Slim City

For a number of years I've had the idea of creating an incremental game which involves slowly creating a city map by adding different map elements over time. This week I decided to try and put that idea into action. The result is Slim City, an idle game which requires you to click on building footprints on an interactive map to build and create a map of a city neighborhood.

In Slim City the more buildings you own then the more of the city map is completed. Each day you earn rent from all the buildings that you own. So, if you run out of money, you just need to wait until the city clock reaches midnight.

And that's it really. To be honest - as it stands Slim City isn't much of a game. I could improve the game by adding more city management features but I am actually going to stop developing this game for now and maybe later start from scratch on version two of Slim City. 

There are a couple of reasons for starting a new version of the game. The first is that at the moment the game has to make lots of calls to the Overpass API to fetch the map data. This really isn't a good idea. My idea now is to instead download all the OpenStreetMap data for a small 200 meter x 200 meter area. I can then re-purpose that data in any way that I require to enable players to slowly add features to a city neighborhood map during a game - without having to make lots of calls to the Overpass API.

The second reason that I'm going to start from scratch on SlimCity 2.0 is that I now have a better idea for some fun city management elements that can be added to the game. I think that these ideas will work better if I start over from the beginning and bake in these features from the very start of development.