Game Of City Life by Bitspace

[raw]
made by Bitspace for LD24 (JAM)
Game Of City Life is a new take on the old Game of Life - this time evolving a city by very simple rules applied on a city made of blocks (think New York or Washington) while managing what is built on these cities.

The game is open-ended, although "get as much population as possible" pretty much makes a good goal.

For info on who made it how, see the README (also directly shown on Github). For instructions on how to play, see ingame help. Playing requires a mouse.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE 2012-08-29, by popular demand/criticism:
Here's a longer and probably complete explanation of what's going on. This has been added AFTER the deadline, so if you want to be as confused as the first testers were, please stop reading at this line!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CONTROLS
Everything is mouse-only. LMB+Drag moves the map, RMB+left/right-drag rotates, LMB+RMB+Up/down-drag zooms. For convenience, arrow keys scroll as well.

BLOCKS
To select a block, click it. The right menu changes from the Main Menu to the Block Menu. At the top, there's a representation of what's currently on this block. Click a building icon to see its stats below. If you need the space, you can order it torn down there (returning 60% of the cost). Click an empty building slot to open the build menu.

BUILDING
Buildings are grouped by their main attributes into 5 categories: Education, Luxury, Housing, Industrial and "special". There is one special building for each category. These can only be built when the block is completely empty, the block is suited for it (shown by colored floor) and they have really high requirements.

ECONOMY
On "Next round" (or 10 times a second on Autoplay), every block is affected by those in a range around it and it's new state is computed. Housing (obviously) provides living space for the population. Industry generates money, but also Pollution. Pollution makes people want to move away. The same goes for overpopulation (i.e. after demolishing an appartment tower). Luxury does the opposite, it attracts people. As a bonus, the Park also decreases Pollution. Educational facilities add to the global Education Level of the city. The Education Level determines which advanced buildings can be constructed - most builings require it, and all Special buildings require very high education levels in addition to their price.

ACRONYMS
We really like them! They look oldschool!
PPL: Population
RND: Round counter (the ingame date)
MON: Money
EDU: Education
IND: industry (generates money)
SPA: Living Space (how many people fit in that area)
POL: Pollution (the bad side effect of industry)
LUX: Luxury (keeps people happy)
RNG: Range (how many blocks affects this)
LPB: how much effect is lost per unit distance

Ratings

Coolness 66% 3
Overall(Jam) 3.20 105
Audio(Jam) 2.75 128
Fun(Jam) 3.00 107
Graphics(Jam) 3.29 118
Humor(Jam) 1.88 174
Innovation(Jam) 3.20 72
Mood(Jam) 2.96 99
Theme(Jam) 2.64 152

Feedback

small trouble
28. Aug 2012 · 13:16 UTC
The game was unclear even after reading the instructions, but from what I've played it seems like a good idea and could be expanded into a good game.
Cell
28. Aug 2012 · 13:18 UTC
i agree with Small trouble, cool concept.
Zoomyzoom
28. Aug 2012 · 13:53 UTC
Im confused! lots of potential though!
kevincorrigan
28. Aug 2012 · 14:47 UTC
I could not get this to work, I just kept getting an unhandled exception message
LemonTree
28. Aug 2012 · 15:00 UTC
Good idea but very poor implementation!
🎤 Bitspace
28. Aug 2012 · 17:51 UTC
@kevincorrigan: the only unhandled exception I know of is if there are eiter some resources missing (ie. something not extracted from archive) OR if you have no OpenAL (but in that case, the message would say exactly that). Maybe it was one of those?
fhoenig
29. Aug 2012 · 05:29 UTC
Do you think this would easily be portable to compile on OSX? I wanna try it out. We did a city theme too.
mes
29. Aug 2012 · 06:02 UTC
Looks like it has lots of potential, but there is more explanation / clarity needed around what to do / what results to get. Maybe explain the mechanic more on the first load-in ?

Good work overall, I suggest spending more time with this.
RARoadkill
29. Aug 2012 · 06:09 UTC
Very cool idea. took me awhile but I think I got most of it figured out. Would love to see this keep being worked on. Think it has a lot of potential
SethR
29. Aug 2012 · 11:39 UTC
Needs a bit more polish but kudos for digging into an ambitious idea like this
goerp
29. Aug 2012 · 11:44 UTC
It worked well, and played good. It looks a lot like SimCity though (but build in 48 hours, so impressive nonetheless).
🎤 Bitspace
29. Aug 2012 · 14:07 UTC
The IRC-channel told me that was okay to do at this point, so... I have added a long description of how to play. I hope that clears things up.

Thanks for all the kind words :) Looks like we have little choice then... ;-)

We have been asked for a Linux version on another forum, so Bergmann is currently working on porting this thing over from Delphi to Lazarus. And now, he has a power outage in the middle of the day. So yeah, that's going to take some time, but we're working on it and if things pan out, we should be able to cross-compile to pretty much everything that has ogg/vorbis, OpenGL and OpenAL.

@goerp: I used to play SC4 hours on end, I guess that just *has* to show on a game like that (and some of that is even intentional) ;-)

//Martok
triliyn
30. Aug 2012 · 00:27 UTC
This sounds interesting, but I couldn't run it. When I double clicked the executable I got something like "Error: No OpenAL found" and a game window opened, but presented an error: "Zugriffsverletzung bei Adresse 0049601F in Modul 'CityLife.exe'. Lesen von Adresse 00000008."
Trying to close this error just pops it up again, so I had to kill it with Task Manager.
🎤 Bitspace
30. Aug 2012 · 11:32 UTC
Uploaded a version that properly terminates if no OpenAL is found. Literally a two-line-change. //Martok
Cipher
01. Sep 2012 · 09:27 UTC
This was nice, i got kinda addicted after a while just building things and gaining money :)
DaveDobson
02. Sep 2012 · 17:18 UTC
I was a little disturbed to see an 8/30 creation date for the game executable, but I guess that's the OpenAL bug fix? I'm not sure that's kosher with the competition (i.e. there are bugs in mine that I'd like to fix too but didn't). The game is a really cool idea though a little bit hard to figure out, since the impacts of the buildings aren't all obvious, and the effects of distance between them weren't clear to me. It may well be I didn't read deeply enough - the tips on the buildings referenced statistics I didn't really understand and didn't know the value of. I did really like how the screen looked, and how your buildings grew with more use. The interface worked well after I got used to it - I just didn't totally understand what I was doing or what would be valuable to accomplish. But a neat idea and well-executed. Nice work.
Kayelgee
02. Sep 2012 · 19:10 UTC
good concept
juaxix
02. Sep 2012 · 19:42 UTC
I would like to know how to build the star buildings, i like the autoplay button , this game has a truly potential m8.
Check out my city!
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/89/gameofcitylifel.jpg/
I think there is a little bug with the height computation, sometimes the same building grows and then decrease in an infinite loop, other times the height is limitless XD
simple game? I dont think show but i see myself playing and enjoying this game ,thanks for your time
Jedi
02. Sep 2012 · 22:35 UTC
Wow, a simcity simulator for a Jam game; what an achievement!
Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much challenge at all. Maybe I just got lucky.
🎤 Bitspace
03. Sep 2012 · 12:24 UTC
@DaveDobson: the way I understand it, bugfixing is allowed to fix "application-breaking" bugs, ie. if it doesn't start at all, but nothing gameplay-related (of course). IMHO fixing what triliyn described falls into the first category... You can check up on us on the Github repo, here's the diff: https://github.com/martok/ld-24/compare/GOCL1...GOCL1_1

@Everyone else: Porting to other platforms turned out to be more of a challenge because of the libraries we used. At least one of them is not cross-platform at all, so I think there won't be any ports. We could do Win32+Win64, that works, but it's kinda pointless.
What I've been told is that it *does* work using wine on Linux.

As for it being kind of easy... let's just say "Balancing" never got crossed off on the to-do list ;-)
demonpants
05. Sep 2012 · 06:08 UTC
Looks very pretty. Is there a Mac version in the works?
mohammad
06. Sep 2012 · 02:09 UTC
F***
Cant even read the readme.
Can you include the OpenAL?
🎤 Bitspace
06. Sep 2012 · 14:50 UTC
@mohammad: here you can download the latest OpenAL-Files: http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx
Spunkmeyer
06. Sep 2012 · 20:09 UTC
crashes on win7 64 bit
Pierrec
08. Sep 2012 · 14:28 UTC
It seems great but too much complicated to me...you should make a post compo version with a playable tutorial
JonathanG
09. Sep 2012 · 14:09 UTC
I enjoyed this and played it for a few hours! I didn't quite understand all of the interactions, but it's fun to experiment and try things out. I really like the wireframe graphics and ambient music!
hgcummings
11. Sep 2012 · 18:13 UTC
I definitely like the idea (kind of a stripped-down SimCity) and thought it was well executed. It's a really impressive game for 72 hours. The controls were sometimes a bit clunky (a lot of clicks to add a single building) but my main problem was that nothing 'bad' seemed to happen: I could just go on autoplay and build a load of stuff, with the interactions of pollution and luxury not really presenting me any problems. I think with a bit more challenge and a bit more feedback to the player this would be a really fun game though.
kibertoad
16. Sep 2012 · 18:02 UTC
Nice idea, wish it got more polish :(.