I loved your game. I'm wondering about the decision of making the game with a registration on your website instead of a more traditional approach of having a standalone game. The friction point for me was having to register to save progress. I would gladly pay in Steam or itch.io for a game that i can download and play locally.
I'm guessing the decision is about making a online leaderboard?
Yeah, also VR devices. Right now im mostly focused on getting the media server depdendency management and install process more user friendly, it works, but can require a little trouble shooting to get everything working.
It’s such an untapped domain, and despite the consoles being more tightly integrated this generation, we’re still mostly using the horsepower for traditional AAA realism-focused graphics, as opposed to this whole new world of computation available.
Edit: Also, thank you! The game has evolved a ton over the last year and is really coming into its own stylistically, bit by bit.
As someone who worked on HR Tech in 2024-2025, I think you're really solving a problem here. Cat is out of the bag already it's not like HR can go back to the pre-AI world ... I'm also puzzled by the flags. Congrats on your project :)
I continue to work on my city builder game Microlandia, launched here in HN ~6 months ago. I originally predicted a few dozen urbanism nerds would play it, but now almost 10,000 copies sold. I'm still a solo developer but now I collaborate with 2D, 3D and music artists. Which is good because the original art that I drew myself for the launch was horrible.
I'm currently working on modeling energy, climate and new policies like universal basic income
Based on the general reception you get almost every time you mention this on HN, you really should make your own text-based forum available as there is a ton of us interested in diving into the game mechanics, your plans and general ideas a lot more than probably HN could support.
Let me know if you're looking for an experienced web dev who can help you with all of it ;)
I'm really interested in how the landlord/land price logic works, as it would be key to building a realistic city where higher income earners live closer to CBD, etc. Are there slums and ghettos? Gentrification? The promo shows single detached houses seemingly quite close to city center.
Unhoused people do exist, and they vote for you so it's in there. Also shelters with real costs based on good data. Modeling slums is actually quite hard. There were unhoused camping sites in the early access version but I was unhappy with how it turned out and retired the feature back to the drawing board.
I want it to come back because it's in the spirit of the game not to hide the "ugly" aspects of city life.
There is gentrification in the way that landlords discriminate low income renters and NIMBYs have political power over you (in the form of the 'disagreement aura')
There's no rules against building single family homes in a city center, but the effect is what you would expect: non optimal tax revenue as you could zone it for something that's worth a lot more.
Does the AI have a say in what type of residential buildings are built, or is it all up to the player? If the AI is choosing, then there should be some way to naturally incentivize the landlords to build apartment towers where there is a higher demand, and cheaper housing in the suburbs where workers can't afford to pay higher rents.
Congrats on the game and I hope you're keeping some design notes as the balancing act between realism and gameplay will surely make for an interesting story.
This looks great. I've had a quick look through the docs and can't see anything about bikes under transport, or, under housing, anything relating to modes of tenure that aren't private rentals (e.g. Vienna-style social housing, housing co-operatives, or private ownership). Would be lovely to play around with those variables.
Also, for finance, is there a particular reason why the finance sector calculations look quite simple (on the face of it, at least)? They seem only to be a percentage lift based on aura, rather than anything resembling any number of complex sectoral dynamics, from full rentier-financial domination to prudent support of industry/services.
Regarding the unit economics for finance sector, you are right, the calculations are way too simple, and I'm not entirely happy with it, so I'm looking to improve it, but it does need to be a sweet spot between 1. realistic enough to be educatioal and 2. simple enough you can use it as a gameplay mechanic.
Before the end of the year there will be mod support, and I will pay special attention to making sure that modders can swap the economic formulas for more sophisticated models.
This reminds me of what "Hell Mod" did to Diablo I: Basically reinvented the game as it would have been if Blizzard hadn't been constrained by money or time, and knew what worked from their sequels.
I like that it's non-serious and contains jokes throughout the user interfaces. Reminds me a little of Airline Tycoon's non-serious/joking nature, and Theme Hospital if going further back in time. It makes the game fun rather than a boring simulator some city planner would use for work.
Man looks amazing, the detail level of the simulation seems to be in another level compared to sity skylines and co.
If you need any help or just chat about this, reach out to contact (At) khorchani (dot)fr
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of the economy is that money is earned when someone creates value. Just "giving people money" without having the corresponding value be created increases demand for valuable things without increasing supply, leading to inflation and the costs of said things going up.
Money is earned either by extracting rents/profits/taxes, through borrowing or by selling something. None of these have to actually create value.
You can advertise something without value and “earn” money selling it. The perceived value was created by advertising, but didn’t actually exist.
You can raise funds, sell at a loss, buy out the competition and later drive up prices without creating any value. This is how Amazon got started.
You can go to the bank, borrow money(increasing the money supply, driving inflation, thanks to fractional reserve banking), buy up houses (driving housing inflation), and extract rent without doing anything useful for your community.
In fact, cloud computing is largely that: buying up all the compute and renting it out to those without the capital to buy themselves.
A person can create value without earning money (parenthood, volunteering), and one can earn money without creating value (rent extraction), although the word “earn” is under a lot of strain.
You're wrong. People have inherent value whether they "create value" or not. UBI is not about rewarding people for some economic contribution but rather provides everyone with a reasonable amount of money so they can survive (hopefully) and stay healthy and have a shot at the prerequisites for "freedom" to exist.
Money has been completely manufactured in financial markets already and doesn't seem to be screwing us over too badly. I hardly think UBI paid from taxing the largest economic surpluses and wealth in the history of the world will have a significant impact on inflation.
Any inflationary impact would happen if you print the money supply to pay UBI rather than using existing dollars in the supply.
You're also completely writing off the additional surpluses that people receiving UBI could provide if they're confident they can get by on a daily basis and also ensure they stayed healthy and working rather than spiraling any time one or two things go sideways.
In, say, the Netherlands we already have something that's very close to free money. I know many, many folks perusing said mechanism(s). Sure, it's not UBI and there is some stigma involved but I think it's the closest you'll get. I won't be snarky about this, but let's just say I need some.. convincing this reliably addresses the primary obstacles in economically disadvantaged folks. In my experience our economic situation is downstream from other more urgent issues that we find hard to talk about. Culture, ethics, behavioral and cognitive differences, etc. Thorny, nasty things, but .. real and more importantly they don't respond to dollar bills. In fact, it may make it worse.
But anyway, I'm not too worried about inflation mainly because of the points you raised, but I am worried about resource constrained markets like housing. If nothing is done to stop this, and I don't know how, I'm sure they'll just raise the prices to completely cancel out any UBI you'll pass around. It's not just housing either, but that's an obvious one.
So far in Croatia any kind of stimulus from the government just makes the market compensate. For example, an increase in public spending made the prices of goods and services more expensive and providing subsidies for first time home buyers caused prices of real estate to increase by that amount.
> our economic situation is downstream from other more urgent issues that we find hard to talk about. Culture, ethics, behavioral and cognitive differences
I see it as exactly the opposite - culture, ethics, behavior differences etc are downstream of financial inequality. When people are financially insecure it becomes much harder to tolerate disagreement, and much easier to blame [insert whatever populist notion of enemy]. I think it would be easier to engage with people with opposing ideas, not seeing them as an existential threat, if you are not worried about housing, income or health insurance.
Cultural polarization is a deflection mechanism (both in the subconscious psychological sense as well as a politcal/propaganda technique) meant to mask the real deeper structural inequalities. It's the lie we tell ourselves and the powers that be tell us to prevent to change the direction of the "wealth redistribution" we've been witnessing for 20+ years.
The real problem during the pandemic is most of the stimulus money went to the already wealthy. Higher cost of living is because we keep printing money, that money goes to banks, and inflation ends up being an implicit tax on the poor who aren't invested in the markets.
What I can definitely tell you is that the people that currently can't even afford basic things are somehow causing higher cost of living. The economy is not jacked up right now because we gave people laughably small amounts like a thousand dollars. The real problem is people like Sergei Brin spending 57 million dollars to fight a one-time 5% tax.
Pandemic checks were from expanding the money supply IIRC rather than distributed taxes on the already very wealthy. These are very different mechanisms. What they did (expanding the money supply) drove inflation way more than the actual money in people’s pockets. Otherwise you’d have argue people shouldn’t get paid because it causes too much inflation.
What intrigues me the most about AI progress, is not AGI or the model du jour by $AI_UNICORN, but rather what can be run locally. I remember having an amusing, but rather useless model in a beefy gaming PC that I had 6 years ago; and now, something that’s a hundred times better on my M5 laptop.
Should the market react to the memory shortage, the progress of the Apple silicon continue at the same pace, and what we’ll be able to run locally in 6 years will be very exciting. or frightening.
Also I don’t know what this means for the valuation of the AI companies. I remember asking about this very idea to one of their employees at an event and instead of answering he bailed out to grab a cocktail.
- There is no "moat" (lasting, easy-to-defend technological edge) in AI model businesses. There are just short-term advantages.
- An AI business is a capital-intensive business, just like old factories. Data centers are expensive, models are energy-hungry, and the hardware inside must be replaced every 3–4 years.
- Smaller, specialized models eat margins from below. Transcription, voice, or image detection do not need large models.
There is no reason to expect high margins like you can in traditional software business. Benefits of AI go mostly to consumers.
edit: There is potential for economies of scale. Few megacorps can strive for cost advantage when they achieve scale (Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta)
It does seem like the structural characteristics we’ve observed so far suggest there is a kind of flywheel from short-term to long-term advantage due to the capital requirements at various levels.
If you’re Nvidia, making the best GPUs today, the expanding wavefront of demand is consuming them with volume and margins to give you a huge edge in building out the best next generation of GPUs. Similar to how the mobile wave gave TSMC sustained advantage for about a decade now.
I’m guessing this is also what we’re seeing as Anthropic and OpenAI swap spots in the token-vendor market.
I can see the fly wheel in action for Nvidia[1], but in terms of model building - I think the companies that have the advantage here are not Anthropic or OpenAI, but rather companies with substantial revenues from other sources - Google is the obvious player here - reported to be planning on spending 185 billion this year without having a raise a dime from the markets, but there are plenty of other companies - like Meta or Alibaba who can easily fund the longer game from existing revenues.
What you can run locally in consumer hardware is progressing pretty well.
If you get a not-quite-the-best gaming GPU like a 5080, you can run local models that are better than the state of the art from early 2025. Depending on what you want to do, you might have to switch models. The one size fits all huge models are still a data center thing.
Its a convenience thing. You can run a whole lot of stuff locally from wikipedia to social media/email/video servers whatever. Most people with a full time job and 2 kids dont do it cause who has time and energy to patch and maintain the ever growing complexity of this stuff. These systems will keep growing complex. That also means more bugs. Age old tradeoff between freedom and convenience.
You can run mediawiki at home but you won't have wikipedia. You can run a video server but you won't have all the movies that Netfix has. A local model is actually the real thing.
Thanks I didn't know about kiwix, but, let's consider the fact that a wiki, or netflix movies are cheap or free, while AI is actually quite expensive at least for now, and i'm not sure if it's because of real costs or to justify the valuation.
So there is a bigger incentive to run locally something that's gonna get you $20 or $100 worth of bills to OpenAI than to mirror something that is actually free.
Example: In the past there was a whole market for sound cards, if you wanted your computer to have any "multimedia" capabilities you needed to get a sound blaster but now everybody assumes a computer will produce sound, and it's basically for free as all chips have it. Now sound interfaces are still a thing but only for audiophiles who are esoteric enough like me to believe that it's worth to have that extra hi-fi quality.
What I think it could happen, is that eventually AI will be part of all the chips, just like soundcards. And there will be people who will buy specialized AI from companies that perhaps are not OpenAI or Anthropic but second-generation sleepers who watched the carnage in the market and decided to enter when it was reasonable.
This could be Apple, or Nvidia or something new. They're just waiting for the others to do the research and introduce the taste for it to the masses, just like sound blaster made us fall in love with high fidelity sound in our computers.
--what this means for the valuation of the AI companies
Probably nothing. Most users have no idea what an LLM is or how it runs. Anecdotally speaking, I see many LLM users default to whatever their day job provides to them. And even slightly more sophisticated users seem ok with paying for their openai or anthropic subscriptions.
Maybe we will see a small but dedicated group of open weight model users who prefer local llm, but everybody else will just consume from the big providers? The scenario might look something like OS choices today - a small, committed group of Linux users vs the vast majority of other users running Windows, MacOS, or Chrome?
Prices from OpenAI and Anthropic have really jumped in the past month. I work for a big giant company and our Github co-pilot costs increased as of today, June 1st. Our internal estimates are that our bill will double or triple. How much are we willing to pay? I don't know, but nobody wants to be "left behind".
I think there's actually a big market opportunity here. Somebody, like Dell or HP, should start selling turnkey on-prem LLM servers.
This has always been true of software, particularly games. You can get a 5-6 year old game for a fraction of the price, and run it on modest hardware. But the industry wont sit on its hands for 5 years, there will be newer software that requires better hardware.
A new game is a totally new world with everything created from scratch. A creation. A model, on the other hand, is a reinterpretation machine for hundreds of years of human creations, but not a creation in itself, more like a discovery.
You would think that by now we would have a much better Bitcoin that's taking over the payment networks of the world but what we actually got is a shitload of shitcoin.
If you want to learn about crowd insanity read Nietzsche, if you want to learn about bubbles read about 1998 to 2001 and the current AI bubble. Both were and will be worst than 1929.
I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going.
The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that).
Sure, there's something great about Cities Skylines that (at least with very powerful hardware) can look and feel like reality. But at the same time the game engine, in order to make this photorealism of terrain elevations with infinite possible shapes of infrastructure, is so complex that the actual simulation is sloppy, and feels to me like a big downgrade from SC3000.
Traffic, economics, zoning, crime, pollution. are so much practical to simulate (both in the computer, and in our mind models) in this classic isometric style.
Looks pretty cool. Reminds me also of Metropolis 1998, which is also going for the isometric style - with a lot more detail, i.e. you can design individual homes and see the lives of "sims" too, something like if SimCity and The Sims were merged.
Awesome! I am going to try this when I have some time next week. Fantasizing about how to make a better SimCity 25 years ago is what inspired me to pursue a computer science degree. I got sidetracked by a PhD and never returned to making games. Maybe your version is the one I always wanted!
This looks great, I just bought a copy. While it's downloading I'm perusing the listing, and I'm curious if this supports generating a large image/print of your finished city, like you could in SCURK (SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, which shipped with SC2K).
One thing I particularly loved was printing out very large maps of my city to go on the wall :)
Edit: I like the music a lot, and the little tutorial guy is endearing. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I tried scroll click drag, mouse button drag, arrow keys.
Maybe we manage to make something that doesn't need blender (though it probably won't look as cool) or we just stop dev-gatekeeping the function that exports the 3d file. Consider it done for the next point release :)
Beautiful, yes, that's what I am looking for. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I've tried various click drags and arrow keys. Pan/zoom/tilt works great.
Up and down arrow keys will change the tilt. left right to rotate in 90 degree steps. WASD to pan.
(the keys can be changed in control settings)
If you're looking for a free-angle view we don't have it, the game is designed to be looked like a isometric game. Having said that, I'm working on a "photo mode" that frees the camera and lets you choose a lens (with depth of field) and a film but so far it's only for shooting pictures and not for actually playing the game.
Thank you, WASD is what I was looking for. I just want to take a moment and say I find the music very nostalgic, it's great. Can you tell me more about the soundtrack? Is this tracker music?
In other news, I was on track to win re-election and lost. I lost while having the selector for building a structure enabled, and that was stuck on the placing-a-tile, even though I'd lost and the game ended. Very fun game nonetheless!
The compositions are by Pablo Rubio, a long time collaborator. Originally it's inspired in the soundtrack of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The music is not tracker music but we made the artistic decision to use similar limitations (small number of channels, sample-based instruments) to get the aesthetics of tracker music (actually SNES music but practically the same principles). The soundtrack is still getting expanded. Every month we add a new track to the playlist.
Thanks for the explanation, it hits the mark. Please pass on the compliments to Pablo, the soundtrack does a lot to set the mood. I'm about to start my next city, hopefully I do better in the election :) Thanks for sharing this, I was not expecting to get this sucked in so fast.
Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.
"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.
I more meant "I had 200m in the bank and accidentally spent 170m of it to start constructing a police HQ".
If you bulldoze a building when it's only 2% of the way through being constructed, you should probably be able to get 98% of the resources spent back - whether housing demand, money, whatever you spent.
Possibly 100% back until you hit 5%, just to allow for those mis-clicks.
> The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia
That would be a real challenge to achieve simply because most of us are constantly surrounded by cities, but it is something that we should strive for.
For instance, game designer Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian) said that I never wants to visit any old castles or ruins for fear that it would ruin his imagination on how game worlds should be built. It is a fair point, none of his games have had any focus on reality in terms of scale and that is what makes them so special.
Also looking at your game... can I get a copy of Microslop Excellence? ;)
How big can cities get, though? One of the things I love about Cities Skylines is how massive the land plots are, and the tiny plots of SimCity 2013 was a bigger turnoff than anything else in its disastrous launch.
At this moment, not so big but lately I've done some interesting technical breakthroughs that will enable large maps :D ... or at least a lot larger than SimCity 2013
The real key will be to discover how to run a city simulation such that it doesn't all have to be "active" at the same time (e.g, the opposite of the Factorio simulation).
I think the simulation in Cities Skylines is also quite advanced, or not? The simulation is much more the reason why it requires powerful hardware to run on, much less the graphics.
Can't speak on how demanding the simulation is/was. But on launch Cities Skylines 2 was extremely demanding in respect of its graphics due to very poor optimisation. This PC Gamer article summarises a more technical analysis, which is linked through
But yes, at launch Cities Skylines 2 was very heavily GPU bound, due to very unoptimized meshes and a poor culling implementation. I haven't profiled it afterwards, but from what I've read they've optimized it enough that on most systems the limiting factor is now the CPU.
Thank you for your analysis! Apologies for not linking to you by name but I thought I'd keep it light and refer to the PC Gamer summary, which does link through to you as well for those who would be interested.
Cities Skylines has pretty decent simulation and it uses quite a bit of raw CPU horsepower, but it only really shines with tonnes of mods (just like SimCity 4 before it).
Realistic traffic is always the bane of these simulators.
Although I don't have the same focus, I also came to the same conclusion: the actual game and gameplay itself got worse over the years. Same with civilization and many other games. Modern game designers don't understand this or don't care. But I spoke to some of them, and while I initially thought they understand but don't care, most of them really do not UNDERSTAND the problem domain. In particular younger ones; many of them have not played old games.
Not the same genre (at least for me). Timberborn is more like a colony builder (think Rimworld) than a city builder (SimCity/Cities Skylines). Its the micromanaging vs macromanaging, in a colony builder you are micromanaging what each creature does (such as timberborn or rimworld) while on a city builder you manage the city itself and invididual pawns are alot less important! Plus the survival aspect in that sense doesnt really add up when I'd like to play with the simulation aspects - education, traffic, crime, etc..!
timberborn doesnt have the beavers figuring out for themselves what to do, and operate with agents pulling jobs you the player put on a queue rather than statistics.
Timberborn is a good idea, terrible execution, and feels unfinished. At least as a "City builder". It feels closer to a sandbox or "casual" game.
You can build robots to take over work, but the robots use the exact same fuel as the normal beavers (food and water) so the benefit is their lack of need to sleep, but that's just not that great a benefit for how much they cost? Also you have to micromanage them, choosing which buildings use robot labor and the setting is exclusive which makes them a pain in the ass to use. Not a very rewarding endgame system. It really should be automatically preferring robot labor and require zero settings changes.
The research/science section of the game makes itself completely redundant extremely quickly, and then you have no reason to run the science buildings. The progression of it also means you start and it's a serious pain to unlock any new buildings, but after you get your first 1000 science points you can unlock the science building that will generate more science than you ever need really quickly. So the pacing is utterly broken.
The UI has odd choices. Why do I have to go back and forth between different menus for building the tree planting shack, and then a separate menu that lets you set up which tree to plant where? And the "select which tree to plant" menu also plants "Bushes" which for some reason includes "dandelions", which are not at all a bush. Because of this, you cannot see the size of the area the planting shack can reach at the same time you can actually place tree planting plots.
The two "Blocks" you can build, the levee and dirt block, are in different menus than the path and stair building menu, so any nontrivial amount of bridge or scaffolding to get anywhere requires you to go back and forth between those two menus constantly. This sucks, because you need to do this kind of nontrivial building because your beavers cannot build anything that is more than two tiles from a connected path. Your beavers are also dumb enough to trap themselves.
You constantly have to build paths through resource zones, but as far as I can tell, there's no option to allow you to automatically build paths over a resource, so you constantly have to mark resources for destruction manually while expanding.
The "Districts" feature used to be way way worse, because it was required. You could only build within a certain range of each district. It was so terrible they dummied it out, and now districts just kind of exist as this barely useful appendage.
Waterwheels, to extract power from the main point of the game, function on water flow rate in a way that kind of disconnects from gravity potential energy, so half the point of really engineering a big damn or something is gone.
Water soaks into the ground so fast that artificial lakes are useless. I was hoping to build a big one to be able to weather a long, end game drought or badwater, but even a huge one would drain so fast you could maybe last an extra cycle before dying.
IIRC, there used to be a building to revitalize the land around it so you could plant, like a water sprayer, but I guess it was removed? I don't understand why. The maps were not updated, so there are large plains that were meant to be watered for crop growth but now you have to channel rivers through them instead.
Also, it takes absolutely forever to load for zero reason. There's a button to click to see the "wellness" of all your citizens, which freezes the entire game for 10 seconds and that also seems absurd.
Like it's still fun at what it is, and I've played hours lately, but it is bad in weird ways otherwise.
I've commented this many times, but I definitely want to see more isometric grid games like SC3k, RC2 or TTD.
They were less-realistic, yes, but is so pleasant how everything ties together and you can neatly fill out the whole map.
Meanwhile, while I like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, it is always incredibly awkward to build roads and paths to the point where I find it frustrating.
Looks great. For accuracy, when you build something, occasionally construction should stop half way through. You're then told that costs have doubled, and you'll need to pay again to complete the construction.
On Steam Deck, I am having a rough time with the road that the paperclip wants me to place. Holding down the physical A button (of the ABXY group) and wiggling around the left joystick (as well as every other control I can think of), both pressed and not pressed. Sometimes I'll see the green highlight appear, and I can stretch it out into a road path, but when I release A, it just vanishes.
whoa that game looks very cool— love it. also loved SC3k… the soundtrack was amazing. game was kinda lowkey hard, though. or maybe it was because i was just a kid haha.
The camera is very very close to isometric but as you've noticed, it's not an ortographic projection. During early access I decided against it but tbh I can't recall why. I'll go back to the drawing board on this one (or at least allow it to be enabled in settings)
This advice is sound only if you think of success as defined by SV-investor-echo-chamber standards.
Too many "tales of side-projects that grew into successful businesses" can narrow your understanding of what it actually means. I agree that it's OK to abandon a side project, but it is a much deeper reflection.
I'm guessing the decision is about making a online leaderboard?
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