SimCity That I Used to Know

Oh boy, I hadn't seen this before. This is wonderful.

Paradox is known for making very complicated, somewhat buggy, but lofty and (in my opinion) very fun titles.

I swear their approach to games is "So they say 'a game is a series of interesting decisions,' lets see how many decisions we can pack into this one!"

The Hearts of Iron series is basically SimCity for World War 2. You pick any country and a starting year and just go. Decide on major events, pick your cabinet, how you allocate resources (industrial and brainpower), who you spy on, what you research, elections, and of course the whole war thing. Just everything. The game is huge fun if you like to sit down and plan things and I totally recommend it to anyone who loved the sim cities of old.

Hearts of Iron 3 is on Steam here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/25890/

I hope it turns out better than the several versions of Cities XL did.

Will's talks and interviews are all fascinating and well worth watching, taking notes, and studying. It's interesting to see how the projects he was talking about at the time turned out years later. I'll also link to an excellent interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers on The Sims, who is an absolutely brilliant designer who worked Will on The Sims and Spore, who according to Will can manipulate the very fabric to Time and Space, and is a pretty good designer, for a girl: https://web.archive.org/web/20131117041434/http://pickleodeo...

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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/9

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games

A summary of Will Wright's talk to Terry Winnograd's User Interface Class at Stanford, in 1996. Written by Don Hopkins.

Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winnograd's user interface class at Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000). At the end of the talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the time. I attended the talk and took notes, on which this article elaborates. I was fascinated by Dollhouse, and subsequently went to work with Will Wright at Maxis for three years. We finally released it as The Sims in 2000, after several name changes: TDS (Tactical Domestic Simulator), Project-X (everybody has one of those), Jefferson (after the president, not the sitcom), happy fun house (or some other forgetable Japanese placism).

At the talk, he reflected on the design of simulators and user interfaces in SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt. He demonstrated several of his games, including his current project, Dollhouse.

Here are some important points Will Wright made, at this and other talks. I've elaborated on some of his ideas with my own comments, based on my experiences playing lots of SimCity, talking with Will, studying the source code and porting it to Unix, reworking the user interface, and adding multi player support.

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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35

The Future of Content - Will Wright's Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005

What I learned about content from the Sims. ...and why it's driven me to procedural methods. ...And what I now plan to do with them. Will Wright Game Developers Conference 3/11/2005

Notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and from other discussions with Will Wright.

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http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/31

Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion

The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".

Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.

The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!

In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.

If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!

http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/chris-trottier-the-...

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If you want to get it running again without too much of a headache, Good Old Games has it for $6.

http://www.gog.com/game/simcity_2000_special_edition

Yeah, nativ.ly is the network. See here: http://nativ.ly/medium-partners-with-bmw-to-produce-a-digita...

The entire re-form is sponsored by BMW, I honestly don't get your point. It's a really interesting section of Medium, try looking for the other articles.

That's sponsorship more than native advertising.

The piece itself has nothing to do with BMW and there's nothing BMW being sold under the pretence of a journalistic piece (that I could see), there's an article, and BMW sponsors the series so here's their logo.

I'm curious about this as well.

There's the Caesar & Pharaoh series which does something along those lines, albeit with ancient cities.

Well there was Streets of Sim City[0] where you could take any of your Sim City 2000 cities, and turn it into a vehicular racing and combat playground. Way fun at the time!

0.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity

Have you tried Stronghold? It's like SimCity in a medieval setting, though with much finer-grained control on what you build where (placing specific buildings and laying out walls, rather than allocating general "zones"), and in most scenarios you need to build troops to defend against periodic attacks from enemy armies.

ETA GOG link: http://www.gog.com/game/stronghold

Take a look at Factorio. It's not perfectly what you're looking for, but the state of mind that it puts me in is right in between starcraft and sim city.

Anno 2070 might fit the bill.

Well, there was a lot of criticism about the recent SimCity, around how the underlying simulation was broken. That's probably enough to get a breakup-song reference going.

e.g. the 100% residential city: http://www.pcgamesn.com/simcity/simcity-100-residential-city...

It's nice, but too hard ...or too unforgiving. A little mistake early on means all your citizens but handful will die 60min later.

City building games like the Settler 2, Anno 1602 or Caesar III are more fun.

It’s one thing to edit Wikipedia; it’s another thing altogether to make that edit stick. Now that Will Wright has been cited in an article published by a third party, an editor has already started the process of changing it via the article’s talk page. Creatives have had a very big problem self-correcting the site, since the official editors have a distrust of uncited sources.

For Arch users, micropolis is in the AUR.

I played countless hours of that with my little brother, who was about 9 at the time. Decades later he still claims that he figured out the system for fairly accurately predicting where rebels would be placed. He did seem to hit my hospitals with alarming accuracy, so I'm inclined to believe him, although I could never figure it out myself and he never would tell.

Here's a chance to relive it!

https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/

EA open-sourced the SimCity code (under the original name Micropolis), it's since been ported to Java and some other environments.