I’ve been itching to make something bigger than a one-off minigame after the EVE hacking prototype.  This time the idea is a city builder game like Sim City, Cities Skylines, or Tropico but you’re building colonies on another planet.  I’ve had this idea for years and even tinkered with some very basic logic in Unity once, but with the re-release of Fable 5 now seems like a great time to try it out.

I’ve made some fairly solid progress so far.  The graphics are all placeholders but the UI is fairly developed.  My focus has been more on getting the mechanics working.  A city builder is definitely more involved than say a FPS or even a simple RPG since you have to build out the simulation logic, get roads to calculate connections, etc.  One thing I was pleasantly surprise with though was how much Claude was able to look up techniques from previous games.  Cities Skylines has a strong modding community so it’s been pretty heavily picked apart and posted about online.  I was also able to reference Spore’s technique of using a 6 faced cube and then transforming it into a sphere to make it look like a planet.

Here’s a couple screenshots of what I have so far:

     

     

Things are coming together nicely and I have the early/midgame tech tree mostly fleshed out.  At this point the main thing I’ve been holding off on is actually creating building assets.  I only know basic blender skills but know what I want the buildings to look like.  So in the spirit of vibe coding the project I’m going to look into generating the 3D assets with AI too.