Artifying Micropolis (SimCity 1989)
—— Adding museums into the SimCity system
The Sims Series has been one of my all time favorites.
As the original SimCity (1989) didn't have any type of arts or education in the systems, I decided to add a new type of building -- Museum into the game. Let's "artify" the beloved city!
👉Click to Quickly Jump to:
For this artification, I have...
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Designed museum as a new building type with cohesive art styles and proper interaction
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Created pixel icons for museums in multiple sizes
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Factored museums' cultural impact into city evaluation
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Developed a real-time heat map feature to visualize museums' cultural impact
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Built a monitoring component that tracks museum metrics and provides player guidance
👇One-page Game Design Document
It can be easily seen from the design doc that adding a museum will involve three main aspects:
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Land value will increase
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Crime rate will decrease
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Education coverage will increase (thus I also added an education coverage map to let players know how impactful the museums are, and what regions are impacted)
👇Design Flow
Museums provide cities with education and arts. They also bring about climbing land values, flow-in migration, subtle decreases of crime, and other socio-economic impacts. To reflect the changes in the game, the system designer must be clearly aware of the internal relationships between different parameters, because the parameters out there are not all independent -- some affect others.
As Micropolis already has an organically connected system as a whole, the addition of museums should only change the most directly related parameters, as these changed parameters will continue to affect other related ones. Land value, crime, and nearby education coverage are the three main directly affected metrics of the city. This is why I have chosen the implementation plan as shown in my design doc.
👇Implementation Results
I first created two pixel icons for the museum. I designed the icon this way to match other existing icons.
Regular Status
Clicked Status
Now, education coverage has been successfully embedded into the map overlays. If the player clicks the map, it will show the coverage of the museums. Also, as museums also affect population, land price, crime, and many other factors, players will be able to see how other parameters are affected in their respective maps.
👇 Here is how the education map is embedded in the existing map system:
👇 This is how the education coverage map looks like:
Regular-sized Map
Enlarged Map View
☝️ The effect of the spreaded-out pixels on the maps are created using a smooth-out function which has a kernel that moves upon the map tile grids to make arithmetic changes so that the pixels are smoothly smudged.
👇Technical Steps
🔹 The below document is pulled from my GitHub repository, you can also look at the repository directly if you like.
👇Finally
I hope you like my work🙌!