Matthew Conto

does things with low-fi vr headsets and talks about one day actually making a city building game

[futureinterface]

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

[drfuzzyness]

Urbaniniminoes by Matthew Conto

A democratic city building game

[juliamccartney]

what is this game even

[drfuzzyness]

What's Next for Urbaninimoes

What’s Next for Urbaninimoes

Add more reasons for Real Estate developers to hate you Protected land Beaches Local/State parks Add more environmental effects Factories have much more negative effects on nearby residents as well as overall environment Visual effects from cars, pollution Add detail to land Improve ‘feedback’ system from local special interest groups Notifications about what they liked, didn’t like Punishment…

View On WordPress

[drfuzzyness]

[drfuzzyness]

Working on that one city building game

[oldgamemags]

Wow, an advert for @StupidFunWill’s very original Sim City! It’s certainly come a long way.

Follow oldgamemags on Tumblr for more awesome scans from yesteryear!

[vgjunk]

Sim City 2000 advert.

[vgjunk]

Ad for Sim City 2000. For non-British readers, Milton Keynes is an English town that was planned and built around a grid system, unlike most towns and cities in the UK. Milton Keynes is also known for being extremely boring.

[killscreen]

[by Frontier Nerds, via Retronator]

[vgprintads]

“Maxis Games - ‘It’s a SimWorld. Get lost in it.’” SimCity 2000; SimIsle; SimTower

Computer Gaming World, February 1996 (#139)

Uploaded by CGW Museum

[procedural-generation]

Simcity 2000 (1994)

Reticulating Splines

SimCity is a game about arranging things in space. The relationship between the city and the terrain it is built on is near the core of the moment-to-moment interactions you have with the game. While you can bulldoze everything flat for the perfectly optimal city block pattern, you miss a lot of the interesting challenges that can give a city character.

As such, the map generator has a lot of influence over your experience with the game. Using three basic components (elevation, water, and trees) it is capable of composing a wide variety of landscapes with very different challenges for city-building. All of the maps are viable for building cities, partially due to SimCity’s legendary toybox flexibility, but the generator is capable of pushing some extremes for more interesting flavors: cities on island chains, cities in mountains, cities in river basins, cities in forests, cities in canyons.

Because of how SimCity interacts with the map, every output from the generator has some relevance when playing the game, even if its just as an inconvenient hill. That’s what makes the map generation really work, despite its relative simplicity.

[tksmantis-deactivated20210525]

[procedural-generation]

SimCity 2000 - Newspapers

Simcity 2000 doesn’t just have terrain generation. Every city has between one and six newspapers that are updated every month with new stories about the city.

The articles are clearly generated from templates, with liberal word substitutions. The templates frequently correspond to the current state of your city, with a few international news items thrown in. The absurdity of the word swaps and the tone of the templates fit in well with the rest of Maxis’s trademark humor. 

Later SimCity games would use news tickers, but I miss the extra bit of narrative connection you get with your citizens when you read an interview with them, even one constructed out of absurd templates. The news tickers tended to have clever headlines, but become exhausted fairly quickly, whereas the newspapers had predictable, even serious headlines and funny madlib text, which is I think what gives them more staying power.

Fred Haslam, Debra Larson, and Chris Weiss are credited with writing the content for the newspapers.

[welcometobusinesstown]

I expect a lot of layout criticism on this one. /

[turnislefthome]

Playing around with some low-AA rendering.

[drfuzzyness]

https://vimeo.com/drfn/cityclicker