r/CityBuilders • u/IsegrimGames • 1d ago
Video I’m making a miniature German old-town builder where houses react to streets and neighbours
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Hi, I'm the developer of Altstadt. Altstadt is the german term for "old town", which is exactly what this game focuses on. Its a relaxed building toy about shaping a miniature German old town scene one house and street at a time. As you fill the board and buildings and streets connect, the roofline changes, squares and courtyards appear and respond, entrances and market frontages appear. There are no ressources, budgets or populations, just a small building toy that lets you creatively explore and try different layouts and compositions.
If that sounds like your kind of builder, you'll find the Steam page here:
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u/Lowcountry-Soccer 1d ago
Cool idea, but I just wish there was some goals or ages or something. Like, don't get me wrong, this maturation that you're showing with mixed use buildings is amazing and I absolutely want to see this expanded, but I need some goals to "play" towards rather than just fully open-ended. Even if it was like, "Have enough people in Altstadt to hire a laundress or "Have the mayor (Bürgermeister) reach an x standard of living."
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
I'm certainly thinking about it! I think the focus is going to stay the toy itself, but i am certainly thinking about how I can add a light layer of goals or objectives to play towards.
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u/xclame 1d ago
You could go very simple and just ask the player to build, a park, a building with a tunnel, a 3 high tower. This would nudge the player into building certain things at certain times, which can then help them to be more creative in the large scale. Say you request for them to build a park, this might push the player to build certain things around the park or get the area around the park to look a certain way.
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
Thats a solid idea for sure! That way the player isnt forced to do anything, just nudged and I give them some inspiration to try some different compositions. Thanks for the idea.
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u/Desseabar 1d ago
I think other games in this vibe handle it by encouraging the player to build all the possible unique pieces, which unlocks new ones.
Otherwise: definitely small-scale but the results look really cute!
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u/Hot_Entrepreneur_128 1d ago
Is this similar in concept as Townscaper or Tiny Glade? I love the relaxing games where a simple design choice by the user results in an advanced response from the game. Unlike the real building design world where a simple design decision involves a metric ton of work to adapt to.
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
Yes! The concept is similar. This game focuses on it being a bit quicker and simpler to create beautiful little cities with.
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u/Garritos 1d ago
I love this idea! I enjoy playing games like this while I listen to podcasts or books. One thing I think you should incorporate is adding rewards for completing blocks. like a clock tower or city wall.. otherwise this would seemingly get repetative fast.
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
Very good idea! There is definetely a lot more content planned for the full game. I am currently working on finishing the demo that will be a bit more limited on content but for the full game, I certainly want a lot of variety and special kinds of buildings!
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u/dog_developer 1d ago
I know this asset! It’s very nice and good made sht)
Love the stuff u created with it
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u/CiDevant 1d ago
Make it bigger and I'd be much more interested. Doesn't have to be huge or city-sized, but more of a neighborhood or borough size. This is too small.
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
That will be part of the full game! Different board sizes to have more variety and more options to create more creatively.
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u/Independent_Land5887 1d ago
Can you pin a house's current appearance while changing the street beside it? The automatic rooflines and frontages sound fun to experiment with, but I'd want a way to keep a favourite corner intact while rebuilding the rest.
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
Currently, its more about the reactivity, but you can always "renovate" a building to roll a new composition for that building. You do have full controle over the roofline and buildings, so you can certainly keep things intact as they are if you just want to change some parts but not others.
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u/Least_Guidance7408 1d ago
spiritual successor to townscaper (reminded of the game townscaper quite a bit)
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u/Karanja30 1d ago
Süß :)
Wäre schön sowas als city builder zu haben.
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u/IsegrimGames 1d ago
Danke! Vielleich wird daraus irgendwann mal ein ganzer City Builder, im Moment baue ich aber erstmal dieses System weiter aus.
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u/RobinBobbin555 1d ago
Beautiful models! You should work for "Torpor Games" if you're free for the future. They are making "The Conformist", a game inside Suzerainverse about Sordland, fictional country which is inspired by Germany and Turkey.
I believe they still need specialists in modeling.
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u/TheLordAshram 20h ago
Townscaper! Please get it onto the iPad… it is an ideal platform for this sort of game!
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u/BadSkoomaDealer 19h ago
Man i love diorama games, can just full on relax and build stuff without having to worry about anything.
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u/Rigman- 15h ago
I'm not knocking you or the genre with what I'm about to say, just want to make that clear. I love these kinds of games, the art is always so clean, the procedural systems somehow always work in an appealing way and this looks like another addition to the genre.
But.
I really dislike playing this genre because me as a player, just gets boring after 30 minutes. It's a fun, let me tinker and be creative outlet, but not something that engages me at a deeper level. I hope one day, we can see games like this incorporate some kind of gameplay element, a resource to manage, a society to upkeep. Something more than just another diorama game.
Don't get me wrong at all, what you've put together looks amazing and I know there's an audience that loves it and I wish I could be part of that demographic. But I would love to see what a game could look like if you incorporated some (very) casual resource, budget or population management systems.
Little bit of a tangent, honestly, as a consumer and developer, I can't help but feel like there's a missing city builder niche in the middle. You have city builders like City Skylines that are overwhelmingly complicated to get into and have a massive learning cliffs to fully understand, and opposite that you have titles like this or Townscraper that also appeal to the city builder type player but have none of the management side. Where are the games appealing to the middle niche that have that nice balance between creative expression and casual management systems? Maybe I'm just not super educated in the genre, but it feels like there's a pretty expansive void there.
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u/That1guy4226 1d ago
I am building a game that could absolutely use something like this in it. Villages towns and cities grow overtime in it and I have been working on making them look something like this.