Metropolis 1998

Played the Steam demo. Lovely graphics and concept! It combines city building with interior designing, which many players will potentially appreciate. Perhaps I'm just making an amateur mistake but I can't figure out how to get other zones.

Games take a while to load. Cars when turning will sometimes clip through streetlights but it does not detract from the game too much. I did experience a bug which is that sometimes clicking one building preset will cause any other building preset to be placed as the first preset you clicked. E.g., I clicked 'Gas Station', and then 'Pet Shop' - then the pet shops placed resulted in gas stations. This problem went away when I reloaded the UI widget.

If I were to list some things I'd like to see, it would be more outdoor building options! I wanted to build a parking lot but couldn't.

I'd like to see this project succeed. Keep up the nice work.

Loving the game so far. At this phase it's more of a toy but I see great potential. I had a few thoughts and bugs as I played - I'll share them here. I'm a Windows 10 user with a dedicated gaming PC with mid-high specs.

THOUGHTS:

-Found the UI to be cute and functional, but I wish there were a more complete border or color swap depending on the build state I'm in (zoning, furniture, nudging) so I know which state I have selected.

-Found laying out rooms easy, but re-working their size or adding walls to create two adjoining rooms of the same type felt a little wonky and unintuitive. I wanted to click within an office to create another office, but instead you have to delete one tile and start the new office in a tile which is not already an office.

-I really love the furniture assets in the game and hope that you have plans for modders to add their own objects/designs, or a way to edit or create furniture in the game! I spent my hour with the game thinking of all sorts of specific junk I would decorate with to make each property feel unique. As a dabbling sprite artist I felt inspired and wanted to jump right into making my own little fax machines, lava lamps, and milk crates :)

BUGS:

-Some behaviors with Alt will create ghosts of furniture which are not interactable items.

-Experienced a crash on attempting to load a saved game after quitting to desktop and relaunching game.

-Experienced a crash deleting a road intersected with the start road.

I've been waiting for a game like this forever, so I'll be watching this one closely!

How do you download this? Says it can't define the build.

It's so fun just to mess around at the moment. Having a lot of fun just planning out my city. :)

Excited to see where this goes. Playing Simcity back in the day I always imagined seeing inside the houses and the isometric sprites are gorgeous, so this is right up my street.

I think this game will live or die on its GUI being slick. Right now there's some usability issues:

- For the panel on the left, on a 1920x1080 monitor the icons are very small (may be a retina problem) and also have readability problems - it's obvious when you mouse over them and see the tooltip, but the icon itself isn't saying much.  Introducing scaling to the panels would help, but I think introducing symbols rather than a literal representation would go a long way.

- Currently the game opens a window at the screen's resolution, but that doesn't account for the taskbar, so (at least on my screen) the build UI was fully hidden until resized. 

- Right now, building houses is kind of cumbersome, mostly because there's a lot of unnecessary clicking - you need to click the ui to set a zone, drag it, then click the ui again, drag to make the foundation, then click on the ui again and drag to define a room. I think a contextual drag system could work -  dragging on the  zone to make a house, and contextually dragging on the foundation to make a room might be a more elegant solution to that.

- There should be a different styling on the buttons for the furniture selection to make them different from the buttons on the room selection. Left aligning vs center helps a bit, but I think the background colour is too similar to the room buttons. My first reaction when I fiddled around with that UI was 'why is clicking on this room causing more rooms to appear?' Also, I think what could help is changing that UI to a filter system instead - you click a room, and all the items are displayed, until you click on eg televisions to remove them from the list.

- Some items like bushes don't show the red square particularly well underneath them when they aren't in a zone. This could be fixed by just making the shader tint the entire sprite red when it can't be placed.

- When I first made a building, the world showed the roof over the foundation, in a way that it wasn't immediately apparent it was showing the roof (as it had no walls). Maybe just don't draw the roof if there isn't a room in the building.

- The dropdown menus in the build UI aren't great from a usability point of view. When you click on a dropdown menu, any sub menus need to open up to the right or left, rather than replacing the current items, or display feedback in some other way. When there's no feedback to the user prior to changing the items, it's not clear that they've changed anything.

- Mouse controls for rotating objects would be great, even just scroll wheel or right click and drag to rotate.

Hope to see the gameplay part of this going well, because you've got a very promising demo!

Looks good so far. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

The game looks nice, i love the graphics and the sounds.

I hope there will be updates !