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)