Hello Karate25.
Well here's my peace of advice talk to aprone. Aprone, danny, or Cae_Jones are the only ones I believe who have the ability and talent to do something like this. I don't know if you were around when this happened but somebody asked aprone to make an accessible version of a final fantasy mini-game called tripple triade. He had a working version in two or three days if I remember correctly. I haven't play tripple triade in a while but last time I did it was amazing.
That said I too would love to see a city builder or an open-world game. As someone who has tried many times and failed at coding I know this kind of project is huge. I don't know how the mainstream city building games work but an audio version could be turn-based as you deal with events and problems.
An open world game where you choose your skills would be amazing. Very hard to make but very fun to play. What we need is a dedicated team you can work together nicely to maoe this kind of game. Get a couple of people like kai (sorry if I spelled that wrong), and other sound designers working on quality sounds for multiple aspects of the game from footsteps to weapon and enemy sounds. Working with them we need a team of talented coders let's say aprone, danny, samtupy, Cae_Jones, others to work on the coding aspects of the game. I say from experience if you can get a team who are friends, work well together, and enjoy the work you can really get quality work from them. Story would be good in an open-world game too. I don't mean to brag but I'm an experienced writer and if something like this ever got off the ground I would love to contribute in some way. Having a back story, character stories, and a main story to run throught the game will give the game more replay value.
Well that's enough rambling for me. Karate25, these games are very possible to make the problem is there has been no one who has attempted to make one yet.

I'm glad to see some pretty good interest in this so far, I figured you guys would love stuff like this and for guitarman, city builders are usually in real time and not turn-based like a board game. Hey Aprone, if you're willing to help me tackle this kind of project, I'd love to have you on board. Remember, I can't code my way through a home security system so I wouldn't be able to help in any way with that but I could help come up with storylines and things along with guitarman. In fact, we could have it so that you could trade resources with each other and their cities and ship them to each other. As far as the virtual world, that can wait awhile because I would at least like to see a good city builder come out first and formost.

Actually KArate, Castaways 2 is very much going the way you describe with real time building. It's medeival in setting and at the moment Aprone has this hole competitive multiplayer going, but I think when he gets around to the single player we'll see far more aspects of the sort of game you mention, even if in a different setting.
I'd love a single player city building game, my brother used to love sim city back on the Snes, and I always fancied that, but I don't think it's long before we get one.

Btw, while we're talking about this style of game, also don't forget parkboss from Nick Adamson, sinse that is an awesome game, and again, while not exactly a city builder does have the groundwork for the aspects of game you would need to make one, it actually wouldn't surprise me if we see an audio city builder pretty soon, that is if castaways 2 doesn't get there first.

you know dark, that makes sense exactly and I was thinking along the same lines as the park boss mechanics. I have that game and love it and the same mechanics could be used to build our city building game. For example, rather than the zones as in park boss, you could have the game unlock a districts feature in which you could separate your city into differing districts should you wish. Ironcross I also thoroughly enjoy your suggestions as well and was thinking the same thing about the different aspects you had outlined. I can tell that this is going to be an extremely fun discussion.

Well it's a type of game we've not had yet and this is certainly not the first request, however as I said I'm interested to see where castaways 2 goes, particularly sinse builds are getting more and more complex and I suspect at least a medeival type of city might occur later.

Hi Samtupy.
All your ideas sound awesome. I think this is something worth pursuing from what I've seen you definitley have the skill especially pulling off survive the wild. Plus if you finished the game you would go down in audiogames history as building the first accessible city builder.
I have just a few things to suggest. First popularity is great but maybe also give the ability to talk to people who live in the city and see what they think about what your doing in the city. This would be hard if you were using voice actors but you can use tts voices to represent the people in yrur city. This will save you a lot of time in the long run. Next you could have crime rates rise in the city you create a police force but let's say new problems rise with creating the police force like officers beating crooks or becoming crooks themselves or things like that. You could also have people try to assassinate you and take over your city this could either be players on multiplayer or npcs in the game itself. Another cool thing would be to make tourist attractions for your city to attract more people. On the other hand if you didn't want tourists in your city you just leave out tourist attractions like theme parks and such. However the people might get upset that there aren't things like theme parks in their city.
Well that's all I've got. Please don't misunderstand I'm not trying to tell you what to do just throwing suggestions out there.

CW, as long as the programmer knows what they are doing, it wouldn't matter what language they used.  The speed/performance differences between languages does exist to some degree, but it is mostly myth on modern computers and for the types of projects we're talking about in the audio game community.  I think this city sim idea could be turned into a game by many of the developers we have floating around, so hopefully we'll see someone do it!    I wouldn't want any potential builder of this game to pass on the project based on their preferred language.  They would just need to be efficient with how they laid out the game logic.  If their game loops through a huge 2D array of the city 10 times per second, just to find and check some rarely-changing condition for the 2 police stations, then it is a poor design that is wasting tons of resources.  In extreme cases like that, someone might notice a difference between languages, but on modern computers even a mistake like this could go unnoticed.

Skimming back through my post, I hope it isn't viewed as taking things off topic.  I can see now how it might cause undesirable side-conversations, but I'm not sure I want to delete and rewrite it. 

I always enjoyed the old sim city games and really do hope someone jumps in to tackle karate's idea.

The source code for the original Sim City was realeased back in 2008 under a GPLv3 licsense, and for legal reasons renamed Micropolis. If anyones interested you can find it and the source code over here.

oh my goodness! I can see I've started one hek of a discussion here, and Sam I absolutely love your ideas for this project, I was thinking along those same lines and I'm glad to see we're on the same page. Since I've got you on Skype, would you like to discuss this a little further? let me know. Have a wonderful day. Another feature I'd like to suggest is to have the ability to walk through your city as you can do in park boss. I especially enjoy your ideas of being able to visit other player's cities and being able to ship items back and forth to them as well. Have a wonderful day everyone and let's keep this awesome conversation flowing man this is so much fun!!