Check out the changing seasons!







More info on our blog! http://www.somasim.com/blog/

[City of Gangsters]

Hey all, it's been a while since I posted about gamedev here - but here's a new project we're working on!

City of Gangsters is a mafia management tycoon.
Start from nothing and grow to be the boss of the whole city, during the Prohibition in the 1920s.
If you ever wanted to run illegal manufacturing and supply chains, that's what it's all about





I'll keep updating as we get further and further into development! Here and also on our blog: http://www.somasim.com/blog/

Oh man, this reminds me of Jones in the Fast Lane so much! That's awesome. 

One bit of a comment: the UI feels very abstract and dry right now. If you remember from Jones, it was very visually rich - every place you went had custom visuals for the dialog (looked like a fast food menu, or like a library, or like a department store, etc) and that made a huge difference in getting into the fantasy of being a person going from place to place. Your UI seems to have the core loop mechanics down right, but it lacks the fantasy. Do you suppose it's something that could be brought into it?

Love the concept by the way, I've been hoping for someone to do a Jones reboot for a long time. Good luck to you!

This looks amazing!

I'll be following your development for sure  

A fancy apartment building

It is lunchtime

Artificial people living their artificial lives in Project Highrise

New highrise under construction...

Hey, I remember Smooth Operators! That was a fun (and funny) game. 

I'd be curious to hear how you're changing the gameplay in the new one?

Working on campaign mode. This is scenario #2: the Flatiron Building.

It's a very narrow lot, and the only place to go is up.

Here's what it looks like after a few hours of playing:

Two screenshots this time!

1. A very narrow "Flatiron Building" scenario, where the only way to go is up.
Also there's a fancy building information UI in the lower right!



2. Flatiron building a few hours later - looks like a very busy place

Working on scenarios for a campaign mode... Starting with the Merchandise Mart in Chicago!

A few new screenies showing UI to illustrate what's going on under the hood:

1. Your standard skyscraper:



2. Examining interior power lines, phone lines, water and gas hookups:



3. Heatmap showing tenants who are comfortably profitable (green) or trending towards insolvency (red):

Hey, thanks! I hope we can live up to the expectations

I know what you mean about room types. I think it's easier once you start playing the game, because there are color themes for particular types of rooms - warm beiges for offices, cool grays for retail, oranges for residential units, greens for restaurants, etc. - but it's not really obvious from these few screenshots. And for sure, we'll need to do some color grading work once we have all the assets in place.

Speaking of which, I should make some animated gifs! That's a good idea, things always look better in motion. Thanks!

And to answer your question, it's all Unity - but using my own spritesheet animation code, so that we could squeeze out more perf than unity's built-in sprite system. So far, on a desktop computer, I can build a tower with 500 rooms and 500 NPCs without breaking a sweat. We'll see about laptops and mobile, though

PS. Looking forward to Parkitect! I've been following the news about that game for a while now.

Can I get a hand for this awesome fountain? 

Tax day is still two months away, but I'm setting up an accounting office already

Wow, I remember seeing this at Indie City Games. Seems like it has come a long way!

Hey, thanks! :D  By the way we'll be there this Saturday, too, playtesting the new tutorial after the meeting!

Good points about object pooling and similar reuse techniques, they can make a *huge* difference in avoiding spurious allocations!

One question, though: are you quite sure Vector3.Equals causes heap allocations? This is the decompiled source for it (via ILSpy):

Code:

// UnityEngine.Vector3
public override bool Equals(object other)
{
if (!(other is Vector3))
{
return false;
}
Vector3 vector = (Vector3)other;
return this.x.Equals(vector.x) && this.y.Equals(vector.y) && this.z.Equals(vector.z);
}

I'm not sure where allocations could be coming from, especially since Vector3 is a value type... Maybe in your use case you were accidentally boxing things by casting up to Object first, before calling Equals?

This looks really cool! I have recently thinking about what sort of art style I can use for my startup simulation game to set it apart from every other sim game, and a side view of the building and characters was on my list of potentials. Then I came across this thread and definitely like the vibe (though I'll be going for more of a cartoony/hand-drawn look)

Hey, thanks! I have to say, having a side view makes it much easier to see what's going on in a simulation like that. We did some mock-ups of isometric 3d-like views, but that doesn't work well for a skyscraper: we ran into player friction trying to switch between floors, not being able to see everything at a single glance, etc... So the single 2d view was a clear winner. Plus, it looks like an architectural drawing come alive, which is a bonus

By the way, startup simulation sounds pretty awesome! On a related note, are you aware of startupcompanygame.com? It's something I just learned about this weekend, sounds like it's in a very similar space!

Check out the lobby in this building! Such sculptures! All those planters! They say money can't buy happiness - but it can certainly buy a lot of art. And art, by proxy, can buy prestige. And that's close enough to happiness, no?

(Yes, we've been doing a lot of work on the prestige and happiness systems lately.  )