Comment by auto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by auto | Hacker News Reader

Two months ago I went full time on my indie game after just under a year and a half of part time work. I’ve been prototyping in Godot for about 6 years now, and finally had a game that my business partner and I were really interested in and felt matched the current market desires. It’s cozy world builder, drawing inspiration for Sim City, Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims, with an aesthetic influence of Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, and the like.

This was very much a passion project and an idea I’ve wanted to see alive for decades, and also let me explore some tech I wanted to get deeper on. I’m bullish on the the tighter integration of CPUs, GPU style cores, and shared memory. Our game, LocoMo, relies heavily of GPU processing of entities under the hood.

You can see me do a walkthrough of the current state of the game here: https://youtu.be/NbB0DCX8Pis?is=vGEw5oTMu_W9f-zT

Interesting project! The zoom-out revealing a much larger map was really cool after having spent time in the zoomed in view without suspecting there was much more to see around! One thing I'm curious about in these kind of sandbox games is the emerging behaviors we could see and that I feel can bring a lot of life to virtual worlds. Do you already know what platforms you will be targeting?

The emergent behavior is very much our end goal, it’s the reason everything is very systems oriented, and we’re trying to put as much control in the players hands as possible. One of our biggest remaining efforts is adding the depth to the villagers under the hood, and integrating tons of little animations and interactions, but we’re confident on the vision!

Targeting (and wishlist-able now!) Steam first, with development actively happening on Windows, Mac, Linux and the Steam Deck. Closely followed by mobile, where I’ve currently got iOS builds working for a proof of concept, just not proper controls. After that we’d love to target consoles.

Loving the art style! I'm also bullish on the simulation games that can be created with newer architectures.

It’s such an untapped domain, and despite the consoles being more tightly integrated this generation, we’re still mostly using the horsepower for traditional AAA realism-focused graphics, as opposed to this whole new world of computation available.

Edit: Also, thank you! The game has evolved a ton over the last year and is really coming into its own stylistically, bit by bit.

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