Build Prosperity with New Cities
—A fresh take on take on the classic game.
GAME IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FOR: Windows 7+ (64-bit required), Certain Linux Distros (Ubuntu 18.04+ confirmed)
https://newcities.io
@lone_pine_games
Build your city - From a small farm town to a thriving metropolis.
You’re the Mayor, and you lead your city with impunity. There are no councilmembers here—every decision, every victory and setback… it all comes down to you. Build your city from the ground up, rural town to metropolitan jewel, calling all the shots along the way.
Learn their names - Track individual people and businesses.
Peek into the lives of your citizens and follow them through their daily routines. See where they work, play, and sleep. Big Brother Mayor is watching. And hopefully, you’re benevolent.
Plan for traffic - Upgrade roads and plan highway networks.
Carefully place your city’s roads to create the circulatory system that keeps it humming. Make sure to leave room for upgrades once your citizens outgrow the humble two-lane road…
Parks and schools - Create a livable city -- to collect more taxes.
Add all the amenities to keep your citizens happy. Word of mouth gets around, and you’ll find your population booming in short order. More citizens mean more money, and often more problems in turn.
Balance the budget - From careful planning to emergency fixes.
There’s no Finance Director to delegate your budget to. Manage your finances well to keep your city in the black. Sustainable growth is the key, don’t overextend yourself. The economy can be a fickle beast.
Get the skyscraper - Cultivate a towering city center and win world renown.
The badge of honor for cities across the globe are towers of steel and glass that reach forth to touch the sky itself. Do your job right, and the skyscraper is yours—along with the renown and prestige it brings.
Design a unique city - The building designer allows for endless creativity.
Set your creativity loose. Build the city of your dreams, or recreate the city you live in. The choice is yours. You have every tool at your disposal, mayor. The only limit is your imagination.
Perils straight from the headlines – The only disasters are the ones we make
Tired of UFOs attacking your city? So are we. This isn’t that kind of city builder. Here, the disasters are of our own design. Do you have what it takes to keep your city thriving through an economic recession? Take a Line of Credit from the bank and get to work, but remember—you’ll have to pay it back eventually…
A word from Lone Pine:
I have developed and played games since childhood. I think that the time is right for a game that focuses on creative approaches to city living. Players can design residential areas with parks, museums, schools and retail centers. They can build industrial centers, office complexes and farms. All of this is connected by roads, and highways.
Over the past year, I’ve developed a city builder with a traffic simulation and customizable 3D rendered buildings. In the past few months I’ve fully implemented “The Prosperity System” which will define the game: it’s a dynamic economic model where neighborhoods thrive or fail based on access to work, shopping, parks, and schools.
The game is based around six “heatmaps.” The heatmaps are Pollution, Crime, Education, Prosperity, Value, and Density. Essentially, Education (plus a good road system) creates Prosperity, Prosperity (among other things) creates Value, and Value (plus Prosperity) creates Density. However, Density creates Crime and Pollution, which have a negative impact on Prosperity and Value, creating a negative feedback loop. Negative feedback loops are important to me, since they counteract the explosive nature of positive feedback loops which turn many simulation games into sandboxes.
As a player, you have two options. You can buy very expensive city services (schools, parks, police stations, etc) to cut through the negative feedback loop. Alternately, you can build a broad, flat, suburban city, with the intention to grow a dense city center later in the game. I call these two approaches “San Francisco vs Los Angeles.” I consider this to be a kind of morality system, creating the opportunity for different play-styles and different cities.
In this game, a city doesn’t grow linearly. Instead, the community behaves like a living organism, emerging out of chaos and always at risk of dying. You’ll have to shepherd your city through randomized recessions in the national economy as well as the consequences of any blunders you make. It will be a unique game compared with other city builders, with a more vulnerable budget maintaining a fundamentally unstable economic system.
What We Need & What You Get
I need you to join our campaign with a donation that supports a closed alpha test for a few months prior to the launch of Early Access on Steam.
You get a set of rewards based on your contribution. This includes logo T-Shirts, votes in the developer poll, participation in the closed alpha, building naming and more. See the Perks section to see all the details and select the support tier that’s right for you!
Your Support will Bring New Cities to Life
The game is fully developed and almost ready for players to enjoy. We need to perform a live test with a select group of campaign supporters in a closed alpha release. We intend to conduct Feature Polls soon, in which we will determine the next set of features to be included in New Cities.
We are active on social media and across the web promoting New Cities to the gaming community. Your contribution will help expand our presence and get the word out.
Thank you for your support, and we look forward to hearing of your experiences with New Cities soon.
The Perks
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You’re probably as eager to play New Cities as we are to have you play it, so the first 1000 contributors (Apartment Complex tier and up) will receive access to the Closed Alpha. It begins in January and runs right up to the Early Access release. Put down some roads, build up a few cities, and you’ll have our undivided attention for feedback as we tune and polish.
(Of course, any tier with perks related to your name are completely optional. You can choose to claim the rest of the perks in the tier anonymously. You are also welcome to suggest alternate names or pseudonyms, pending approval.)
The House tier comes with the opportunity to put your name in the credits right beside the developers, as a special thanks for your support, along with access to an exclusive channel and role on our Discord. You’ll have the ear of the development team; use this newfound power wisely. And, random citizens of cities will be named after you, with your permission of course!
The next tier, Apartment Complex, nets you access to the Closed Alpha (Limited quantity of Close Alpha slots available) and a New Cities Game Key on final release. You'll also have the opportunity to vote in a New Feature poll to shape the next leg of our journey. But like any good mayor, perhaps you want to keep building onward and upward from there.
With the Factory tier, you become the proud owner of a New Cities T-Shirt, along with additional votes in New Feature polls to ensure your voice is heard. You’ll get a chance to shape the future of the game—we need your feedback to make it the best it can be! As a special thanks, schools, parks and roads will be named in your honor.
The Office Complex tier is more of a good thing, Your voting power is upped to ten votes in the New Feature polls, so you can rest comfortably in the knowledge that the future of New Cities is being shaped by dapper and wise patrons such as yourself. You’ll also be immortalized in-game with a statue, handcrafted by the developers with your input.
The final tier, Skyscraper, is for the true city builder fanatic. You’ll get an opportunity to have a 30 minute conversation with the developer to discuss features and gameplay and to suggest new content. In addition to all of the above, you get a massive one hundred votes in the New Feature polls, and top-tier naming in the credits. Oh, and you’ll get your very own 3D printed skyscraper.
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