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Comment by YesBox | Hacker News Reader

Well crap, I'm going to have some serious competition :D

I've been developing a city builder myself over the last year (Metropolis 1998). I wanted to do a 3D version sometime in the future, but alas. Maybe people will be tired of purchasing $15 DLCs on top of a shallow base game (probably not).

Time to get to work

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As long as the shallow base game still has more gameplay hours than most games I don't think people mind additional (also needing to be worthwhile) content costing money. That's Paradox's general business model and I think it works great for the types of games. I think I have nearly all of the optional content for Cities Skylines now but dollars per hour I'm still doing better than when it launched and when it launched the dollars per hour was still significantly lower than traditional games.

Looking at Metropolis 1998 my feedback would be I'm excited for the concept of a modern take on retro builders but I'm worried the gameplay will end up more "2D grid traffic simulator" than city builder. "Traffic simulator" can be a key layer for city builder die-hards but I'm hesitant that a 2D grid approach would be more interesting than base CS1, particularly with a free mod that simulates traffic more realistically (albeit not as performant what you can do with the traffic and road designs in 3D freeform is also much more interesting). I'll keep an eye on it though, it may be something I pick up in the future as it materializes :).

Thanks! I agree with your feedback. I intend to have different options to mitigate the traffic if people don't want to manage it. My biggest inspiration for the game is actually roller coaster tycoon. I want to offer to the player the option to sit back and enjoy what they built (from scratch if they want!), and then switch back to managing and building their city, much like a theme park.

i like that idea. i would enjoy watching what i built. taking this as a springboard for a feature discussion: many sim games suffer from needing to build american style car centric cities. how is your approach here? could we build historical european cities? futuristic car-free ones? public transport like trams? separate bike paths?

I'd love to fulfill all of those options, and I plan to, but I dont think I will have them all available in the first release build. I'm the only developer working on the game, and the only other person I work with is the pixel artist.

So expect cars and sidewalks. Pedestrian-only walk ways should be possible in the first release.

i am obviously not expecting miracles here, more wondering in which direction you want to go, and if those ideas fit your goals.

found it on Steam. added to my wishlist. will also check out early access...

Also if you're willing to wait about 6 months for any DLC, you can pick it up for a couple dollars. I don't think I've paid more than $5 for any of Cities Skyline's major DLC.

Looked it up, here's a clickable Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

The graphics remind me a little bit of the ones in OpenTTD (an open source transportation tycoon game), the top down view also looks interesting, since most games just stick to one perspective. Oh, maybe the style is a little bit like the Simutans game (another transportation tycoon), but that depends on the graphics package.

I don't think that anyone has quite done city builders where you can look inside of buildings, so that sounds pretty unique - good luck with your project. I'm pretty sure that the genre is big enough for Cities: Skylines II, niche games like Urbek City Builder (voxel based city builder where building placement matters, almost like a puzzle) and plenty of other games out there, so don't feel too discouraged.

I wouldn't be worried, the market for modern city builders is large enough to support a few of them, assuming they're distinctive enough. I'm kind of shocked nobody made an attempt to displace C:S in the last couple of years. Meanwhile we have hundreds of variants of The Settlers and Caesar.

Yes. I'd rather buy an indie game with SOVL and pixel art than a big production. Just seeing the photorealistic images on the steam page is a turn-off. I'll take a game looking like SimCity 2000 or 3000 over that.

Btw I'm also working on my own indie game, it's quite challenging but I'm happy with progress I'm making by being consistent on it.

Your game looks really neat! Wishlisted it. Can I ask what sort of tech stack you're building it on?

Awesome, thank you! I'm using C++ (custom engine) and SFML (graphics framework)

Looks neat, added it to my wishlist!

I'm curious about some of the tech behind this if you don't mind me asking:

1. Is the top down view just rendering the same isometric assets from a different viewpoint, are they pre-baked sprites, or are they completely different and hand-tuned?

2. How are you doing the changing wall height for seeing inside buildings? Do you just have 4 pre-set wall heights that you're animating between globally, or is it dynamic?

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