Playable Demo -- Better than SimCity?

[goldenpanda]

Not actually.. ;)

But it plays quite different. Internally we've been having fun with it. Please try it out! You will be scored.

http://www.cityscapegame.com/cityscape-5-6.zip

http://www.cityscapegame.com/uploads/kirby/demo-large.jpg

[goldenpanda]

If anyone has tried it please let us know your impressions!

I'll provide a little more info about the game. The difference from SimCity is the amount of detail. We represent the income, spending, and happiness of each and every sim. Firms produce goods, which trucks carry to their points of sale. The entire city is built up piece by piece by your workers, using the appropriate materials, which you can buy or make on your own.

In this respect we're more akin to Tropico. But we use trucks and roads to move things around the map, and travel distance is not *the* dominant factor to your city's productivity the way it is in Tropico. We are also trying to do a "closed" economy, where money is transferred always between two agents in the game -- instead of vaporizing $1000 to build a fire station, you pay a construction yard to do it, which in turn pays its workers, suppliers, owners -- these agents in turn spend it on things they desire, and so on.

In the demo imports and exports are not closed in this sense. In a future version all trade will be with other players, or with a mega-distributor such as a game-master.

The demo comes with a tutorial, with great voice-acting by an 18 year old kid!

Kirby

[jeb_]

Yeah, I've tried it.

The tutorial is pretty good, I did not have any problems following it. However, I made a mistake when I placed my farms because I thought the yellow area was for agriculture. Overall, that's my main gripe with the game... the graphics aren't very descriptive. For example, the tutorial said that it would take some time before the road was completed, which was a surprise to me since it looked like the roads were already placed. I then discovered the tiiiiny percentage numbers on them :)

Unfortunately I think you must improve the graphics if you want to sell this game. Many people I know don't play SimCity because of the simulation challenge, but because they want to build something nice (in other words they use cheats whenever possible and still have a good time). The reward for building stuff isn't the same when all you see is a rectangle with a different color.

Another thing... I'm not sure if this is a visual basic problem, but the information tabs on the right side should be hidden when the option is not available for the current selection. I kept trying to click on the tabs, but I guess only one tab is enabled for each type of construction (right?).

Final comment: It's nice that the shacks have families with names and characteristics, I liked that :)

[goldenpanda]

Thanks for your comments!

We haven't encountered the tabs problem during play testing. Can you post a screenshot and some description of your system?

Yes I should have explained about the graphics. You can think of everything as placeholders to give us a cheap way to test gameplay concepts. If you play the game through (win or lose), you'll reach a screen that takes you to our 3D engine videos (http://www.cityscapegame.com/www/archive.htm). We've put the 3D work aside to make it easier to experiment with gameplay.

We put more effort into sound than actual graphics -- as the cheaper way to tickle player imagination (hopefully). Did you have sound turned on?

Thanks again for your inputs.

Kirby

[jeb_]

Ah, then I understand.

Yes, the sounds were nice (except for the "incorrect" sound effect, hehe).

Here's a screenshot of the tabs:
http://www.oxeye.se/files/arf/cityscape.jpg

As you can see, there is one tab beneath the "Tenants" tab, and one beneath the "Workers" tab. Sometimes these tab would be larger than in this screenshot, but I wasn't able to reproduce that artifact now.

[goldenpanda]

Are you running Windows 2000 or another older operating system?

Win32/MFC is not very fun to work with. It was turning to be a huge pain just to customize the colors. We're going to be replacing it with a DirectX based custom UI.

[jeb_]

Yes, I'm running Win2k here.