Townscaper can be yours for $6 on Steam. It was developed by one of the programmers from Bad North. At the moment, it’s more of an experimental game or toy than a game. Buy it so that the developer continues to work on it and turns it into a game. :)
That said, it’s a very relaxing experience and fun to diddle around with. It would make for a perfect activity during boring Zoom meetings.
Here’s a town I started. My kids are really enjoying it, too.
Thanks! Bought!
For what it’s worth, the town building is an implementation of the WaveFunctionCollapse constraint solving algorithm.
Which is really just a multi-dimensional Markov Chain.
It’s really neat and satisfying to play around with. And a very cool technical accomplishment.
I might be wrong, but I get the impression he doesn’t necessarily plan on making it into a game. I definitely haven’t seen him say explicitly that it’s going that way.
Yeah, I follow Oskar on Twitter and that was my impression too. Lovely toys are fine! I have enough games :-)
According to my daughters, this is their new favorite thing to do on the computer, beating Minecraft, Don’t Starve Together, Portal, and some other games.
Been keeping an eye on this one for a while since I heard about it. I totally can understand the appeal, plenty of people get a lot of joy out of playing Cities Skylines purely as a creative sandbox (unlimited money, etc) rather than as a simulation game.
Watching that trailer I kept thinking it would be an awesome tool for creating Thief levels.
Hopefully at some point he adds 3D terrain in addition to flat water.
They might enjoy Factory Town. It is kind of like a Factorio (lighter version) game but very cute to look at.
Oh shit you can move the camera around? I was kind of dreaming that would be a feature without ever thinking it would happen. Amazing!
The camera movement is a little wonky, and you’ll run into boundaries where it doesn’t feel like there should be any. But with some effort, you can get the camera to just about anywhere.
One of my favourite things in Dungeon Keeper was being able to possess my minions and see the world (and its denizens) from a totally different perspective. I hope the feature gets ironed out or expanded upon!
Thanks for the highlight Clay! This game is blowing up. 500 in game right now and Oskar’s twitter post has 46K likes so far.
I typically stay away from early access games, but this might an exception.
Oh wow, that’s lovely!
I adore the little touches: the wellies that appear on doorsteps, the occasional bee boxes, the birds and washing lines.
