There are a few circumstances in which the game does fake things, however. They have to be connected, and more than that, how they’re connected matters. After all, the city is not statistically modelled so that as long as amenities exist, they’re factored in. For the player, that means roads are absolutely necessary for linking each part of the city to the rest so the citizens can access them. And thus you can watch cars purposefully drive around the city, showing off what’s running in the simulation itself. “We do not like faking citizen behaviours,” says programmer Damien Morello. And once they’d built that system out, it was only logical that they’d extend it to the traffic, since it reflects all these movements.
Materials needed for commerce and industry are modelled moving from place to place, too. They also wanted the city to feel alive with residents so players would feel attached to what they’d constructed, and so every citizen has a home, workplaces and family, and is simulated as they move around from one to another. “It seemed like the one thing where constant quick changes felt good and it felt meaningful for the player to make changes to the road network,” says Korppoo. The team also wanted to achieve something rather tricky, to feature deep micromanagement-based play that would also appeal to less experienced players, and they realised that the realtime, flow-y nature of traffic could be the key. “Roads are part of the character of a city,” game designer Karoliina Korppoo tells me.
But for a game about managing a city, they needed to capture its essence. It’d already made two Cities in Motion games, which are about building public transportation systems. They may walk or take a bus or train, but you’ll mostly notice them driving, creating traffic which fundamentally represents the health of your city, a pulsing network that’s driven by Cities: Skylines’ beating heart:ĭeveloper Colossal Order was no stranger to transit when it started making Cities: Skylines. You can watch each citizen make its way through your creation, from home to place of work, and from there to visit a park. Oh, and an incidental byproduct of a good road system is the growth of a city around it.Ĭities: Skylines is a sim that feels uncommonly alive and reactive to your planning. Its lovely set of road-building tools allow you to scribe beautiful curved boulevards into the gentle slopes and combes of virgin lands, and it has inspired 19-page forum topics entitled Show Us Your Interchanges and Steam Workshop lists 24,482 interchange designs. Ĭities: Skylines is a game about building roads. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games.