Building Cities

I’ve finished a first pass at building cities on an island. You can create a new island* and then start building on it. You can start cities, build roads, and irrigate bare land to create fields. There’s also a terraforming menu, so you can flatten mountains and fill in the ocean if you want. Terraforming won’t be there in the finished game, but makes it easier to play around with different island shapes at this stage. Some of the basic building logic is implemented (so you can’t build a road across mountains, you can’t build a city in the water, etc.)

The interface is…simple. It is the simplest interface that could just barely be construed as working.  I’ll definitely be spending more time on this, but I want to get the core of the game working first.

As I hinted at in my last post, I’m writing this game in 2 distinct parts:

1) A library which implements a simple island economy game
2) A django app which puts a nice user interface on this library

By implementing my core game logic as pure (non-django-related) python, I have a bit more freedom writing tests and experimenting. I’m just writing normal tests using the unittest module. I’ve started on a basic economy, and so I have a couple command-line programs that let me poke around at different parameters trying to get something reasonably stable and convincing.

The live version is running at http://naru.countlessprojects.com. If you try it out, I’d appreciate any comments, questions, or feedback you might have.

* For now, I’m requiring sign-ins using google accounts. This was the fastest way for me to make sure no one else can edit your maps. I definitely want to allow instant, no-sign-in play later, but right now there are much bigger features to tackle.