Of all SimCity’s faults, the biggest was that, even when it was working, it was a very poor city simulator. Things essential to your planning — transport, land value, etc — seemed like they were either busted or running in a fantasy land.
Where most of us simply made sad faces though, Anselm Eickhoff rolled up his sleeves and got to work.
“I began to research traffic simulation, read dozens of papers, familiarised myself with procedural city generation techniques, building on my existing knowledge and interest for procedural generation,” he told Gamasutra. “I discovered that cities don’t fascinate me just in games, but in general.”
He’s hard at work now building his own city-planning game, called Citybound. It’s described as everything SimCity should have been but isn’t, “a city-building game that could simulate large tracts of land, be played offline by a single player, and accept user-made modifications.”
And while there’s a long road ahead, the fact he’s starting from a purist’s starting point – not…wherever Maxis started with SimCity – he’s already picked up a big following on his site and on Reddit.
Citybound is going to ship as a standalone browser game, which means it will be “a standalone browser game that runs in a special version of Chrome on PC, Mac and Linux”.
Citybound: One man’s attempt to build a better SimCity [Gamasutra]
Citybound [Dev Blog]
Comments
7 responses to “SimCity Was A Disaster, So One Man Is Trying To Make A Better Game”
One man did and he called it “Banished”
agreed, i was a big simcity fan. bourght SC4 & felt totally ripped off. haven’t played it much, it’s too easy..
Banished however, is most excellent.
Banished is a weird one because it’s not your typical city builder where you’re aiming for your perfect city. You’re building to survive at a razor’s edge. For those like me to just like to see their city “run”, not for me.
I’ve been thinking about Banished and this is an extremely useful summary of what to expect. Thanks!
Well i say good luck to him. He’s got a long, long road ahead of him.
I see what you did there. *Tips Hat*
that depends on whether or not the road uses SimCity’s pathfinding… otherwise it might just be a really short trip! :p
maybe a few bridges to cross as well