Power City by TheWGBbroz
Power city is my game for Ludum Dare 39. The theme is Running out of Power, that's why your citizens require quite alot of power.
Game mechanics
The goal is to get as many citizens in your city as you can. To get people to live in houses or hotels, they require a way to get there (With a road) and they need to have power. All tiles except for roads can transfer power.
To get power, you need to place a power station or solar panels. To get them to emit power, people that work there need to be able to get there via a road.
For every factory you place 10 more people will stay in each hotel you have.
Controls
Left mouse click - Select/place a tile
Right mouse click - Destroy a tile
M - Gives you 1B dollar (CHEAT)
Downloads
If you have set up Java correctly: https://www.dropbox.com/s/72druqhef6za8z0/LD39.zip?dl=0
If you haven't set up Java correctly (Includes Java, Windows only): https://www.dropbox.com/s/xklm5gj9cuguw9s/LD39%20Game%20%2B%20Java%20%28Windows%29.zip?dl=0
Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/69tkn3qh5t1zhk0/LD39%20source.rar?dl=0
To run the game, open "Run game.bat" if you're on Windows or "Run game.sh" if you're on Linux. I haven't tested the game on Mac or Linux. If someone could do this and tell me if it works or not that would be great!
If you can't get the .bat or .sh files to work, you can try double clicking "Game.jar".
Time lapse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLyp_IQ8xAc
Screenshots
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/power-city |
Ratings
| Overall | 250th | 3.44⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 442th | 2.92⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 264th | 3.24⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 301th | 3.56⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 578th | 2.4⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 418th | 2.48⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 372th | 2.15⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 417th | 2.762⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 35🗳️ | 3🗨️ |
I will add that I wasn't too sure how money was generated, I assume from the factories but it seemed like money poured in even when I didn't have factories. And I wasn't too sure how to use solar panels.
I think that some music would improve it, and maybe add more space.
This is my world, and as you can see, I run out of space quicker than I run out of power!
Also, more factories don't seem to make more money. Is that a bug?
And the money you get is depending on the mood of your citizens. If you have no citizens, you get no money. If you have angry citizens, you also get no money. If you have neutral citizens, you get a little money, if they are OK a little bit more, etc.
Excellent work.
I feel like the buildings could have benefited from a popup tooltip to help explain each of the buildings but it was kind of fun to discover them myself.
A bit more polishing and this could be a great game.
Fun little game, I like building things. I couldn't figure out how to get Solar Panels to do anything useful though, and my money didn't seem to increase much faster between when I had a hundred people or a thousand people, despite them being happy the whole time, not sure exactly how that is supposed to work.
Graphics are simple, but consistent, which is good =).
The theme of this game seems to more be running into power than out of it though, since there was little risk of actually running out of power.
Other than that great job.
It was fun to play but as Jimbly said, having 5,000+ people didn't seem to earn me money any faster. It felt like I was still waiting 20+ seconds between building each hotel, and constantly broke.
I even tried building more factories but idk the hotels already had 300+ people in them?
I gave up after 20 minutes of play time. It would be a lot of fun with music, slightly better graphics (Can't tell what I'm about to put down on which tile) and some subtle indication of whether I'm playing right or not.
I'm not sure if I actually needed the roads to connect rather than there simply being a road. But either way, well done!
Could squeeze out more population with hotels, factories and less happy people, but I like my utopia the way it is.
The simulation is too simple to be interesting really. There should be some forces working against you to make building the city less cookie cutter. Some ideas:
* Global events (climate, recession, war, new technologies, etc.) affecting population and happiness
* Local effects (weather, powerty, riots, new building designs, etc.) affecting infrastructure condition and happiness
Thematically these seem like big complicated things, but they can be simulated in very simple ways (weighted die rolls with a bit of data tracking to make sure that successive events make some sense at least).
It's a fine start for a city builder simulation. Not complicated enough yet.