CitiesCorp Concept

This looks like quite an interesting project, I don't think It'll get Greenlit in it's state at the moment, but with some polish and better interfece, it might have some chance. I'd love to see what you can do with this game, it looks very interesting.

Looks like a rushed Citybound

Micromanagement inferno. Either it would be enjoyable for a few minutes with the right recipe or it can become a very furious micromanagement game if the UI and the tutorials don't help you much and the city becomes very large.

This looks like quite an interesting project, I don't think It'll get Greenlit in it's state at the moment, but with some polish and better interfece, it might have some chance. I'd love to see what you can do with this game, it looks very interesting.

Hi, thanks for your feedback - yes, Greenlight is a hard task to overcome, especially when most of the people are looking for action games :-). But as far as I can judge it, there is plenty of traffic on CitiesCorp's site there. Moreover I hope there will be also sufficient city builders who will find the game sooner or later and vote for it.

You are right, polishing had to be sacrificed during development in order to generate in-depth content - but sooner or later it will come back on the agenda again, especially when we speak about the interface. For the visuals of the city itself, I have completely different ideas, so this was the maximum possible without leaving the path to the future ;-). 

At this stage I wanted to present the game and show what it is capable to do.

I'm also thinking to launch a demo-version for "advanced majors", because it is important to me that people know what they are going to buy. 

Micromanagement inferno. Either it would be enjoyable for a few minutes with the right recipe or it can become a very furious micromanagement game if the UI and the tutorials don't help you much and the city becomes very large.

Thanks for your feedback as well. Actually, CitiesCorp Concept is a "slow building" game with couple of monitoring tools - that is, there is NO ZONING as we know it from SimCity or Cities Skylines where suddenly houses pop up and after 1 hour, your city grows by tens of thousands of citizens - The player has to think about his or her next step and set the buildings properly. The reason behind it is that you can re-use building for different purposes - e.g. if it used to be an appartment house, you can change it later to offices, without having the need to build a new building - this will especially occur, when first traffic jams will occur, you will have to start to spread things across the city, instead of working on concentration - there are tools inside the game that help you to monitor where your appartments, shops, offices, factories are. 

The other things are the production lines and capacities - If we speak about a city of 10km x 10km, it is sufficient for the city to have e.g. 1-2 bakeries, 1 car factory etc.(I think this comes also pretty close to reality). What will happen over time is that the player will have to rescale the production capacities, due to a higher number of population, by either outsourcing parts of the production lines to other buildings (e.g. you can build complexes), or you simply establish a new bigger factory, and re-use the old factory for a different product.

What is still open are the "production recipies" and eventually the community can help out: All the products have a particular "production recipe". My initial idea was to keep it secret and the player has to figure out on his own how to be in the position to start  e.g. a car production which is indeed another ingame challenge - according to my experience in citybuilding, all the games have a very simple economic concept and I always end up with a lot of money, without having an idea how to spend it. This is what I wanted to do differently in CitiesCorp. 

So, what do you think? Should the production be straightforward with disclosed recipies or should it be content of the game to find out?

 

the recipes should not be a secret.

The cause of the "unlimited money" problem in other games is that time doesn't matter. You can just press play, switch to the highest speed and wait until the money appears.

You have to make sure that it is not possible to do that.

the recipes should not be a secret.

The cause of the "unlimited money" problem in other games is that time doesn't matter. You can just press play, switch to the highest speed and wait until the money appears.

You have to make sure that it is not possible to do that.

thanks for your kind input. I'll seriously consider to disclose the recipies - it will be challenging enough to handle all the hundreds of products ;-).

funny that you mention speed & money, what was also an aspect when coding it: In CitiesCorp I skipped the speed function completely - there is just one speed, because as you mentioned, switching to highest speed and waiting until money comes did not appear to me to be challenging enough for experienced city builders. I'm currently polishing the game, as maybe some of you have already read it on Greenlight and so far, including earlier testing, it was always hard for me to keep the city at a positive balance. So, it is a very challenging economic simulation as well. 

The basic economic idea in CitiesCorp is to keep a balance between revenues (rents & product sales) against unemployment  (sideremark: there are no taxes in the city). The unemployment has a direct effect on the revenue side, what means that if the player develops the city in an unbalanced way, with either high or low unemployment, he will immediately see this unbalancing also on the revenue side.

 

 

Looks awesome! But when you will build your "own" building for example residential how can you control living population inside ?

Looks awesome! But when you will build your "own" building for example residential how can you control living population inside ?

Thanks for your comment - the control of the "building-inside" mechanisms works pretty straightforward.

1.) Size matters: It makes a difference whether your building has 100 sqm or 1000 sqm - the bigger the building, the bigger is the implication on people living inside or jobs created or even storage, production or sales capacities of products. 

2.) Allocate e.g. 100% of the overall building to e.g. appartments in the building's blueprint (see second screenshot with "building plan" - instead of products it will be appartments); With that the game will calculate how many people can live inside the building - in case of 100 sqm just 2 persons, in case of 1000 sqm it's 24 persons. 

I'm planning to create a gameplay video right after I got to a certain polishing stage, in order to explain the economic depth in more detail - so please keep following and asking questions.

Finally, what is worthy to mention with regards to the economy of the game: On Steam Greenlight, some people asked whether this game is some sort of citybuilding combined with features from the Capitalism series: This is correct - the economy of the game has almost nothing to do with e.g. SimCity or CitiesSkylines - the closest economy from different games is most probably the Capitalism series.