A Promising 2016

2015

• got married
• moved to Germany
• started working again
• Michael quit the project
• decided to modularize & open-source parts of Citybound

progress:

• implemented some very complex geometry stuff (straight skeletons & error-tolerant geometry)
• came up with models for individual citizen's everyday life + economic micro-interactions
• started implementing manual memory management for JS, making savegames, multithreading & interop with other languages possible
• implemented a prototype for planning mode

good:

• solutions for the most difficult technical problems clearer
• planning mode as the central gameplay mode and defining element of Citybound
• persistence through the ups and downs of life
• listened to gut feeling & community

bad:

• too little focus on gameplay, only background work
• bad code architecture decisions
• too little communication with community
• no clear plans & timeframe

2016

• clear goals are needed
• overarching goals need to be reduced into realistic steps

Preparation Phase

timeframe: 2 weeks - 1 month

• finish extracting geometry code (already done)
• finish implementing memory-management

Alpha 1

"Make it run and interactable"

timeframe: 3 months

planning mode for roads & zones

random economy & population growth

building lot generation

basic placeholder buildings ("blocks")

simple daily routines

abstract car trips

• no actual traffic sim
• choose closest shop/work

abstract neighbouring city

savegames

Private release to:

• selected people from the community
• slowly more and more people will get access

why?

• keep amount of initial feedback manageable
• make sure no one's expectations are disappointed early on

Alpha 2

"Slowly add complexity"

timeframe: ???

• microscopic car traffic simulation & pathfinding
• detailed (per-trip) and localized tracking of economic interactions

Can also be stretch-goals for Prototype 1

Alpha 3

"Make it a game"

• feedback economic interactions -> growth
• fun
• basic procedural buildings & vegetation
• citizen thoughts
• pedestrian traffic

Long-Term

"Make it Citybound"

• multi-modal traffic & pathfinding
• chunking/multithreading
• huge scale cities
• custom renderer
• 3D terrain
• water simulation
• etc.

PS:

If you didn't hear yet: Livestreams are no longer on Twitch, but on Beam. The stream delay there is much lower and it is in general much better! Please resubscribe!

PPS:

For christmas, as part of a gamejam, I created a small experimental interactiony-thing with water simulation and procedural trees, check it out: