MessiahAndrw

Hi, I started a region a few weeks ago called Europa on East Europe 2, but it's very lonely as I'm the only one in there. There is no one to trade or play with. My city's population is currently 413,226 And there is an archology under construction, but as I'm the only one, I'm having trouble supplying it with resources. Anyone is welcome, my origin ID is MessiahAndrw.

As a fan of SimCity and Simutrans style games, I wish to create a free community city building simulator. Since the release of SimCity somewhat over half a decade ago, there haven't been any real contenders to the genre, at least not targetting the hardcore players wanting realism. Cities XL seems to be promising, but as a beta tester its more of an arcade style game rather than a realistic management game I'd find myself getting into. As for myself, I am a programmer. I have experience in the field of working on graphics engine, physics, AI, aswell as networking and general gameplay. This game idea wouldn't be commercial, at least not in the beginning, since I will work on it during my free time. If the game requires funding (for online services, or if I need to work full time on it) I could subsidize it through in-game advertising and charging players for purchasing extra land, but my intention is to always keep it free to play. I want the main focus of the game to be on player-created content. By encouraging player-created content, not only do I cut down the amount of work required by me (allowing me to work on the more technical and gameplay aspects), I also open up a world of expression, creativity, and variety when it comes to players designing their cities. My two largest insperations have been the free-form curved roads in Cities XL, aswell as the procedural buildings in CityEngine. The underlying principle in CityEngine is given a plot of land of any shape, you can apply a script that contains a set of rules for growing a building (with a small amount of random variation). I have applied the same sort of principle and written a draft design for my own variation of this idea. The first stage of development of this game I am about to describe will involve releasing a Building Editor to the communitiy, and then spend time improving and perfecting it to a reasonable level that the community is happy with. This editor will allow the community to design buildings, experiment how they grow when placed on land of different shapes and sizes, aswell as host a community site where they can upload, share, and rate buildings. By releasing the building editor early, I hope a community will start to build around they game, which can influence the development of the actual game, aswell as already having plenty of buildings avaliable for when I start development on the actual game. During the development of the game, I want the community to be involved as much as possible. During each stage of development I will ask the community what they would like to see next (and take a majority rule route), as well as discuss indepth the game's mechanics before implementing anything, as to allow it to be a truly community driven game. Releases will be frequent, but focused on small increments of single features that the community wants, so it will be an ever evolving game. Anyway, onto the actual game play (all of this is open to interpretation and discussion, but this is a general idea of how I see it in my head at the moment). The core mechanic is that you simulate a city council, much like in SimCity. You are the city council as if it was a single omni-present entity, rather than a single role (like a mayor that can get elected out). You're in complete control of micromanaging each department of the city council, simulated as realistically as possible, which (at the current stage of design in my head) includes the Department of Zoning, Department of Utilities, Department of Treasury, Department of Public Services, and the Department of Transportation. These departments will also define how the user interface is catagorised. I'll go through each and give a description. Department of Zoning This department is in charge of zoning blocks of land into what their purpose is, which could be one of the following: Residential Industrial Commercial Retail Agricultural Parkland You're also in charge of subdividing these zones into lots, like a real council. However zones can automatically be divided into lots (into like a grid as in SimCity), but for planning those tricky curves you can manually set the lot boundaries. You can then set a price at which private enterprises/residents will purchase a lot from the city council. Each lot will also have a value, which will be defined by the in-game economics based on supply/demand (including real estate market simulation), and before you can rezone, resize, or demolist a lot you must buy back the lot (or a group of lots) at market value. Your city's land can be divided up into suburbs. The purpose of suburbs allows the player to micromanage sections of the city individually. For example, suburbs can have seperate tax-rates, lot prices, and statistics. Suburbs may optionally be divided into districts, which inherit the properties of the suburb, but allow you to tweak things for a very small area (like increase taxes for river-front businesses). Also, this is where the user-created content comes in. For buildings to be built on lots, they must receive council approval. The player of course doesn't approve each building, instead as mentioned above, in-game the player can access an online database of 'building scripts' (created in the Building Editor, which have been rated and categorised). This 'approval list' can vary between suburbs and districts, so for instance you may have a downtown suburb with high-rise buildings approved with a small Chinatown district, another suburb could be Victoria-era housing, another suburb could be European townhousing (all created by other users). As game development progresses, I expect this to become more indepth. For example, this could extend to include terraforming, and on public land such as parks and nature strips the player could place trees, fountains, benches, draw fences, etc. depending on what the community wants. Department of Utilities This department is in charge of providing your basic consumable services. At this stage they include: Electricity Gas Water Data (which includes combined phone & cable) Postal Sewage Waste Cleaning & maintence (for streets and parks) On a micromanagable level, this includes laying out the electricity, gas, water lines, power plants, and placing post offices. Much like SimCity you can control the funding on each of these services which controls how efficient they are. You can control the prices on certain resources on a per suburb basis (which will affect the cost of living in that area) which will naturally create more affluent areas but also generate revenue. Department of Treasury The treasury is in control of money management. As such the player will be able to set taxes on a per suburb basis. There will be three taxes, each affects the cost of living in the area: Business Tax (a percentage of a businesses income) Land Tax (a percentage of the property's value) Personal Tax (a percentage of a person's income) The treasury will also show the income the city is generating from, the cost of living of, and the wealth of each suburb, which will allow the player to plan their city accordingly. Later in the game's development I see the treasury playing a larger role. This can include the funding of private enterprises that may be failing but contribute to a greater good (for example, funding a failing private zoo which is generating a huge inflow of tourists and therefore making from hotels and surrounding businesses more profitable, returning more taxes to the player). This could also include selling advertising space (billboards) that can be placed on major highways and other public land. Department of Public Services This department handles your more general public services which aren't utilites (like water and electricity). This includes: Media (broadcasting towers, city run television stations and newspapers) Education Fire services Health care Military Police services Prisons Social housing Social services These public services help improve the quality of living. They help eliminating homelessness (if your city's cost of living is to high), assist in emergencies, educate and raise the affluency of your city (and hence you can raise the cost of living and taxes), aswell as attracting and keeping your affluent citizens. Department of Transporation This department is in charge of: Roads and parking Public transport Pedestrian and bikes Transportation will be quite indepth. Based on the time of day, each citizen will have a place to go (e.g. in the morning most citizen will go from home to work, randomly once a week citizens will go to the shops, even rarer citizens will occasionaly want to visit another city or another house on the other side of the city). Then the citizen will take the fastest route from A to B (using a combination of road, pedestrian, bike, and public transport networks). These combined will create a realistic simulation of traffic including the effects rush hour. I've taken a lot of my inspiration for transportation from Simutrans. Since the game uses procedural buildings it makes sense to do the same with roads and tracks. So when laying a road, there won't be preset configurations. Instead, the player will be able to choose how many lanes on each side of the road, how wide the nature strip is, aswell as decorate the road with ornaments (street lights, traffic lights, road signs, etc). The same will apply to trains and other forms of public transport. Parking will be an issue. Cars can park in low density buildings, however they won't be able to in larger buildings, so the player must place car parks in high density areas, and make sure they're within walking distance of buildings. In smaller low density cities you don't have to worry (just lay down a road and away you go), but by later stages when congestion and parking becomes an issue it will encourage players to think more about public transport and traffic. Public transport will be a major step up in building a city, and also adds another element to micromanage. You must ensure stations/terminals are within walking distance of area you want to cover, aswell as assigning vehicles and setting up schedules, laying tracks to ensure trains don't collide and areas don't become congested. Networks can be integrated, for example, a resident may drive or catch a bus to the nearest train terminal as long as the total time of the entire journey is still quicker than driving to their destination. It will require a lot of strategy to create a mass transit network that is more efficient that the roads, but at the same time it will be possible for a player to create a car-free city if that is what they wish. Toll gates and public transport can also be used as a source of revenue which can be adjusted per suburb, but too high will discourage residents (which will have allocated a percentage of their income to transporation) from using it. There will be a simulated economy that the player cannot directly control (but rather observe growing). For example, there will be simulated real estate, food, electronics, hotel, tourism industries that all affect the cost of living in a particular area. The industries and businesses will be inter-dependent and trade with one another (which will create freight traffic - both intracity and intercity (at an extra expense for the company)) and help stimulate other businesses which in return will generate taxable revenue. As such, small changes in the economy can ripple out to give recessions and booms, all which affect the cities GDP, the likelyhood of other businesses setting up in your city, residents migrating or leaving, and the tax the player collects. Though the player can't affect the economy directly, they can indirectly. For example, through the Deparment of Treasury it will be possible to see if a large private employer or a business that other businesses depend on are unprofitable and fund them, assure efficient transportation (freight rail, highways), and lower taxes in that area. Far off into the future of the game's development, I would also like it to be possible to be able to fund (through grants) stadiums to be built, and sponsor sporting events and conventions, which will give a boost to tourism. Being a procedural 3D game it will inherently mean things like streetview will be avaliable, and controlling an in-game avatar will be possible. Another idea far off in the future involves your avatar interacting with the mass transit. Though what the community wants will utlimately steer the direction. Although overall it may seem like a lot to micromanage, I am targetting this game to the hardcore city-building players. It's won't be a game where you can zone an new area, build some quick utilities, stick it on fast-speed and away you go. Instead, adding a new residential zone/suburb will mean a lot of careful strategy and planning (connecting your utilities, highways, ensure public services are efficient, and extending your public transport network and setting up schedules), therefore cities will develop slowly and adding a new suburb may be a week or more of game playing and careful planning. Early in the development the game will start off single player, but my goal is to extend it to be online, with the game taking place is a persistant world with a living, breathing, private economy that is always running. An in-game day may pass every two hours, which is slow enough that if the global economy shifted and suddenly all your businesses started loosing money you could log in a few days later and only a month would have passed in-game, and hopefully you would have saved enough reserves to correct it. This is also slow enough that you can rebuild major parts of your infrastructure while traffic is low, yet fast enough that you can observe the effects of rush hour, daily trends, and target problem spots within a reasonable playing period. Being an persitant online world also means that you can visit other player's living cities, explore them at street level, each with their own unique layouts and user-created architecture. It seems like an ambitious project I have set out to do, and may very well take several years to get to a playable level with only a quater of what I mentioned above implemented. But if each step is taken incrementally, each new feature improved, discussed, and approved by the community before being implemented, I believe it is possible. And with the majority of the artwork being community-created, I can focus on just the technical aspects of the game. What do people think?