I really like the graphics style.

Nice puzzle game ! I really like the idea, it could totally be a full game !

I just find the map a little too big, and that makes thinking carefully at the beginning of the game realy difficult.

Good game really enjoyed it!

I like the idea, but the over all feeling of the game was a bit clunky.

The graphics are really cool they kinda remind me of into the breach, overall it was a fun puzzle game!

Nice and chill puzzler, art style really reminds me of transport tycoon deluxe.

Graphics is really nice. Your idea uses theme really nicely and building a city is really engaging.

The music's super calming and the game's a really relaxing city designer. There's enough complexity to make a deep and engaging compo entry, but not enough to make the game confusing or frustrating. There's a lot of polish put into the feel of the menus and it creates a great atmosphere.

I'm pretty sure I just locked my game up at 657 florins, and I kinda wish the game would do a check for possible placement spots and let me know when I can't place anything else. I guess I could start the game over and try to fill up the entire available space, but that seems like it would largely involve just hoping/paying for the 1x1 roads to appear, since so many areas are locked off by narrow passageways.

I feel like the game is missing something more exciting to work towards than "fill up the map" or "gain all the money", but I can't think of any goals that would suit it.

All in all, I think this is a great title, and while I have some complaints they're minor and didn't stop me enjoying this game. Great work.

Is that a pixelization effect when you place a building? It's subtle but it really makes placing things feel good.

@valden I thought about making the map smaller, but when I reduced its size, I ran into a bug scrambling up the UI that would've taken ages to fix :-/

@amras0000 Nice beefy feedback :-) Yeah, a placement-lock-out-check would've been nice, so many things left unimplemented... The 'missing something' was supposed to be the subsidy/reward system, but they may not have been enough to spice it up.

@star-sought It's an effect similar to screen-shake, except I shake each sprite individually. I came up with this effect during LD#37 (at least, I think it was that one, I'd have to check), and used it in nearly every game since.

@kaboosh @runner-alien I took my inspiration from SimCity (Classic and 2000), so you're not far off! :-)

Very nice! You made a city builder as a puzzle game work really well. One little nitpick is that for me my city became more than 50% road. :laughing: I think it would be nice if you'd allow the roads in the pieces to overlap with existing roads on the map when you place them, if that makes sense.

Awesome game! Even though the use of the theme was very straightforward it was super engaging to figure out the best place to put the buildings so it ended up making the theme really stick. I love how you have options on what types of building blueprints you can pick instead of just placing them one by one, it made it a lot more challenging. The art was fantastic as well! Great job!

This is an interesting idea, it is extremely easy to run out of space if you don't plan out your every move from the start of the game but I like it this way because it adds that difficulty. Also I really love the graphics.

Awesome game mate!

Love the relaxing music and game mood. Found myself just passing time building my city in no time.

Very well done!

I little bit more polish on the UI and it would make a huge difference.
Also think that the map is a bit too big for a in-browser build.

Keep it :up:

Awesome game mate!

Love the relaxing music and game mood. Found myself just passing time building my city in no time.

Very well done!

I little bit more polish on the UI and it would make a huge difference.
Also think that the map is a bit too big for an in-browser build.

Keep it :up:

Whoa. A isometric city building puzzle is not what you see everyday.

Nice graphics and sounds, tricky gameplay that makes you stuck in no time if you going build wild without thinking.

Excellent job!

Nice game, I especially enjoyed the "retro" feeling through the graphics and the music, however sometimes I had difficulty to read the tiles and didn't know if I could construct something on a specific area or not (I played on the web version). I think it would be more "comfortable" if the map was closer or the tiles larger. But anyway, good job :)

A nice puzzler! The music is chill, and placing stuff has a bit of fun in its own.
I got to a place where I missed one spot and my city was not completely full! Cool idea.

The city itself look very road-heavy, a bit american I guess. Pixel buildings are nicely colored, but the background green and black dots was a bit too much for me, very busy :D.

Game mechanic wise, I started of a bit slow, figuring out the UI here and there. But once I got the hang of it, all went smoothly. The subsidies were a bit hit and miss, was stuck on one for a while.

The special buildings were a nice touch, I wanted to have more. :)

Ideas for tweaks:
- Make your texts pop a bit more by putting a one+one pixel offset shade under it
- An extra expensive / rare 'destroy tile' option
- Placement tiles that contain & should match water
- Make the roads a bit less crossroady by drawing only connecting road bits instead of a full X (and change it when people build)

Why can't I just stop playing this? =) This game has everything: isometric pixel art, chilling music, and most importantly, it has a *mechanic* that works like a charm. On my first run I got stuck with no roads to connect to, that thought me to think several steps ahead. =)

Sure, UI needs some polish, especially buttons with the text overlapping the images, but this is a very solid prototype. Great work!

Graphic style is like SimCity-Classic but in isometric perspective, i really love it :slight_smile:

You've already watched it, but maybe others find it entertaining to watch be me puzzle over the mechanics ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDyS27Iams

On my first attempt, I focused on building as many of the 3x3 and 3x2 pieces as I could, and I got a whopping 793 Fl. Then I realized I had build a row of houses which was preventing me from ever reaching part of the map, so I restarted. I aborted my next game early because I realized that the a portion of the map was cut off by mountains, making it impossible for me to fill all the non-water-nor-mountain spaces. On my last game, having learned some good strategies, I managed to cover every reachable square-- but then I realized there was one tile surrounded by water and mountains, so I couldn't fill this map either :(

I have a few comments about the rewards. I didn't really try to complete them, but they got completed anyway as a side-effect of trying to place every tile without skipping too many. As a consequence I often didn't notice that I got a reward until I looked at that corner of the UI much later, so I definitely think there should be some kind of notification telling you that a reward was obtained. The rewards could also be a lot more, err, rewarding? The farm was the worst reward: both times I unlocked it, I had covered so much of the map already that I had no spot to place it. The bridge sounds like it would be super useful, but both times I obtained it, I had built my city as if water and mountains were both forever impassable, so I didn't have a spot ready for it, and so I didn't find it that useful. Maybe I need to mimic the Tetris strategy of leaving a gap for the 4x1 to clear four lines at once, by putting roads towards a piece of water, hoping that I'll eventually be able to cross it?

Finally, a few comments about the production values. The tile graphics are really good... but the vanishing point road is really bad. The music is also good... but I eventually grew tired of it and turned off my speakers. I played a lot though, so this probably says more about the quality of the gameplay than the quality of the music :)

Cute little city builder-puzzler! And, of course, very theme appropriate ;)

It took me a few attempts to really figure out what was going on (and my first map had pretty bad water and mountain placement), but once I got the hang of it this is a neat concept! Reasonably robust complexity for Compo game, too, despite the features you planned which did not make it.

Nice sim-city inspired retro look. Graphics are generally readable though I occasionally missed that a tile was water until the cannot-place indicator when trying to place a piece.

Music is appropriately sedate, I like it.

Contrary to one of your earlier reviewers, I actually found the map just a little small; such is the nature of feedback I suppose ;) Or perhaps I really found it a little crowded with blockers on some of my maps? A way to pay to build a bridge over water could be nice.

Edit: Ohhh, I'm a dink, I apologize. Apparently you do have a bridge, I just never accessed it.

Things did end up very road heavy.

I see why you shared this with me, it is indeed very much from the opposite perspective of mine. Must eat all the land!

I like this, nice entry!

So, the 'fallout' of this iteration:

First, thank you all _so much_ for your wonderful feedback! :-) It seems I got a decent amount of large, detailed, mixed positive/negative ones (again) this time! Just like I try to leave for others, so it must be working? ;-D

While this game is 'outclassed' (if you put much value in the numerical results anyway) in almost every aspect by my previous success, this _does_ mark the first time I've ever 'broken the 100' (and +4 score) specifically within the Graphics category. But even without that, I'm pleased with the outcome.

On a more personal level, I'm very happy to report that this is the first game that my mom thought was fun to play for her personally, instead of just the (also welcome) general favorable feelings/appreciation towards my creativity/art I usually get when she tries my latest.

On more or less the same note, while the game didn't get attention from gamejamcurator this time around (you can't win 'em all...), the game _did_ get picked up by the itch.io .. err picks _somehow_, which I think is a huge honour as well! :-D I'm not sure how to tell them that/thank them where they see it, but I'll try to figure something out.

Lastly, I had the privilege to see a video of my game played by a (very tired) Phil (see above), which was in equal parts gratifying, frustrating (because apparently I didn't explain the subsidy/reward-system well enough and he kept just missing it...), and awesome :-)