Upcoming Skyscraper Builder/Simulator Games

[Ocram's Razr 963]

There are no fewer than 5 indie games under development designed to let the player build skyscrapers: Project Highrise, Block'hood, IsoTower, Skylimit Tycoon, and Cloud City, and they inspired me to start back up on OcramTower in a way with minimal overlap with them.

Here is a breakdown of the games (listed in approximated chronological order until release):

Block'hood is an arcology builder/simulator with a Minecraft-esque appearance and strong ecological focus. It released on March 10. I describe it as a puzzle game where resource supplies are supposed to be balanced.

Project Highrise has its own thread. Long story short, a high quality SimTower clone with a 1960s Chicago style/theme and campaigns/events was found to be so promising that Kalypso picked up the title.

IsoTower is the labour of love of a lone developer (Todd B). It used HD isometric graphics before being rebuilt but has a better simulation now, an Art Deco themed UI, and the next major release will be available soon enough. The developer is diligent and hard-working and posts updates seemingly daily on facebook.

Skylimit Tycoon is a full 3D tower simulator with modding tools completed already (to make content creation easier for the developers) with a ton of fun new features but still in the early Alpha stage.

Cloud City is sort of like a dystopian SimTower with full 3D graphics (but only 1 layer like classic SimTower).

 

OcramTower's environment is similar to that of Project Highrise because it is vector based and it will feature a classic view. Its construction is done slice by slice, however, OcramTower will have depth, making it functionally similar to multiple highrises in a row if played in Classic View.

The most useful (besides multi-floor problems like checking of which floors have utilities and how well elevators work) view will be Top-Down View, which will look similar to architectural drafts of floor plans (in color, with changes from people in real time). Top-down view will be freely rotatable because of the ease of such transformations on SVG. Classic View and Isometric View will only have zoom (which stay sharp at all resolutions and levels of zoom) and will need different graphics for every angle (4 isometric angles) and slice (most rooms are 2 slices deep, hallways are 1 slice deep, the biggest room will be 10 slices). One slice is 4 meters deep, one tile is 1 meter wide, one storey is 3.9 meters tall (including space between floors).

OhTees cannot move through rooms besides rare exceptions (like public amenities), which means you must either build hallways or leave unfinished floor space between rooms. Better elevators will unlock with higher star levels and eventually time.

 

 

The setting of the first location (multiple are planned) is a generic Asian metropolis in the 1980s onwards, which I call Daitoshi, where the player builds on 320 meter wide, 80 meter deep block (owning only part at first) without legal height limits (height only being limited by elevator technology) but hard coded limit of 200 storeys up and 10 (plus subway) basement storeys down that can be built. In the Alpha, the game will end in 1991 if the player hasn't moved on (winning or quitting) with all the offices abandoning, all the shops shuttering, all renters moving out and if the player plays until midnight, a Game Over credit screen describing an exaggerated recount of The Lost Decades.

If and when I get to chronological progression of technology (no earlier than beta) I will add a second location, which will be a generic tropical beach resort (or alternate history Hawaii) with influence from Polynesia, Hawaii, colonial Spain, colonial Japan, modern China, and modern America (like many resorts in the tropics that care more about money than authenticity) in the 1950s onwards; I call it Resort District. In the beta, the hotel and timeshare demand will eventually skyrocket (like shop and office demand in Daitoshi) and subsequently plummet (this time with cockroach infestations occurring at the end of a single day (instead of a week) of a hotel room left dirty) and a Game Over screen (possibly with a natural disaster) in 1972 (twice as long as Daitoshi has). The late beta will have missions to avert economic disasters and will let the player move to Daitoshi if the missions were successful and allow the player to rebuild and renovate if all goes well.

Daitoshi's campaign mission will mitigate the effects of the bubble and recession and allow the player to unlock modern/futuristic technologies that will allow food to be grown in your tower, sewage to be treated onsite, electricity to be generated on site, garbage (recycling and compost) to be processed on site, magnetic express elevators to be built from basement 20 to floor 200, and pnematic people tubes to send OhTees up or down 14 stories without delay. 

Late beta will have closed source, unmoddable features. Alpha will be open source (prealpha is already open source). Beta will be freeware and should be easy replicate (and make a better fork) using the open source alpha, open source modifiable modules, decent programming skills, and common sense.

If and when I implement political influence (which will only be publicly available in the full release, which I plan to be online freemium (political influence will be closed source and most aspects of it and the New Deco City location must be bought)), I will add a third city (in the 1920s); it will be entirely in the Art Deco style (with less lavish 1920s-1930s Modernism for the poorest/cheapest rooms and city buildings) with a fictional location in coastal northern California/southern Oregon with influences from NYC, Miami, and LA and will be called New Deco City. New Deco City will be interesting because I plan on having almost a third of the city available for purchase and (re)development. If I get to the point I want, the player will be able to delay the onset and reduce the impact of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl by bolstering New Deco City's economy in a sustainable way (low unemployment, high productivity, acceptably low Opulence, offering to "revitalize" factories instead of razing them for lavish high-rises, demanding (enough) sustainable and American crops (which would be difficult because you would have to foster New Deco City from a small backwater vacation town to an economic powerhouse (preventing the stock market crash by adding enough robust businesses to minimize the impact of East Coast businesses with dropping profits plummeting in values and further helped by subsequently buying up the stocks (hostile takeovers) of the companies known (probably through trial and error because the names will be fictional) to come out of the Great Depression), and not only demand all your businesses and tenants to order sustainable crops but use media influence (must buy the rundown newspaper building and turn it into a major media powerhouse with print, radio, and TV news and entertainment) to convince the majority of the population to as well. Successful play in New Deco City will allow the player to purchase up to 2 lots (instead of 1) in the tropical island's Resort District up to a decade early and up to 3 (instead of 1) plots in the far less modernized Daitoshi (looking much like 1930s Japan instead of 1960s) up to 2 decades early (requires successful lobbying of the government to enter "The War" before 1941).

Your property empire will thus be maximized by meddling in world affairs and I plan on eventually releasing a casino resort expansion and arcology expansion that will be placed in different, more lucrative, locations if you meddle enough from New Deco City; the casino resort will be in Reno by default but will be closer to New Deco City (and more popular than even Las Vegas, which will only be mentioned regardless of default start vs Good+ ending start) and the arcology will be in Texas instead of "Coastal Desert" if the expansions are played from a successful New Deco City campaign. I want players to enter a username and company name when starting up and have a leaderboard that starts with fictional characters in the top 3 (I want it to be Don Maddoff of OmniCorp as number 1, Joh Frederson of Métropole Illimité as number 2, and probably some anime reference for number 3) that even the top position could potentially be beat if a player does everything right across the three locations.

Playing the game with the SimTower goal of "rush to Tower status" [rush to 6 stars in my game] will lend itself best to Daitoshi's Mixed-Use and Tropical Isle's Beach Resort and should be able to be achieved before major timeline events but the game will be paced so that the economy crashes within a year or so of straight-laced victory (Daitoshi's Lost Decade, Tropical Isle's agricultural embargo (fictional pest), New Deco City's Great Depression, Reno's fade into obscurity in response to Las Vegas's rise, Coastal Desert's depleting resources)

 

My goal is to make--at first--a functionally 3D Yoot Tower clone with 2D SVG graphics (rendered as PNG below) and evolve it into a campaign to become the most powerful real estate magnate in the world by manipulating markets and politics using your vast wealth, influence, and business skills. So far, I have a dead-end prealpha 3, new art, and handwritten code snippets and flowcharts for prealpha 4.

1 Bedroom Apartment top-down view

1 Bedroom Apartment classic view

2 Bedroom family condo top-down view

Fast Coffee Shop (this unlocks from the get-go, luxury cafes unlock at 3 stars)

Office Reception Room top-down (low-rent occupants)

  Edited April 24, 2016 by OcramsRzr  
fixed images, links & typos