About this game

Welcome to ¶City, the Text-Based City-Building Simulation RPG.

If at any time during play you feel lost or confused, just shout "HELP" and somebody is certain to respond. You can also try clicking on bold text if you aren't sure what it's referring to. Usually, it will provide you with some elaboration.

¶City is played in your modern internet browser supporting ES6 JavaScript syntax. It was tested using Chrome; I recommend using Chrome to play ¶City unless you're sure of your browser's full support of ES6 functionality.

The game hasn't got music or sounds of its own, but I recommend putting on a playlist in the background such as this one while you build and explore...

Click here to play ¶City

Background

I was considering ways to interpret the theme and, as soon as I hit on the idea of a text-based RPG/city-building sim hybrid, I knew I had something with potential. I've been writing text RPG games for as long as I've been writing code at all; I even made one for LD16! But I've come a long way as a game developer since then, and I think I've done a lot better this time.

¶City is pronounced as Pilcrow City, Paragraph City or, if you're not feeling up to all those syllables, P-City. The game mechanics are inspired primarily by Simcity 3 and 4, both of which I spent silly amounts of time playing when I was a kid. Meanwhile the fantasy environment and narrative tone take a lot from the Discworld series, which I happen to be reading through recently...

Game mechanics

With all the time I saved by not making graphics, I was able to add a lot of content to ¶City — more than 8,000 words of text worth.

There are roughly thirty different types of buildings in the game, and all of them will have different effects on your city. Many of them also help you to develop and navigate the city in unique ways. (For example, at the Senate and at Courthouses you can speak with an NPC to learn about the city's population, housing, and employment statistics, and you can also approve construction offers at a bulletin board.) A lot of information about different kinds of buildings can be gleaned by reading in-game help topics, but the only way to really understand the effects a building has on your city is to go ahead and have it built! ¶City is meant to be a game of exploration, in which by experimentation you can gradually gain a better understanding of your city and and how its different pieces interact.

Being a game partly about exploration of its mechanics, ¶City can be a bit opaque sometimes. If you're having trouble, you can read the tutorial here. But don't resort to the tutorial for help unless you're really lost; much of the fun of playing ¶City is discovering its mechanics and interactions on your own!

Note that your game progress is saved to your browser's local storage. This means that if you close the tab and come back to the game later, you'll be able to pick up from where you left off.

Miscellaneous data

• Time spent actively developing ¶City: About 30 hours
• Tools used: Chrome and Sublime Text 3
• Code written: 6,080 lines
• Amount of unique in-game text: 8,622 words
• Most-used non-stopwords: people (35), city (33), residents (33), food (28), and place (27)
• Number of distinct colors: 90 hexcodes
• Most frustrating moment: Adding interiors to player-constructed buildings
• Most satisfying moment: Adding Her Royal Highness as an NPC
• Tea/coffee consumed: Two cups of decaf Earl Gray

Post-deadline changes

• 2018-04-23 15:40 UTC: Fixed an issue that was preventing a very important piece of help text from appearing when the player enters "wait".
• 2018-04-23 18:20 UTC: Fixed an issue that could sometimes occur when talking to a barkeep.
• 2018-04-26 17:50 UTC: Fixed an issue involving Galleries erroneously believing that they were Smithys.
• 2018-04-27 18:50 UTC: Fixed an issue where certain building types were impossible not to overtax.
• 2018-04-27 19:00 UTC: Fixed an issue with the conditions under which a building's "marked for demolition" text was displayed.