Design is everywhere, if you are a front end dev like me, design constantly follows you. I mean I pick new bottles of wine at the store based on their design. Everything around you is designed mostly to please you in one way or the other.
For those of you who have already joined the sim city community, thats great! For those of you who have never played or are not into video games, but are into design, then trust me you need to give it a chance. And trust me its nothing like the Sims Franchise, so do not worry about assisting with sims daily choices, everyone is programmed to work, shop, and go home.
The base game is challenging, you have to design a city or multiple cities, and create an infrastructure all while dealing with traffic, pollution, noise complaints, fires, crime, land value, etc.. Since giving the game another go, I now drive around my city and notice how different roads are made: main roads, side roads, bypasses, interchanges, 3 lane roads, 6 lane roads, roads with parking on the side, bus only lanes, traffic will make a ton of sense once you play this game and watch sims struggle from a birds eye view. As well as how the city is planned as in how the grids are formed and how certain districts are planned to become touristy, or simply just an inner-city neighborhood. Google an urban design or roadmap of a city near you (bigger cities are better), you can see why it takes 30-40 min to reach each destination around a city like San Francisco for example, It all comes down to the design and layout of roads.
Compare San Diego to San Francisco traffic wise, both are desirable cities, but San Diegos design of freeways within their city create far less traffic than San Francisco's reliance on city roads with stoplights everywhere.
Now before I go too deep in to the answer of the question: "how does traffic even happen?", let's get back to my persuasion of getting you to play Sim City. You get to have every ounce of control of how your city looks and runs. The mod community is large, you can stray away from the vanilla assets of the game (basic assets that come with the original game) and bring in buildings, trees, roads, etc., that other people have made to make the game better. You get to design districts, making them dedicated to industry, business, offices, parks, residential or a mix of all. Design parks, add benches, add water fountains, edit terrain, pretty much everything is editable and it all matters for your economic output.
To highlight a smaller creator I have recently landed upon, check out Few Candy on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FewCandy/videos
The game will certainly give you a break from whatever you are dealing with, throw on some calming music, drink some tea, open your window, and create a city at your full discretion. Much like the developer community, the sim city community is very strong and are very prevalent on Youtube and Reddit.
Top comments (1)
Ah. Yes, Cities Skyline, used to play the old ones so I got mixed up with the correct name.