A multiplayer city-building game running on the Minetest Engine.
Quick Rundown
You've been employed by a company with plenty of energy to sell but no customers to sell it to! It's your job to build a city for them so that they can make some cash!
Quick Start
Press K to enable flight. You can only build roads and buildings next to existing roads so you will need to find a road in order to begin building your city. Buildings cost coins and eventually you will run out. Don't worry you can collect more coins by delivering energy to the structures you have built. You'll need to click on energy sources to charge your battery. You can also check on the status of your city at any time by pressing I / inventory, whilst within the city limits.
Assets
The assets for this game have been sourced from various CC0 sources. The houses, buildings, trees and roads are by Kenny [https://kenney.nl]. The sounds have been sourced from Freesound under CC0 or CC-BY-3.0 [https://freesound.org]. The icons are emojis from Twemoji [https://twemoji.twitter.com].
The wind turbine and powercraft were both authored by me using AssetForge [https://assetforge.io/].
Existing Mods
The game uses a modified copy of naturalslopeslib LGPL2/later. [https://content.minetest.net/packages/karamel/naturalslopeslib/]
Features Wishlist / Roadmap / Ideas
A list of features that would be nice to have, if you are a modder, submit a PR!
- Traffic
- Airports
- Railroads
- Ports/Ships
- Upgradable Crafts
- Disasters
- Farms/Industry
- Smoother Coastlines
- Mesecon-style power?
- Bridges, Tunnels and Hilly Roads
- Driving around the city in a car.
- Walking around the city as a person?
Minetest Engine Wishlist
If you work on the Minetest engine, here are some features that would help to polish & improve Builda City.
- Meshlike particles
- Change the chat/log/debug position
- Use the game name in the pause menu.
- Automatically load clientmods in the game directory (for singleplayer) if provided.
License
This is a special release of the project released under the Affero General Public License v3.0 + additional conditions. The standard version is available from github.com/splizard/buildacity and is licensed under a more permissive license.
A solid start
Builda City at its present functions as a very simple citybuilder game, with only 5 things to place, houses, shops, offices, skyscapers and roads. As usual, Kenny graphics are amazing, and that choice alone adds significant appeal to it.
The gameplay is very simple, it is more of a creative mode citybuilder than a survival one at its current state, and I have no issues with that, as a major fan of simulation construction games. Those that were expecting more gameplay may be disappointed in this aspect.
However, this is a solid start and there's so much more potential. Out of all gamejam submissions so far, I have spent the longest time in this, trying to perfect my cute little city. I do look forward to its continual development, and maybe contributing to it.
Great potential
This is one of the two games from the 2021 Jam (along with Subway Miner) that I've kept installed on my PC, because I really want to see what the author can come up with. Yes, as for now there is not a lot to do, but it looks like a solid foundation to potentially build something entertaining. Kenney assets help conveying a brightful atmosphere (using exisisting libre assets was smart), and you can see the author cared about the artistic aspect since the very beginning, as they customised the main menu and added a soundtrack.
I would have increased the flying speed, as it's very slow if someone doesn't press AUX1, but... yeah, let's see what it'll become
Windmills decided not to generate.
When i first started playing this game, it was kinda nice... building a nice little city. But then, as soon as i ran out of money, i encountered the problem of being unable to get more, i asked in the minetest discord how you get money/energy to get money (i saw from the description that you get energy to sell to the houses to make money), they responded that you needed to punch windmills to get energy... But no windmills had generated in the terrain for me, leaving me unable to play.
I also have two questions i hope you could answer: * why is the player a plane, is this something to do with the storyline or what? * why does that player have to manually find the starting road?
I'd love to play a city builder game on MT if there were more gameplay
There's not really a lot of gameplay and the tutorial isn't shown right away, but I love being able to fly above my little city and interact with it: it is waay more immersive than just clicking on the buildings (as it happens in classic city builder games); I can imagine how funny it would be to fly on people/vehicles walking on the streets. It also has some good-looking assets. I hope this game will be further developed, 'cause right now there's not enough content to play around with.
interesting concept
This package leaves me with conflicted view. To start off with, looking at the positives it is a interesting game concept, something different not seen/really done with the minetest engine. the concept of what the game could be is really interesting. onto the cons, from a playability standpoint it simply is just placing some elements and increasing a counter, and after a while it gets boring. additionally you are limited to placing things branching off of existing areas rather than placing things anywhere on the map. in spite of this i think that the game could be a great thing if some of the wanted contributions for features e implemented and could potentionally give the game a point. on the topic of contributions wanted it seems the author wants to keep going with there very odd dreampt up license https://github.com/Splizard/buildacity/blob/d2b30f7aa203c163a6015947bddfb9148a249069/License.txt of which there is a osi thread asking it to be approved https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2021-February/005068.html which appears to lead nowhere as well as potentially suggesting that git hosting sites forks might not be allowed (not a lawyer disclaimer here). regardless contributing to this code base while something that would be fun to do, seems like something that is probably best to be avoided.
Nice game
It is funny to play Builda City.
The makings of a quality game.
There is little content but I think what is there is sufficient for the game jam.
The game is aesthetically pleasing, easy to pick up and the mechanics are unique to me.
I see the potential for this to become something like a 3D OpenTTD
I was reminded of OpenTTD while playing Builda City.
If Builda City is further developed in this direction it will probably become one of my favorite games.
Hard to figure out but a bit of fun
I like this game. At the strart, you build and get confused. And then you realise wind turbines exist, so you turn them on. And then you get to work. And then you get confused because you have already run out of money. And then you realise roads can be left-clicked to make money and so can houses. So you build and build.
However, this game is not very fun after, say, 10 minutes. You end up bored with the lack of choice. Where are the railway lines? Where are the drivers honking at each other and pedestrians? Where do people get food? Why aren't the big buildings connected like any decent town would have them?
Where is the choice and gameplay? Where is the possibility to make a spaghetti of tunnels?
Guter Ansatz
Ich finde diese Mod durchaus Gelungen. Leider hab ich auch neben Positives auch Negative dinge bemerkt. Positiv: Eine Stadt kann binnen weniger Minuten erstellt werden. Ähnlich wie in einigen Aufbau- und Wirtschaftsimulatoren.
Negativ: Es ist etwas Umständlich und es gibt kaum erklärungen. Beispielsweise konnte ich nicht einfach auf dem Rasen bauen. Ich habe tatsächlich ein Stück Straße gesehen und musste dort Anfangen zu bauen, weil sich die Straßen nicht frei setzen ließen.
Die Häuser sind alle nur Rot und sie wiederholen sich ziemlich. Es gibt (noch) keine Funktionen für die Häuser.
Auch wird mir gesagt, ich hätte eine Bevolkerung nur was diese Tut oder wozu sie Da ist wird mir nicht schlüssig.
Great game. Hoping for more types of buildings and more gameplay
This game was played and rated in the Minetest GAME JAM LIVE (ep5): https://rumble.com/vrmbsg-minetest-game-jam-live-ep5.html Note: rating system was changed a bit from ep1
OVERVIEW
OVERALL: 24/30 (Great)
CONCLUSION
This was a fun game, I think it'd be cool to add more buildings you can build, the game kind of lacks gameplay, but the graphics are really nice, and there is some fun in just building a city. Maybe add music? Thanks for participating!
-StarNinjas
Simple but fun
In this current state it is a fun creative city build.The gameplay can be expanded to add ressources management issues.
Simple and plain
After a few seconds of gameplay, I now know how to play it. Which causes a problem which is quite apparent (now what do I do next, after placing dozens of homes shops offices etc.)
Simple and fun—too simple?
I loved this—really smooth gameplay. Thought it took me a little while to figure out how to get the power and how to turn on the lights. But so far seems to be pretty easy. I wonder what challenges might come. It also doesn't seem to matter much where your city is or how it is laid out. Seems like building in some more dynamics about how users construct their cities would make it more interesting and challenging.
Thank you for your time and energy on this!
Good start
This game has great potential IMO. The basic mechanisms (power supply, money, road connections) are there and the plain textures fit in perfectly well.
Suggestions:
- Hint the player to the help. I struggled a bit how to start playing until I discovered that there was some help available when pressing
I. Could also include some more information (like given in the CDB's package description) in the in-game help.- Buildable power plants
- Enable roads to go up/down
- (Music?)
Really looking forward what will come next to this game (more infrastructure?).
Reviews from Emojiminetest and his brother: Addicted
Pros
Cons
Overall
This game is a good start of a fully functional city game!
Aimless Building Game
This game seems to have no defined goal so I didn’t really enjoy the game that much, but I could see how someone might enjoy just expanding a city endlessly. There’s not much challenge and the cities don’t feel alive at all. That said, my brother enjoyed this game and build a fairly large city, so I would still recommend it if you enjoy open world building with no limits.
Too little gameplay
PLEASE NOTE: This review is written for the 2021 Minetest Game Jam version of this game, by a PARTICIPANT. I used Minetest version 5.4.1 to playtest.
I almost gave up playing this game at all. It took me ages to figure out that I have to build at the first street. Building anywhere else is forbidden. :/ Okay, so the game is basically a very simple sandbox. You can basically only do 3 things: Collect power from wind turbines, and build streets and houses, and power them. That's it. Building costs money, but powering a building (or street) gives you back the full cost. So there is literally no strategy at all required here. You could theoretically make your city infinitely large (well, at least until you hit the ocean or hill, because slopes and bridges don't work yet). The controls are kind of awkward and simply due to Minetest's limitations. Since Minetest is at its core a first-person game, top-down city-planning games are somewhat awkward to do, but the game tries its best. You have to awkwardly rely on Minetest's "fly mode". This is one of the more special games for Minetest which shows the limitations of the engine. Another big limitation of the controls is that you can't really build long streeds or housing areas properly with drag-and-drop like in other city building games. Again, Minetest's fault. The graphics style is really cute, something really refreshing to see in Minetest. The ocean could look better but apart from that I like it a lot. As for the gameplay: Really basic sandbox building game, except you can only build streets and like 5 types of houses that don't do anything. It feels very incomplete. Needless to say, it gets boring very fast. And because of this, I give a thumbs down (sorry!).
Stop working
Nice grapics, nice idea, but the itens placement stop to working for me. I made new worlds and the problem stay. I miss too instructions on the itens cost and descriptions. Hope this game go ahead.