SimCity Roundup this week!

Now that you understand what we’re creating, let’s talk about the process we use to make one of the modular buildings and the family of buildings it belongs to. Let’s look at coal. Several buildings span that category in our game, Coal Mines (which extract the raw resource and can also refine it), Coal Power Plants (which use the coal to power cities), and Coal Storage and Shipping Lots (which store the coal and allow for building an empire of trade). As I mentioned earlier, basic research is the foundation of creating one of our buildings because we want to try to stay faithful to the simulation and to the core of SimCity style, which is grounded in contemporary reality.

As you may have read in Engineer Robert Perry’s previous blog post about physics, “what you see is what we Sim” is one of the core driving philosophies on SimCity In my case, it’s more “when you see your Sims, you’re seeing your Sims’ simulation.” It’s not enough to make a city feel alive. It has to be alive. If you see a Sim wearing scrubs walking down the street, that’s not some random “extra,” that’s a nurse heading home from a shift at the hospital.