ZEPTOPOLIS

[chysn]

ZEPTOPOLIS is coming in mid-August 2021!

ZEPTOPOLIS is a turn-based city management game for the unexpanded VIC-20. It features eight types of buildable structure, each with its own special abilities. Effects of special structures are ranged, and depend upon being connected by roads (except for the Wind Farm, which does not need to be connected by roads). Property values depend on proximity, encouraging experimentation with urban (closely packed, with less differentiation between housing and business zones) and suburban (sprawling, with clearer housing/business differentiation) neighborhoods, or even combinations of urban and suburban neighborhoods.

[Vic20-Ian]

Wow - Sim City on the Vic20. Impressive.

Please enter it in the competition.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10130

[orion70]

how could you squeeze everything in 3k??? Base RAM has been used very well to the last drop lately

[chysn]

how could you squeeze everything in 3k??? Base RAM has been used very well to the last drop lately

It's like the old fashion trick. "Turn around quickly in front of the mirror, and the first accessory you see, get rid of it."

Except with code instead of fashion accessories. And "the last thing you see" instead of the first. And "the last hundred things you see" instead of just one.

Wow - Sim City on the Vic20. Impressive.

Well... I'm surely not going to market it as a SimCity port. As I hinted at above, the focus is considerably narrowed. But hopefully there's a richness to it that will reward replays. I'll get more into the points of balance later. The basic framework (construction, positional evaluation) is done, but a lot of the rules are up in the air.

[Mike]

how [...]?

There's also a good set of (cross-)development tools available nowadays that help a lot to achieve such a feat.

Programming a game like this on the VIC-20 itself, using just the base machine without any extra RAM - but perhaps a monitor - is possible, but prone to many headaches.

[chysn]

how [...]?

There's also a good set of (cross-)development tools available nowadays that help a lot to achieve such a feat.

Programming a game like this on the VIC-20 itself, using just the base machine without any extra RAM - but perhaps a monitor - is possible, but prone to many headaches.

I use XA for development and wAx for testing and debugging. I keep thinking that some day I'll do a full unexpanded game strictly on hardware using wAx, but I've come to enjoy the cross-assembly-to-VICE workflow. As rewarding as it would be to get "down to bare metal," like you said... headaches.

[chysn]

Here's my city after the great earthquake of 2069. I lost some roads, which cuts off some of my properties from the Fire Department, but I didn't lose any Wind Farms, so the population shouldn't get too restless. And the kids in the southwest can still get to school, while the kids up north got a year off.

As I experimented with the frequency and level of devastation that disasters should rain down, I realized that it would be nice to put gameplay configuration in a contiguous region of memory just under the character set. This way, it'll be possible to release ModPacks that change the game with different build costs, maintenance costs, property value parameters, etc.

I'm approaching a good balance, I think. Much of the work involves creating tensions in the rules, so that there are organic upsides and downsides to decisions, rather than trying to force players to develop a certain way. There's also no specific goal. You can decide whether you want to go for population or income or full employment or education level, or whatever, and there's no particular end to the game. Other than the occasional earthquake, it's nice and relaxing. It's like one of those little zen gardens for the VIC-20.

Yeah, those Wind Farms and fires are animated. I can't wait to show this to you. It's my best game ever, easily.

I have 989 bytes left to do stuff with. So more to come! I think it's time to focus on sound effects, but that's only 100 bytes or so.

[huffelduff]

I have 989 bytes left to do stuff with. So more to come! I think it's time to focus on sound effects, but that's only 100 bytes or so.

Hi chysn,

So you managed to shove all this into 2.5k? That is exceptionally efficient.
With the depth of game-play you're describing and maybe a separate designer app to come later, it sounds like magic.
I can't wait to play it.

I'm attaching an image of something which I have toyed with.
Its not an open ended strategy game, its, wait for it, another arcade game
You're not playing the humans, you're a deity who has decided to smote mankind.

You wrote: "Turn around quickly in front of the mirror, and the first accessory you see, get rid of it."
This should be 3.5k design rule. I like it a lot and I'm adopting it.

[chysn]

So you managed to shove all this into 2.5k? That is exceptionally efficient.

I'm a little surprised. I have a pretty good sense of what I can cram into an unexpanded VIC, and I originally figured I'd have to stretch more than I did. There are a couple related reasons for the smallesse. One is that the depth is emergent rather than coded. And it turned out that many important rules could be described with lots of tiny data tables. The challenging part was coding a way to tell if two structures are connected by road. Once I figured this out (basically, a shift register of 2-bit cardinal directions), everything else was easy.

Making it the player's job to set up the game board is also a big efficiency!

You're not playing the humans, you're a deity who has decided to smote mankind.

Ha! That looks nice. The malevolent/benevolent god approach was one of my candidates for a "sim"-type game, as was a Civ-style game with tech tree. I work within the constraint that all my games are weaponless, so city management felt like a better fit. But, you know, sometimes you just want to smite all mortals.

[orion70]

Emergence of complexity from small sets of rules is probably one of the most interesting fields of study, period . I have always been fascinated by this, especially because I'm a biologist and it has so much to do with life at all levels, from DNA to ecosystems.

I am so glad that some contemporary products for the small computer that could are taking advantage of this phenomenon. Proud to be part of this community. Thank you Chysn, thank you guys.

[Victim_RLSH]

"Ha! That looks nice. The malevolent/benevolent god approach was one of my candidates for a "sim"-type game, as was a Civ-style game with tech tree. I work within the constraint that all my games are weaponless, so city management felt like a better fit. But, you know, sometimes you just want to smite all mortals."

While I definitely love blowing sh*t up like most gamers, I have a real admiration for games that can be just as interesting and challenging without it. Early gaming was defined by shooting things, but the MOST interesting of the 8-bit games were not violent. One of my favorite games of all time on the Vic and 64 was a type-in oil drilling game from Compute.

[orion70]

Yep, Oil Tycoon - great game
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e6wDOhYnjsE

[Victim_RLSH]

I threw up a review of that on the Retropie forum's Hidden Gems thread. https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/170 ... 7875104460 I play that at work on my phone using RetroArch. IMHO the Vic version is better than the C-64. There is a wider and deeper field in the C-64 version, meaning more can happen before you have a chance to pump out the whole thing and start a new round.

[chysn]

The release candidate for ZEPTOPOLIS is at the top of this topic. There might be changes to the cassette release.

[Victim_RLSH]

Gack, made the mistake of building a ton of houses at the start of the game, kinda pointless considering they don't fill up very fast.