ThisIsColossal shared this beautiful game by Oskar Stålberg which immediately reminded me of my urban metabolism game (I mention it here).
Townscaper is “similar to Sim City without the threat of natural disaster or the need to maintain characters’ emotional well-being.” Which is fantastic. I play games to get away from people and it irritates me without fail (especially with Godus) that I need to have more people to please to progress in the game. Why does a beautiful game need a terrible trade-off? Piss off, people! Or like, go do your thing but leave me be.
Oskar’s Twitter then showed me another minimalist city builder game called Islanders. It’s almost perfect, but I’d like to earn points for conserving, not building, as well. But I love the overall aesthetic. This motivated me to get back to figuring out how to build the basics of these things myself.
Both Townscaper and Islanders run on the Steam platform (So do yourself a favour and install it).
Added bonus: Oskar also has this City Generator game. Really, go check out his site, he makes such lovely things. I wonder if it’s possible to import an OpenStreetMap base map and then generate a city. So the footprint with topography is real, but the generated city (aka the fine detail) is fictional. That would solve privacy issues, I think, while maintaining the resource requirements to play/model urban metabolism. You could have a few simple settings (with pre-defined defaults for the casual user), for example urban density on a scale of, say, 1 to 5, percent coverage of hard area vs green space, some settings on rainfall and whatever, and then Go! Go! Algorithm!
In short, thank you Oskar, for amazing work 🙂