This is incredibly faithful to the look and feel of the likes of TTD, RCT and old Simcity games... and it is amazing that you did this as it is not in any way an easy genre to create a functioning game in much less one that has a consistent style with this nostalgic charm.
Definitely following you now as your skill is clear. And the game itself shows early indications of a really fun design. I know it is not finished but there is a ton of promise visible already.
Not going to say my dev or asset pack stuff is in line with what you're doing aesthetically but my profile is here if you want to know a bit more about who just commented :) : matthornb.itch.io
Oh, this looks insanely cute. Wishlisted it on Steam and am following you and this project. I'll definitely be trying it out. Love cozy city builders! Can't wait to try this out tonight. It looks incredible!
Wonderful! Even just a quick undo placement sort of feature would be nice :) also it would be cool to have hot keys for like pretty much every action, a bit like Factorio has. Completely different game, I know, but the amount of hot keys for different situations is incredibly useful.
So much fun, messed around with this for a little bit and I can already tell the absolute hold this game could have on my life! I took a look at your roadmap and man I can't wait for there to be public transport, would love to try and recreate a 15-minute city inside the game.
Can you try forcing the game to run on your GPU? The game might be using CPU integrated graphics, and I discovered there's an Intel bug related to that.
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!
Same error. "While queuing download: TypeError: Cannot read property 'build' of undefined at file [install location]." Looks like the itch app doesn't know what to install, as there is no possible selection for a user. Will just use the web download myself, recommend the same for now malgrumm.
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!
Thank you for the detailed feedback. Really appreciate this! All of it is solid.
I agree with everything you said, and some of it has fixed or improved over the last week.
I removed building (foundation) placement entirely. Now it's just zones + room placement. (Rooms *are* the building). The workflow is smoother as well, and you can replace rooms without needing to delete first, and can hold ALT to switch to delete mode.
The large window on launch has been downsized too.
I agree wrt the GUI needing to be amazing. I'll be implementing most of your feedback soon, except perfecting the GUI :p
Thanks! I'll be updating the demo for some time. There is not a patcher, so join the discord server if you want to be notified (link in the game folder).
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Very cool. I especially like the 13MB filesize.
Thank you! One of the fun side effects of writing your own engine
This is incredibly faithful to the look and feel of the likes of TTD, RCT and old Simcity games... and it is amazing that you did this as it is not in any way an easy genre to create a functioning game in much less one that has a consistent style with this nostalgic charm.
Definitely following you now as your skill is clear. And the game itself shows early indications of a really fun design. I know it is not finished but there is a ton of promise visible already.
Not going to say my dev or asset pack stuff is in line with what you're doing aesthetically but my profile is here if you want to know a bit more about who just commented :) : matthornb.itch.io
<3
love this game to bits already, cannot wait for release!
Thank you!
Oh, this looks insanely cute. Wishlisted it on Steam and am following you and this project. I'll definitely be trying it out. Love cozy city builders! Can't wait to try this out tonight. It looks incredible!
Belated thank you!!
This is amazing! I love decorating in OpenTTD and this hits all those highpoints and more. Very fun and beautiful pixel graphics.
Thank you!
3 minutes in and I already love it. One thing I'd love though: Ctrl-Z! It would be very nice to have when editing things. :)
Thank you! I'll see if I can implement Ctrl-Z, but it's a notoriously difficult problem and I may not be able to!
Wonderful! Even just a quick undo placement sort of feature would be nice :) also it would be cool to have hot keys for like pretty much every action, a bit like Factorio has. Completely different game, I know, but the amount of hot keys for different situations is incredibly useful.
Can Not Start A New Gam
Hey, sorry about that. I've had a few reports of this happening and they all had the same issue: old (or mobile) CPU and no GPU.
Can you try updating the graphics firmware for the CPU? It might solve the problem
I Fiiggured It Uo
look awesome !
Thank you!
Cool game but, please, disable random colored walls when im try to copy previous floor
For sure. I'll be adding options like that in the near future
So much fun, messed around with this for a little bit and I can already tell the absolute hold this game could have on my life! I took a look at your roadmap and man I can't wait for there to be public transport, would love to try and recreate a 15-minute city inside the game.
Thank you! <3 <3
it hangs after i press "new game", is it my computers issue?
Hmm, first time I've heard that happening. What OS are you using?
Can you try forcing the game to run on your GPU? The game might be using CPU integrated graphics, and I discovered there's an Intel bug related to that.
Edit: new build forces GPU use
At this time are there people? Because none are in my metropolis.
There are people! Did you delete the road running through the map? Currently that's how people move in
i am ENAMORED with this, it's so cute! there's little guys doing little guy things! I'm so excited to see where this project goes
Thank you so much! <3
Downloaded the demo from steam and i can't wait for it to release in full. Cityskylines and rollercoaster tycoon mashed together in such a good way
Thank you!
Just cool 5/5
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.
Hey afteryesterday, thanks for your feedback! I appreciate it.
I have fixed the blueprint bug you mentioned above. It will now warn if no blueprint is available (which was why the previous selection remained).
I just added parking lots to this build :)
Thanks!
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!
Thank you so much for this feedback! All of it is solid. I'll look into into the first two bugs. Third one is fixed for the next release.
Your suggestions are great too, will work on making the UI a bit more obvious, and will think of a way to add some suboptions for room placement.
I plan on working with modders and adding in-game object creation/editing :)
How do you download this? Says it can't define the build.
Is that message from itch or from your computer? Are you using windows?
Same error. "While queuing download: TypeError: Cannot read property 'build' of undefined at file [install location]." Looks like the itch app doesn't know what to install, as there is no possible selection for a user. Will just use the web download myself, recommend the same for now malgrumm.
Where is the web download exactly?
https://yesbox.itch.io/metropolis1998 in your browser.
It's Itch, not the first time i've had a game do this. and yeah i'm using windows...
It's so fun just to mess around at the moment. Having a lot of fun just planning out my city. :)
Awesome! Glad to hear this :)
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!
Thank you for the detailed feedback. Really appreciate this! All of it is solid.
I agree with everything you said, and some of it has fixed or improved over the last week.
I removed building (foundation) placement entirely. Now it's just zones + room placement. (Rooms *are* the building). The workflow is smoother as well, and you can replace rooms without needing to delete first, and can hold ALT to switch to delete mode.
The large window on launch has been downsized too.
I agree wrt the GUI needing to be amazing. I'll be implementing most of your feedback soon, except perfecting the GUI :p
Thanks again!
Working towards an update. All new GUI, sidewalks, more assets. Next next update will be agent sim and simple game loop.
Looks good so far. Can't wait to see how this turns out.
Thanks :)
The game looks nice, i love the graphics and the sounds.
I hope there will be updates !
Thanks! I'll be updating the demo for some time. There is not a patcher, so join the discord server if you want to be notified (link in the game folder).