A Towering Economy
Submitted for GMTK 2024: Built to Scale
This is a little retro-styled city simulator where you build up towers while building up an economy! Click on 'Levy Taxes' to tax the population, once you have enough funds click 'Build Towers' to grow the city. Be careful not to tax too much at once, otherwise the public will seize all the funds you have for the next step!
Controls:
- Mouse: Interact with UI
- WASD/Arrow Keys: shift camera
- Hold Shift + W/D/Up/Down: adjust camera vertical angle
This is mostly meant to be a game to vibe out to and idle-click. Give your city a fun name--the name also acts as a seed for the procedural generation so try different names out for different build patterns! Share some screenshots in the comments below as you scale your city up--the game should continue endlessly and keep growing (there is no end to the game).
The 3D is pretty much entirely done in a single screen-space fragment shader (there are no meshes other than a full-screen quad), but in order to maintain performance I had to lower the quality pretty significantly. I might update this with better tuned parameters.
If you get a lot of lag in browser try downloading instead. This prototype is very unoptimized, so it may run poorly on a lot of machines though.
Download
Install instructions
Windows: may get blocked by smart screen/defender
Macos: you need to open in finder, right click the app file, and then open from there
Linux: you may need to chmod the x86_64 file as executable
Development log
- GMTK Jam 2024 Submission (v0.1.0)88 days ago
Comments
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Not much to say about this. It's an interesting concept and it would be pretty cool to see where it could go given more development time. But as-is it's a pretty basic game that ultimately results in clicking 1 different buttons.
I wanted to see how big the city would get and it did get fairly large after awhile but I got bored pretty quickly and then just mashed the button to see what would happen. Totally expected to be killed by the people or something but it just tells you there's a riot and reset your funding bar haha.
Maybe we'll see more in the future and if so I'll return with a more indepth review then :)
Thanks for checking it out! Appreciate the feedback even though my game is super small this time around :)
This is indeed an clicker game. But for what it is it it does its job well. This is tough to review since it's so small but i'll try.
Creativity:
Does the game fit the theme? Yes it does, scaling your city fits the theme. I did like the fact that you grow your city by increasing taxes and making people mad. I grew to about 36kk GDP. I feel like the city itself could've been more... interesting.
Art:
The UI looks good, i have no problems with it at all. The graphics i understand are the way they are because of performance, but i feel like there could've been something more than different colored towers, since it's actually hard to see the city change at all since it looks mostly the same.
Sound design:
None :p
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Overall this is a clicker game, it could use a little work, but if you want to grow a city while waiting or something this could work :)
Thanks so much for the review! Yeah, I'd love to throw in more visible variation (the current variation is super minor and isn't really visible at larger distances). Also would love to make it more lively