3 Days of Citybound

To conclude my holiday, I spent the last three days doing an informal, solitary hackathon for Citybound. I didn't have a more precise goal than "making progress on economy in some visible way". The result is what I call grocery world:

What you see / current state of economy

• You can randomly spawn houses (represented as yellow circles, of course).
• Houses are filled randomly either with a family or a grocery store.
• Every person slowly becomes more hungry and sleepy (all the other resources you can see exist, but are not used yet).
• When a person becomes too hungry, they use some of their household's groceries.
• When a family runs out of groceries, one idle family member starts a trip to the families' favourite grocery shop.
• When a family doesn't have a favourite grocery shop yet, the most suitable one is found by comparing the offers of all existing grocery shops, also taking into account a simple approximation of travel cost.
• Once the family member arrives at the grocery shop and successfully completes the task, they just sit there.
• You can inspect all the households (families/shops) in a building by clicking on it (like in the screenshot).
• Grocery shops don't really do anything yet, they just keep offering groceries and get money for it, even if they go into "negative groceries"

What's next

• Make grocery shops offer jobs as well and make family members take jobs if they run out of money.
• Then do performance benchmarks of this tiny economic model (how many families/shops can it handle - what are the first obvious slow parts).
• Extend the model with more resources and some more kinds of shops, still just generating resources out of thin air.
• Extend the model with abstract neighbouring cities, acting like a far away shop for more resources.
• Try to get a complete daily cycle going for households that encompasses a very basic set of resources.
• Just see how well that works and do some simple balancing.
• Start adding more complex behaviour for shops/businesses, maybe even already with simple supply chains.
• Somewhere in between add simple graphics for buildings so everything looks nicer.
• At some point when it feels right release another prototype!

As always, let me know what you think!

In other news, I continued writing the Design Document, which is both slow but also really worthwhile.

I also created a Doodle for the next Patrons Calling: please vote here. (I will create a separate reminder post about that tomorrow)