Developing Microlandia, a Socioeconomic City Builder Based on Real-World Data
Cristián González from Information Superhighway Games talked to us about creating a socioeconomic city builder Microlandia, discussing the idea behind the game, going with a voxel style, and using real-world data to power the detailed simulation.
Introduction
We are a team of two, Karen is the artist and creative genius, and I’m the mad scientist. We’re based in Berlin, and we have worked together on other games (most notably Basket Crows, made on a train ride from Chicago to San Francisco with no internet), but Microlandia is by far the most ambitious project and deepest rabbit hole we’ve gone into.
Idea & Inspiration for Microlandia
Some three or four years ago (my memory is fuzzy), I started to write the game that eventually became Microlandia. It was born out of a single curiosity: Is it possible to experiment with different economic policies on a simulated society? I wanted to see if, for example, there’s a house affordability crisis, which levers the city should pull that would solve the problem. Better pensions? Universal basic income? Reduce property tax?
Everybody seems to agree that this is a real problem, but there’s so little consensus that, I think, a game would be a cool way to experience and experiment on solving the problem, and it’s also a super exciting thing for me to reclaim the subject from people in academia, to gamers. Maybe a savvy gamer can figure out something that the intellectual elite hasn't (I’m pretty convinced about this idea).
But city builders in the market are far too imprecise to experience this idea in meaningful ways, because the simulations aren’t grounded in reality. It’s disappointing, for example, to build a mine on an island with no transport connectivity and see how people arrive at work magically. Did they swim there?
My guess is that they are too focused on achieving photorealism instead of socioeconomic realism. Perhaps they want all the horsepower to make cities look like real life, and a microscopic simulation takes resources from that, so they choose to aggregate numbers and do statistical approximations that ‚kinda‘ work.
Or perhaps it is the influence of player psychology trends that propose gameplay decisions should be optimized for dopamine loops (like Pity Timers), which is not necessarily a bad thing; they want to make a fun game after all. But the tradeoff in this case is that we risk creating the wrong mental model of how cities work in players.
Core Experience & Audience of the Game
The game has simple mechanics. It is grid-based, not an elevation classic city-builder experience. Like SimCity classic. It’s totally playable by doing the basic things that make sense, like zoning, building a road network, placing police strategically, etc. The depth comes when you inspect the systems, like looking at the financial results of a company, the effects of changing taxes, the stories that emerge in the newspaper, and the myriad of data that can be looked at about your city.
The fun part (at least for me) is trying to build viable cities with radical ideas, like full corporate taxes and no personal income taxes, a no-car city, or a full-on libertarian city with minimal taxes and public works.
Because it started as a socioeconomic-focused city builder, the transport is buses, and there’s no water or energy systems, but I’ve decided to change that, and I’m currently working on adding those systems.
Choosing the Voxel Style
The original look I wrote for the game was hideous. I am a Dwarf Fortress nerd, so I went for a symbolic type of look that was 2D and composed of symbols and colors; it looked like Minesweeper, or the game of life.
Then Karen joined the project and started building the voxel look, which is still simple enough to leave room for imagination and interpretation, but still very beautiful to look at. The fact that the game is grid-based gives us a lot of advantage on the simulation side, as we can do a lot of discrete math functions with real-world research. If you think about it, altitude, curves, and physical realism are beautiful, but it becomes a problem for the simulation without adding fidelity. So I think the geniality of Karen’s voxel art style is embracing that „squareness“ in a way that celebrates it, allowing players to build beautiful, cozy cities.
Microlandia’s Main Mechanics
On one side, there’s the build mode. That’s where you add roads, commercial buildings like offices and stores, residential buildings of different density and luxury levels, and public works: schools, hospitals, police stations. We’re making it so there’s always more than one choice of building something, like, you can build a super big hospital or a bunch of smaller ones. Every building has special properties that are tradeoffs, as you only have limited resources, and you must have revenue to build more.
The second dimension is maps and stats; there are heatmaps for crime, transportation, and property value, and you can see many types of reports. This is what you use to think about what you will need to build next, or perhaps, demolish a bad decision.
Building a Detailed Simulation & Using Real-World Data
There is a lot of cool tech that we’re leveraging. Modern JavaScript engine, SQLite, and the fact that CPUs with a lot of cores are a lot more common nowadays.Right now, the simulation data is gathered from studies around New York City because it’s the city that has the most comprehensive public data. In the future, players will be able to plug in simulation files that are custom or from other countries/cities.
If there’s good data that we can use for a mechanic, we use the real-world stuff. If something is „arbitrary,“ it is because we didn’t find a good way to model it from the real world. One example is real estate demand; for that, we used a „points“ system that is not grounded in reality, but because all the other factors are, it still becomes a side effect of real-world functions.
Memorable & Challenging in Development
The most memorable, perhaps, has to be with bug reports:
- There was one time we had a leaky abstraction that made some senior citizens immortal. Then we had to submit a patch update that corrected this and caused a mass murder of seniors.
- When we introduced the `succession` algorithm, if a CEO died and there was no other succession, their children succeed CEO, but we didn’t check age, so there was 11-year old CEOs firing people around.
- There was a money glitch in the game, and burglars have an „opportunistic“ algorithm based on real crime research about how there are hotspots for crime. Because of the money glitch, all burglars were robbing the same place, effectively exploiting the money glitch, and suddenly, you had a lot of high-net-worth citizens who were criminals while at the same time, a lot of unemployment.
Why There Will Be No Sequel, DLCs, or In-Game Purchases for Microlandia
I love the idea of „A work of art is never finished, only abandoned“; it suits this project very well, because simulating reality is such an ambitious idea that I see myself working on it for many, many years. So the idea is that we already have a fun or interesting game (hopefully both), and that’s our product. We will keep expanding it and refining it until it makes sense to stop, but we’re nowhere near that point, and I don’t have a single clue what a „finished game“ event would be for this project.
Is Microlandia complete? Well, yes and no. Always and never. By liberating ourselves from that idea of a „complete game,“ we need to think about what to do next; And after that, what’s next, and so on...
If you think about it, Minecraft was like that. Also, Dwarf Fortress. Two of my favorite games.
In other words, would you like to buy a „complete“ city builder that’s super broken, and you have to buy a lot of DLC to get all the content? I don’t.
Reception & Feedback
My favorite thing about working in Microlandia is the community we’ve started. We have some really creative players in the community who have contributed ideas that are shaping the roadmap. I would say now that 50% of the roadmap is our direction, and the other 50% are ideas from Discord, Steam, or e-mails.
I’ve also heard from a teacher who wants to use the game in the classroom, and a very smart parent who found a way for their two kids to play the same city in some sort of ‚multiplayer’ mode by having two computers that sync the same database on a network.
Some players’ve spent a lot of time analyzing the math errors we have. For example, if market prices, relative to the city’s GDP, are off, they send very cool bug reports.
Future Plans
My most ambitious plan right now, which I would like to get finished by the end of the year, is modding. Modding will come in two dimensions:
1. Players will be able to upload their own buildings to steam workshop. We will support the MagicaVoxel format with some limitations. Other players will be able to add custom buildings found in the workshop.
2. Players will be able to create custom modes with different rules. For example: absolute communism, absolute libertarianism, with, of course, custom buildings as well.
For us to get started on that, we need to finish the core game experience first, as the systems are changing too much right now to have a stable modding environment.
Tips for Beginner Developers
I’m gonna give an anti-tip: Believe in yourself. There’s a lot of advice on how to make games, how to market games, and what a successful game looks like.
The advice is so normalized that the game development community is starting to behave like an army following strict rules:
- Launch a game in early access and market until you have 3000 wishlists
- Ask for feedback until you have a game that people like
- Make TikTok videos of every single aspect of your dev journey
- E-mail to no less than 300 content creators
- Etc.
I am constantly finding posts on Reddit about developers who followed all the meta and still find no success in their games, which is sad.
My advice is: don’t just follow advice blindly. Learn instead. Learn a lot about life, about what is fun, about what is beautiful. Not only in games but in life itself. Be confident and make your dream game. You’ll find that some of the advice could be wrong. Or won’t apply to your game. Sometimes the advice is old because the world has changed.
Integrating feedback from the community and playtesters is crucial, but so is listening to yourself. There’s a fine line between being receptive to feedback and being dependent on external validation.
Information Superhighway Games, Developer of Microlandia
Interview conducted by Emma Collins
Ready to grow your game’s revenue?
Talk to us