Progress has been quite fast in the last weeks and most of the basic features are coming to life.

Developing a game on your own is certainly something I wouldn’t easily advise. Working from home is not as easy as you’d guess, keeping the motivation up everyday when you can freely choose when to work and for how long is something you never really get used to. With a year-long project and thousands hours of work ahead of you, only a strong discipline and commitment can keep you on track. And because there’s absolutely no certainty of success at the end of the road you’d better have your optimism in check too. Over the years I’ve seen many promising city builders being abandoned and overly ambitious projects disappear in less than a few months. That’s also why, even though I’d love to be extremely ambitious I’m trying to keep things as simple as possible until I can have a clearer picture of how much work will be needed to complete each basic feature.

Citystate 2 will not be a public transport simulator, the focus stays on the city’s economy and social development. Here’s a list of features you can expect:

Infrastructure

We’ll get roads, avenues and freeways and hopefully a simple bus and train/subway system but nothing more. I plan to add different road styles we could choose from too.

Schools, hospitals, police and fire stations will be there, but that’s probably all for the common public services. We’ll also surely get power plants as I believe energy is fundamental to any economic sim. Possibly water pumps and landfills, if they can add value to the gameplay.

We’ll be able to build parks too of course. We’ll be assembling parks tile per tile (8 meters * 8 meters) by choosing from a range of flowers, trees, fountains and paths tiles. I believe this will add more personality to our cities than just picking from a list of predefined larger parks.

Here’s how roads look as of now (alpha screenshot):

Zoning

This is a tool I’ve been working on too in the last months. The zoning tool creates standard size lots along roads. Having predefined lots from the start allows us to control exactly where buildings will grow. We’ll be able to lay privately owned parks zones in addition to public parks around residential and commercial zones. I believe this is a better compromise, allowing both more building variety (no need to create assets of all possible width to fit all lot sizes, this requires to loose variety for the most common lot size – looking at you cities skyline) and avoiding getting small houses between every skyscraper and weird uneven lots (looking at you sim city 4).

I’m still unsure if the density option should be presented with the 3 usual choices or if we should control it by setting precisely the maximum number of floors allowed.

I haven’t started working on the economic and political features yet but I’ve laid down a plan, here it is.

Policies

In Citystate 1, policies were almost the only thing influencing the economy and the low/middle/upper class ratio. In Citystate 2 they will still have a great impact on the economy but, as policies will be entirely optional, building down enough schools, hospital and so on will be sufficient for the city to develop, at least until a certain point. Policies will speed up the development and they will still affect the rich/poor ratio, the approval rate and other indexes.

Policies will be presented in a very different manner. Firstly, there won’t be lengthy texts to read under each option. Instead we’ll get 5 nuances, usually from totally regulated to unregulated. Secondly, the effects of the policy will be explicitly displayed before having to approve it. I saw how much frustration players had with this, so this will be fully transparent.

Policies’ effects

In Citystate 1, new laws were directly changing the growth of each social class. This won’t be the case in the sequel. Instead, the legislation will affect a global “gentrification” index that will represent how many families are climbing (or descending) the social ladder. The gentrification index will also be affected by the immigration policy, the education level and the unemployment rate.

Policies will also affect some of the 9 types of demand. For example, a law about GMO will affect the agricultural demand and the manufacturing demand. Again, differences between options will all be displayed before enacting the law.

Government buildings

One of the other effect of the legislation will be the number of government offices required. More regulated States will require more government employees. With that comes the need for buildings to accommodate them. Then instead of having an abstract “Total Cost” in the policy window when adding more regulation, we’ll get administrative buildings with a construction cost and a monthly cost.

A word about terrain and graphics in general

The cubic looking terrain is a design choice entirely assumed. This is of course a question of personal taste too but I believe visually speaking that the terrain feels “fuller” and more detailed, especially cliffs and mountains. Associated with the low poly trees currently in use we can reach really big map sizes without any FPS issue. “Low-poly” doesn’t necessarily goes with plain and pale colors (a bit too childish looking for me), in Citystate 2 the environment and the buildings use HD textures. There won’t be any blur effect for close and far objects like in Sim City 2015 and Cities Skyline. Post processing effects will stay minimal.