.

[arcology 224]

I am very much looking forward to this!

[doihaveto 22]

We finally have a screenshot that we can share with the world!
(One that includes actual art, not my questionable programmer art  )

Here's a cut-away of a little office building:

A bunch of game systems came together to make this possible: employment (so that we have offices where people work), economics (so that offices lease space and give you money to keep building), utilities (because everybody needs the lights on and phones working), and a few others. And there are more in development...

Hoping to have more screenshots showing off other stuff - restaurants, apartments, retail stores - sometime soon!

 

 

 

[Mister Giggles 310]

Reminds me of an old Flash game where you built an office tower. Cats were involved. I really liked it. Ran like crap, of course, because Flash, but before the thing slowed to a crawl it was quite fun.

Your game also draws inevitable comparison to Sim Tower. An alright game, for its time. Scalability proved a problem; the bigger the tower became, the more difficult it became to keep anything under control and caused the fun to turn into a frustrating experience where you tried to please unpleasable tenants. Yes, I'm aware limits need to exist to keep the game somewhat challenging, but you don't need to go full tilt annoying to accomplish the goal.

Micromanagement Hell is inevitable with this style of game; I highly suggest you include intuitive, highly developed automation options to help keep the player from drowning in the sheer amount of things happening. Of course, you don't want to go too far and make the game a snore because the game is playing itself. I do not envy your task in balancing this.

Whatever mechanisms you include for the sake of challenge and slowing the player down, you're best to have them seem natural and logical and not overbearing. For instance, having a lightbulb pop every five seconds and need to be repaired ASAP or the tower implodes in on itself like a colony in Dwarf Fortress is not a good idea. Having a resource be expended automatically as the tower grows/exists and needs to be replenished would be a better system, like payday in Dungeon Keeper.

Make sure to have cats. Cats are nice. Have cats be rewards you can put into offices that will make everyone working in them happier. If you have cats, many of them, I will buy your game even if it's terrible.

  Edited June 29, 2015 by Mister Giggles  

[Ocram's Razr 964]

That looks really good but the space between floors seems a little small. Where do the air vents go? Where do the utilities fit? How are the subsequent floors supported? I like that you are working hard at making the art beautiful and the programming to be detailed but I think it would be good to have some more visual cues to see if utilities are hooked up correctly. If you care so much about realism (as you seem to be), increasing the space between floors to be more in line with standard offices with drop ceilings and showing whether rooms have wiring, plumbing, and A/C vents would add an extra detail that will really take your game to another level without too much added work.

 

Keep up the great work!

--Ocram

[doihaveto 22]

 

@MisterGiggles: Yes, SimTower is an old favorite game of mine, and  it was definitely a product of its time...  I had a chance to replay it a few years ago, and there are some things that just don't hold up anymore - the economic simulation is way too simple (it's so easy to get a huge surplus of money), the people simulation is frustrating, and the whole game becomes all about elevator micromanagement once the building reaches a certain size. That said, that's just me coming back to an old game and seeing it through contemporary eyes. But back when it originally came out, I loved it and sank many days into just messing with my tower and its inhabitants. Even in spite of its flaws it's still one of my best gaming memories.

 

But for the new game - while SimTower is definitely a memorable influence, we're designing the mechanics afresh from the ground up (if you'll pardon the pun). We want to focus on the economic simulation, and get the player to strategically plan their moves and think about how they're going to evolve their building - and not have to worry about micromanagement of individual occupants. I like to compare it more to SimCity, where the player's control is one step removed from the individual occupants, so that they can concentrate on growing a large system. It's definitely a fine like to walk, though, so that it doesn't become a game that "plays itself" as you said (as SimCity sometimes does). 

As for cats - that would be really cool! We haven't planned for any pets, but that does sound fun... Hmmm...

 

[doihaveto 22]

@OcramSeattle: Thanks for the kind words! 

The space between floors idea is interesting. Right now utilities go "behind" the occupied offices, and you have to switch visual modes to see them (like in SimCity when you switch to underground view, or in Cities Skylines when you switch to laying out power or water). But putting them between floors might be interesting and it's worth for us to think about that. That's exactly the kind of feedback we were hoping for, thank you!

By the way, I checked out OcramTower, it's a pretty impressive project, and made me nostalgic for the classic SimTower... Any chance you'll be developing it into a full game?

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I am so glad you listen to feedback! Thank you for the kind words on my project; I  really wanted to turn OcramTower into a full game but I do not know much ECMAScript and I do not have much time on my hands while I move to the other side of my state to transfer from Community College to State University.

By the way, I am pretty sure that the flash game about building an office with cats is called Corporation Inc.

 

 

 

[Kiiroitori 55]

Reminds of SimsTower haha Nice to see the genre reborn.

[Linoa06 1,374]

Yay, SimTower reborn!

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I tried to post on your forum a few weeks ago but it never went through. I might as well just post here the core ideas.

Suggestions:

If the game will be completely 2D with only the classic (front-on) view and only 1 layer of rooms, I suggest you move all the utilities to the spaces between floors. In the default view, they would be relatively subtle (a vent for A/C, a pipe for water, small sprinklers for fire protection, wires for electricity, cables with indicator lights for phone and internet) with different room animations depending on access to utilities (no electricity means no lighting or electronics, no water means no running faucets, toilets, water coolers, or soda fountains (have the people complain whenever they try to use water), no telephone service means either no telephone or an obviously broken one, no internet means no computers or obviously broken ones, etc). For detailed status of each utility, another view (like what you said is in the current form) would still make sense.

If you ever have plans on adding physical depth to your towers (either as an expansion or sequel), then everything in the tower will need to have a depth. Example: a party hall has a greater depth than a restaurant, which has a greater depth than an office, which has a greater depth than a hallway or individual cubicle. Elevators will take up space in all directions (height is obvious, width is shown in front view graphics and depth varies by number of elevator cars). This means depending on the system you want to implement and how realistic or detailed you want it, elevators can be handled very differently. I suggest you don't copy the original mechanic where you can only build one row of rooms but can build an 8-car elevator shaft over anything. If you want to go with building a wide and tall but shallow tower, please have elevators take up the space of a room (so they don't overlap). If you ever want to have a program that thinks in 3D (regardless of how it is displayed), the placement of rooms, hallways/lobbies, elevators, and stairs/escalators will change significantly.

A possible idea for an expansion or sequel is to have technological progress with the age of your tower. This way, a tower with groundbreaking ceremony in 1950 can either be built fast and "completed" (abandoned by the player), built slow with remodels taking place during construction, or built moderately fast with remodels happening in the late-game by dedicated players who really want to make the best tower ever. This can tie into development of the surrounding area and changing play-style.

 

--Ocram

[doihaveto 22]

Hi, thanks for the feedback! Yes, the game is definitely going to stay flat 2D, for a couple of reasons. One because it's easier to manage things when the player can see everything at a glance (eg. I remember floor switching in the Sims, and how much of a pain that was when trying to figure out what everybody is doing... now multiply that times hundreds of NPCs ). Two, because there's only a few of us on the project and we don't have the manpower to generate all those 3d assets!   So we're sticking with 2d cutaway, which I think looks pretty good, especially with the current art style... 

For utilities, we talked about putting them between floors, but decided it looks a little too distracting when there's a wide gap between one floor and the next. There's something very visually pleasing about having a simple grid of tenants like this below, and we want to keep this feel:

(That screenie also shows off our new food courts we just added )

So I think we're sticking with mode switching. Here's how it looks like right now, but a word of warning, the conduit mode is programmer art and we're going to revisit it in a few weeks:

Play mode: http://www.somasim.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/building1.png
Conduit mode: http://www.somasim.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/building2.png

And by the way... I love the idea of taking the tower through the decades, and seeing the different visual styles take over... That would make a great post-launch content pack... Now I'm imagining how the nice slick modernist highrise would look once it moves into the 80s and 90s, and the offices start looking all like this... But I also realize how much new art work that would be!

 

(PS. Also, thanks for the heads up about the forum not working! I'll investigate what's up with it. We've been having a lot of problems with spam etc - maybe it's time to find new forum software...)

[doihaveto 22]

Here's a newer screenshot with a bunch of recent additions:

- Weather - it's a dreary, rainy workday afternoon
- New tenant types:
  - Diner restaurant and a salad bar (for workers to grab lunch or dinner)
  - Convenience store (for both workers and residents)
  - Several office types
  - Decorations and plaza sculpture that will keep people happy and contribute to the building's "buzz"

(Click through for full size)

We've also been working on a lot of gameplay systems, like prestige, media buzz, and political favors, but those are all programmer art at the moment and don't look very good...  

[Mister Giggles 310]

I like that you added that second view to see all the internal bits of the skyscraper, it was a good idea. A lot like SimCity 4's underground modes for water and subways.

2D is not just a good idea because of expense and time requirements, it's also allows the highest level of control over the game's aesthetic. With 3D, sacrifices must be made. 2D, only what you limit yourself to.

There's also a group of people who prefer 2D to 3D simply because they feel 2D can be so much more expressive than 3D. Me, for instance. I prefer the high quality 2D pictures that comprise buildings in SimCity 4 to the full 3D models found in SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines.

It's also vastly easier on hardware. Less compatibility issues, too.

  Edited August 23, 2015 by Mister Giggles  

[doihaveto 22]

@Mister Giggles: completely agree! With 2D there are so many more interesting options for visual style - anything from hand-drawn illustration style, to very precise vector graphics, to something more abstract and impressionist, the list goes on. Much easier to do stylized visuals in 2D than 3D!  

 

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I am glad that Project Highrise is progressing so nicely. You inspired me to take some classes to help me finish my own game. Since many screens are so high resolution, I think I will scrap my current raster graphics with vector art of a similar style as I had.

[GMT 389]

women with beards. I love it.

[doihaveto 22]

women with beards. I love it

Hmm, maybe we need to reduce shadow contrast a bit...  

[GMT 389]

women with beards. I love it

Hmm, maybe we need to reduce shadow contrast a bit...  

pretty please because this girl

looks like she has more facial hair growing than I ever will

[Mister Giggles 310]

If it will not unduly burden you, have an easter egg mode that keeps the bearded ladies and programmer art.

"Wait," you say, "People want to see my art?"

FOR THE LULZ!

<_<

  Edited August 30, 2015 by Mister Giggles  

[GMT 389]

actually, add special tenants that boost the quality of certain things. Like an awesome janitor who boosts the quality of the cleaning staff, a great technician who speeds up elevators or increases power output, judge dredd that increases security performance, a beared bearded woman to level up entertainment facilities...

  Edited September 2, 2015 by GMT  
obv

[Mister Giggles 310]

actually, add special tenants that boost the quality of certain things. Like an awesome janitor who boosts the quality of the cleaning staff, a great technician who speeds up elevators or increases power output, judge dredd that increases security performance, a beared woman to level up entertainment facilities...

Are we talking something like a werewolf, where she becomes a bear? Or a woman in a bear suit? Married to a bear? The result of a fusion dance between woman and bear?

Inquiring minds wish to know.

[GMT 389]

actually, add special tenants that boost the quality of certain things. Like an awesome janitor who boosts the quality of the cleaning staff, a great technician who speeds up elevators or increases power output, judge dredd that increases security performance, a beared woman to level up entertainment facilities...

Are we talking something like a werewolf, where she becomes a bear? Or a woman in a bear suit? Married to a bear? The result of a fusion dance between woman and bear?

Inquiring minds wish to know.

hmmmm... that one

[doihaveto 22]

And now an updated screenshot from our alpha build - featuring a bunch of different offices, restaurants, utilities, and other things you build.

(Oh, and we haven't messed with NPC shadow contrast... yet... )

[Linoa06 1,374]

women with beards. I love it.

Dwarf Fortress : The Modern Age