I will be away on a work related trip for a couple of weeks, but thought I would post some progress this weekend.
Commercial zones now (finally!) have a chance to develop as retail and service business (e.g. restaurants) and the city parks are a lot more built out; office buildings have been improved and expanded on too.
The logic for how buildings develop - and how abandoned zones work - is also better.
The graphics are all still full procedurally generated at runtime, including for things like parks, with some types of structure having more variation than others.
The colors and textures (or lack thereof) are still intended to be "placeholders" for more detailed versions, so I haven't added a lot of detail or gone deep with variation, but I haven't been able to help but tinker with them to make them feel serviceable and recognizable.
I have felt like having some visual representation of building styles for retail / services (shops and restaurants) is a milestone, as it allows for a more complete game loop - even without public services / utilities.
Those can be layered on top, but having housing industry, commerce and retail starts to feel like a decent set for building out the supply / demand loop; that having offices alone doesn't quite cut visually.
Currently, all the buildings are still one tile per structure but support for multi-tiled buildings - including houses with attached gardens, large industrial and commercial buildings and public service buildings - is in progress (about half way, with things like power plants being the first example).
For now I've tried to keep things from looking too out of scale, at least if you don't think too hard about it.
SimCity 2000 got away with being a bit loose with scale in a way that was not overly distracting, but still I don't want any elements to seem jarringly out of scale.
That can be tricky when try clearly convey what something is intended to represent through, especially with simple or abstract graphics and when trying to keep representations at a similar level of detail/complexity.
(Some games clearly throw the towel in and rely on really outsized sprites in some cases, which I've never liked.)
Speaking of SC2K....
I view the the city building mechanics as "table stakes" for the more unique gameplay I want to layer on top.
This includes gameplay loops that are well understood from games like SimCity / Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD / etc. and am not intending to go as deep as those games in most instances (but perhaps in some areas...).
As the loops are well known I'm not doing Greyboxing or High-Fidelity Prototyping; we know what works there - it's more Iterative Prototyping.
I find I'm getting a bit attached to my cities now and sad when I overwrite the save to test something out (and instead finding a little corner of the map to experiment in).
This feels like it's a good sign, that even though I've spend a lot of hours making it, I still get joy out of fiddling with it and making new cities, even without gameplay mechanics or sounds or even much in the way of animations.
May do a proper multi-city save system next, with local saving as well as cloud saves.
Iain Collins