alt Hacker NewsA city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't
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Of course, there’s also Car Park Capital, a game for what the city actually wants
This was a really fun game… although it’s a bit of a gallows humour and made me horribly happy I’m not having to try to live there. It’s near impossible to build at a profit unless you dole out a lot of money for what is basically corruption, and the end result is really expensive housing.
For context I’ve personally been responsible for building entire homes in numbers of excess of what goes for a multimillion dollar project in this game. Ouch.
It is January 2015. San Francisco is short of housing in the middle of a tech boom, and most of its land has a 40-foot height limit. You are a resident with a fully paid of mortgage living in the home you love. Nearby, three project teams "landed" with a list of parking lots. Your goal is to keep your neighbourhood 'till 2031 when "tech" will abandon the valley.
Will the new California law Senate Bill (SB) 79 (the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act) help? It came into effect this July.
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
The best I got:
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.
We need one for HS2 where every time you try and build a small section of track, they demand a bat tunnel or a newt ramp or a fox power plant.
Love the idea!
I started something similar as a meme game, but I'm just too busy to keep working on it: Data centre slumlord - https://binary-mirror.itch.io/data-centre-slumlord
Whoever made this, I love you and we should be friends.
Not my original joke:
The United States is a command economy, where the only command is "no".
It does have the blue angels flying over the city at one point
The street grid south of Market isn't rotated at a diagonal; Literally unplayable.
Want to share the Code? I would adapt it to the German situation and add to it - the first YIMBY Simulation
I like that the game used real sites of building proposals. The "historic laundromat" is one I immediately spotted.
The Nuclear option is an interesting choice the game has locked up.
I would love to provide a version of this for my city. I think the council could do with a way to practice without destroying what we have.
I'm just jamming out to the music
I think the problem is that we build it the wrong way around
It should be:
* city decides which area need more housing or re-development, open to community feedback ideas. * developers pen up proposals * city picks one * city keeps an eye on timelines and quality
Developers get the job with less fighting the city, city gets what it wants, where it wants, and hopefully there is less pathologic development all around
I did best by acting like a real world developer - low-ball everything, everything non-union, ignore community activists at all costs, pay for access, sell for a profit, etc.
Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?
Damn I got rekt, crazy to read all the regulations and neighbors just dog walking me :'(
You win by not playing…
I'm a unclear on what high "The Neighborhood" scores mean in the right panel before approving the project, is it good or bad?
This is the inverse of a cozy game. Stressed me out.
I can't find it now, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on HN, but there was a board game like this where you had to cooperatively add housing to the Bay Area under all the constraints you have to operate under, and, when playing, we discovered that the only way to do it was to massively upzone some remote East Bay city.
Is this strictly humor, or is there practical knowledge here? Honestly can't tell.
This game is rigged by pigs at the trough.
Reminds me of tax forms. Good times.
The only way to beat this game is to not play.
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
what a throwback feel, nicely done
how do you complete a tutorial when you cant mute this fucking music
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Line at the end of the in-game "rulebook":
> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
EDIT: I'll link to an example of what I think this game should have been: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
A game made with intent, that is easy to pick up, respects its player's time, and makes its point effectively.
I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.