It waxed about how it was instant translation and works with dynamic content.

I said I didn't believe it was instant and asked how many milliseconds it really takes and how it handles dynamic content (e.g. elements frequently updated with React/Angular/Vue/etc).

It admitted it's not really instant and takes several seconds and that you can define CSS style selectors to tell it what to look for.

There is no way the UX could be good for a product designed to work this way. :/

I went to the website to see how bad it was and it has a headline that claims it's so good "no one will suspect AI" which seems to be casting shade on their own product.

Of course there was no open public facing developer documentation so I engaged with the chatbot to ask about what code for implementation actually looked like and it said it's a <script> tag.

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.

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.

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.)

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.