Show HN: Microlandia, a brutally honest city builder

It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam.

So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.

microlandia.city

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138 points

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phaser

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3 days ago

25 comments

xerox13ster ・ 2 days ago

Homelessness wasn’t ignored in Sim City 2013, it was an integral part of managing housing supply and employment. Until I figured out how to balance things my parks were filled with homeless camps, inverting the land value effect of the park.

I’m deeply autistic about city builders and figure out the systems behind them and build metropolises. I’ve spent well over 35k hours playing city simulators since sim city on SNES and most of that with Sim City.

I haven’t given Cities 2 a try because they think cars should be free from a parking standpoint and while I can design around that to minimize the number of cars overall, it doesn’t feel real.

Parking is something every city builder tries to pretend isn’t real so I hope this game considers that a problem to solve by city designers, not the game designers…

This is really exciting, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

  • phaser ・ 2 days ago

    Parking is a constraint in microlandia :) and parking issues have impact on company productivity and employment. however, there’s a lot of things I’m still missing, like different types of lanes (bike-proprity, bus-priority, highways, etc) so it’s one of the things i will work hard on the next month or two.

rishikeshs ・ 3 hours ago

I purchased the game on itch.io but I didn't receive the steam key. Anyway to get that?

Gormo ・ 2 days ago

Nitpick about the website, but can we ditch the trend of using multi-color emoji characters as the bullets in a bullet list, and just go back to using regular bullets?

  • phaser ・ 2 days ago

    Hahah this is the third time I get this. Now I can't unsee it... will do it :)

cassettelabs ・ 2 days ago

Wasn't that excited since Caesar III.

What did you do, OP? I have a side project to launch, ain't nobody no time for that! :D

  • phaser ・ 2 days ago

    I started working on it around years ago very infrequently, this was the time where I experimented with concepts and programming languages... initially it was a monetary policy simulator written in go. Around 3 months ago I had the concept and basic idea working, then it was decided that I should launch.

    At this point I pushed an early access build to itch.io as soon as possible. It was very incomplete and full of problems.

    I changed the alarm clock to 6am and started working for a good 3 hours before work every weekday, this was great to capture my early morning energy which is when I'm the most creative and sharp. Weekends were full-time days. I sacrificed my social life completely (which is what I'm now determined to get back) what I did not sacrifice was sleep.

    I released a build every single day during those three months. Some of the time was new content, some of the time was bug fixes, most of the time was both. Shipping every day forced me to slice every task in something that can be managed in a couple of days so I would keep the daily cadence.

    I'm fortunate to have my wife help me with art and my good friend Pablo with the soundtrack.

    So basically my formula was: 1. Work before the job 2. Sacrifice weekends 3. Sleep well 4. Daily progress 5. Ask for help

lemontheme ・ 2 days ago

macOS and controller support. Nice!

That's what I've spent the past two years hoping for from Urbek City Builder, whose art style this immediately reminded me of. If you haven't already (which would surprise me), definitely check out Urbek. It's such a fun puzzle game, but development seems to have stalled.

Anyway, buying this right away, if only for the Microslop license.

Edit: I'm 2 hours in. Really fun vibe with a nice soundtrack. Still figuring out why my factory and farms aren't attracting more workers. And I wish I could see the buses drive around (after making public transport free). After bankrupting my first two cities, I'm finally profitable. The trick, it seems: low corporate tax, high income tax.

qmr ・ 2 days ago

SimCity 2000, now with more cynicism, depression, lethargy, nihilism, and violence.

freakynit ・ 2 days ago

It would be a such a fun idea to let LLM be the mayor of a city and manage it :)

frankhsu ・ 3 days ago

I'll purchase. I'm fascinated about how it transformed from the initial highway sketches, gradually developed into a final urban form.

mysterydip ・ 2 days ago

Reading through the page, I love all the people-centric causes and effects. Really interesting design, sharing with my friends!

devrundown ・ a day ago

This looks great! Will purchase.

freakynit ・ 2 days ago

Bro, this is so cool... Can you allow other developers to extend the core simulation? Like add more entity types, define new relations and mappings, and more parameters?

Would be so much fun. People would be able to share their "worlds" and could download any... "dystopian", "utopian", "north korea like full dictatorship", "resource constrained", etc etc...

Will help with behavioral studies as well... plus, can open up an app economy on top.

  • phaser ・ 2 days ago

    Exciting idea! I see that it could happen in more than one way:

    there is a simulation parameters file that we document openly[1]

    it’s a no brainer for me to allow playing with a custom simulation file.

    buildings are typescript types with hook-functions, making new ones is quite fun and easy and after adding sandboxing and safety it should be totally doable to plug in custom ones

    also, the simulation is a websockets protocol, so the game client can connect to a totally custom simulation

    however at this stage data types and names are changing too fast for practical modding

    1. https://microlandia.city/simulation_parameters

    • freakynit ・ 2 days ago

      "there is a simulation parameters file that we document openly[1]" - Excellent... this makes it super easy.

      "buildings are typescript types with hook-functions" - meaning i can use LLM to generate new ones?

      "the simulation is a websockets protocol" - excellent again!

      "however at this stage data types and names are changing too fast for practical modding" - no worries... my comment was mostly a suggestion... would love to see them part of the same some day though..

      Best wishes..

      • phaser ・ 2 days ago
        ・ 2 more

        Regarding custom buildings, it will likely start as a simple JSON setting some variables like workerCapacity, studentCapacity, depth, height, etc and a voxel 3D file, so players can create cities with custom architectural styles.

        Like a city with only stalin-era and soviet-era buildings. Or something where all the residents live in victorian townhouses.

        • freakynit ・ 2 days ago

          Great.. start simple, listen to comminity feedback, improve, iterate..

addaon ・ 3 days ago

Purchased. Thanks for Mac support.

HardwareLust ・ 2 days ago

Steam Deck compatibility?

  • phaser ・ 2 days ago

    Right now, a little flaky: Issues with controls and texture loading in Linux have been reported, but now that i've launched I'm gonna take a deeper look, hopefully next week playing in steam deck will be a decent experience.

    • TrueGeek ・ 2 days ago

      Just purchased - I don't have any time to play this week but I'm on a train for 6 hours next week and have been looking for a game for my Steam Deck.

      • phaser ・ 2 days ago

        Thanks for the purchase. In the next days I plan to release many bugfixes targeting Linux and steam deck, it's the most requested thing at the moment.

heliostatic ・ 3 days ago

Immediate purchase. My urban planning dwarf fortress dream.