Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
What's your "build order"? I can usually get permits for something, but struggle getting the 40 units started by the second one (if I do get permits, it doesn't pencil).
I won on Developer mode too with 4k homes built. Spent all afternoon playing this
Here’s my build order
- 3 market rate projects in supportive supervisor districts, ideally in areas without heavy neighbor or coalition opposition (use the heat maps). Pay the in lieu fee or else risk the projects not penciling by the time they’re approved
- 2 mega projects - mission rock is the best one, then pier 70. Waive prevailing wages, then Spend 2.5M on campaigning mission rock and offer community benefits
Spam community meetings and permit expediting. Don’t agree to labor agreements, don’t give density unless the commission denies your approval. This should get you past the first two investor reviews. Ideally you can complete a mega project, which gives you a buffer to option a bunch of marginal land
Then pivot to affordable around 2020 when everything stops penciling. Max out density bonuses. Start picking up projects that almost pencil but not quite because you’ll need them to get past the reviews in 2027 and beyond
Keep spamming community meetings and permit expediting, and always pay to save on build time unless your in the 20-25 doldrums where nothing pencils. Keep your pipeline full and you should win
Will the new California law Senate Bill (SB) 79 (the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act) help? It came into effect this July.
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
It’s kind of mind-blowing to remember that what’s the basic residential building standard everywhere else in the world is already “huge” in most American cities.
I'm not sure this comment is very useful. It is much too generic. Look at most "old cities" (think Hanseatic era) in Western Europe. Over 10 floors is a huge residential building in central, old areas. Residential buildings in the central arrondissements in Paris are rarely more than 5-6 floors. Same for London. Same for Hamburg. Same for Amsterdam.
The only place in San Francisco that has many residential buildings more than 3-4 floors and is building more/new is SoMa (South of Market) and Rincon Hill. (I have not lived there for 10+ years, so please correct me if I am wrong.) Sure there are some odd ducks in Russian Hill or Nob Hill, but they are from 1960s/70s. Nothing new is built there now, except billionaires doing a tear-down/re-build.
Wild idea: What if we build 4x fifty story apartment blocks on those four blocks that I mentioned at Mission District BART stations? You could do stuff like bottom 3-5 floors are all retail (small biz plus chains), then next 30 floors are middle class housing, and the upper floors are unlimited for the rich. I think it would be a good mix. The hardest part of the build might be creating enough car parking spots for the luxury units at the top. We might need to do something bizarre/exotic underground, or buy adjacent lots to tear-down for a multi-story parking lot. To be clear: I am not excited about building new parking garages in 2020s in urban San Francisco, but it is a reasonable compromise for selling luxury units at the top of the tower. All together, this mega project could be easily a 1B USD build. Another bonus: One floor in one tower near the top could be reserved as an observation deck/floor. That would be very cool, like a modern Coit Tower for the 2020s.
Dunno, if you are dumb enough to try to build a high speed line through an area where endangered species are protected then yeah you’re going to have to avoid killing them.
What a predictably one-sided take from... one of the sides.
Your link claims, technically correctly, that the bat tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife protection laws. What it does not ever admit is that those laws forced something to happen, and that it was already known more than 10 years ago that the least expensive "something" was the bat tunnel.
That link says, under the section "Which other options did HS2 look at?":
> In 2021, a ‘first principles’ review was undertaken by the Department for Transport, DEFRA and Natural England, but did not identify any better solution that was able to both fulfil the requirements of the relevant legislation relating to species protection whilst also reducing cost.
> The most feasible engineering options were also subject to an additional independent design review by the consultants Arup, which concluded that the solution now being taken forward provided the best balance of value for money and risk mitigation, from the four viable options that were shortlisted.
> Choosing any of the other options would have opened-up the risk of legal challenge, delay and subsequent extra cost.
> Options considered included a bored tunnel beneath this area, a shallower ‘cut and cover’ tunnel and rerouting the railway away from the wood altogether. Consideration was even given to permanently slowing down trains as they run past the area.
Regarding my earlier "known 10 years ago" claim, it says:
> The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by our own ecologists.
Finally, it also says:
> Despite the passing of the 2017 Act, HS2 Ltd still had to gain almost 8,500 environmental or planning consents along the 140-mile route from London to the West Midlands.
8500 consents. Your link claims that other causes, like "underfunding" and "bad project management" are to blame for cost and time overruns, and that environmental consents are being used as a scapegoat. That would be easier to believe if that consent number was, say, two orders of magnitude smaller.
Very nearly half of HS2 - 64 miles - is in tunnels. This happened because the Conservative government was terrified of upsetting the Conservative voters along the route. The bat tunnel was nuts, but it's not that significant overall.
That is partly true but it's a downstream consequence of the ultimate cause. Those running and pushing the project in the early stages desperately wanted it to be a 400+kph route for "prestige" reasons.
If they hadn't been so focused on that, they could have built the new rails largely alongside the existing West Coast Main Line which would have been quicker, cheaper and much less controversial.
But because they wanted those very high speeds, the route had to be flatter and straighter than the existing WCML, which means many more tunnels, longer and more complex construction, more people objecting, inconvenienced etc and ultimately much more cost however you look at it.
Yeah it's more because they wanted the high speed trains to go super fast because bigger number is better, in reality it dramatically increases the impact of the track you build - corners have to be wider, gradients have to be avoided, and offsets (and the land you need to purchase for them) need to be bigger.
My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.
> Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio
As would, I’d think, San Francisco under a similar system.
It’s not a good solution. But for the preferences San Francisco’s residents seem to be expressing, it’s the only way. (Fortunately, it’s probably unconstitutional.)
Open immigration for rest of the country from around the world but closed for their city from rest of the country is what these “progressives” seem to want by their actions.
Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?
I can't find it now, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on HN, but there was a board game like this where you had to cooperatively add housing to the Bay Area under all the constraints you have to operate under, and, when playing, we discovered that the only way to do it was to massively upzone some remote East Bay city.
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
Would you include the part where almost every technology you researched in the past made life worse or would they just hate technology for no reason in the game?
I mean that's kinda how Civ works already. Some civs get bonuses for education & research, others in combat, etc, and focusing on the things incompatible with your civ will "punish" you.
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
What would prioritizing education mean in Civilization? The game's model is fairly simple:
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
Some context, because it is definitely an insider joke.
Davis had a long and contentious civic debate on whether or not Target should be allowed to build a store in Davis, eventually Davis held a city wide vote on the matter, which did pass [1].
Davis voters reject Measure V, spiking plans to build Village Farms housing [2].
Just a couple of examples where growth that most cities would approve without thought became a city wide civic issue that the community actually voted on.
Something definitely changed around the dot com crash. The channels I slummed around in of EFNet went from excited hacker archetypes to the same people doing jobs I was am in retrospect surprised about [0]
[0] - Im general, emulator devs working for bigger corporations. But most specifically one that wound up doing stuff around customs intrediction tech, major shift from their pre emulation work.
I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb
> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't. If he wants to make a spreadsheet simulator or something targeted at people who like complex interfaces he can do that. I point at ASCII-UI Dwarf Fortress, one of the great games of this century, as evidence that a game does not need to be accessible to be true art.
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
These people should, instead of posting the game, just post a video of them playing through the game, as most people have no interest in playing other’s slop but may just be curious to watch someone play and provide comedic value.
You've completely missed what my comment was trying to convey. If it's throwaway, why is it so damn complex to play? I've seen AAA games with less features.
There's no reason a "housing crisis" game couldn't have been done like that, with simple choices and immediate reactions. A game that respects the player's time, is easy to pick up and makes the point effectively.
Eh, your example is a different kind of game. Not into linear choose-your-own-adventure games myself. I think the UI of this one accurately models the many moving parts and forces in the process it's simulating, and I didn't have a problem picking it up though I skipped the tutorial. It has a sense of humor (read the speaker comments at meetings, and the news articles), and hits you with the real world outcome each development is based on. Made an impact on me.
Well, you should seek a better tell because I've played ASCII Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. Re-read my comments, I only have an issue with TFA's complexity, in the context of it being a throwaway educational game. It shouldn't require as much involvement from the player as it currently does. And certainly, it shouldn't even occur to people to compare it to Dwarf Fortress, which happened twice already.
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
I remember before COVID I was debating with a friend of mine whether or not private property is justifiable and it's ironic that the discussion was made obsolete by nobody being able to afford private property anymore
I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.
I’m a single family homeowner in SF and as YIMBY as they come. And contrary to my goals of development even if it deflates home prices, development lags and home prices are getting more out of control.
Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.
Here's the mod https://mods.factorio.com/mod/administratorio
That sounds so cute. I'm surprised something like this is even possible within Factorio.
Of course, there’s also Car Park Capital, a game for what the city actually wants
https://www.ign.com/games/car-park-capital
The best I got:
Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.
What's your "build order"? I can usually get permits for something, but struggle getting the 40 units started by the second one (if I do get permits, it doesn't pencil).
I won on Developer mode too with 4k homes built. Spent all afternoon playing this
Here’s my build order - 3 market rate projects in supportive supervisor districts, ideally in areas without heavy neighbor or coalition opposition (use the heat maps). Pay the in lieu fee or else risk the projects not penciling by the time they’re approved - 2 mega projects - mission rock is the best one, then pier 70. Waive prevailing wages, then Spend 2.5M on campaigning mission rock and offer community benefits
Spam community meetings and permit expediting. Don’t agree to labor agreements, don’t give density unless the commission denies your approval. This should get you past the first two investor reviews. Ideally you can complete a mega project, which gives you a buffer to option a bunch of marginal land
Then pivot to affordable around 2020 when everything stops penciling. Max out density bonuses. Start picking up projects that almost pencil but not quite because you’ll need them to get past the reviews in 2027 and beyond
Keep spamming community meetings and permit expediting, and always pay to save on build time unless your in the 20-25 doldrums where nothing pencils. Keep your pipeline full and you should win
Will the new California law Senate Bill (SB) 79 (the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act) help? It came into effect this July.
One specific complaint: The BART station entrances at 16th/24th & Mission: Why not build huge apartment buildings (10/20/30 floors) on top of them? And since both locations are a pair of entrances, you can close one, then build. Then repeat with the other entrance. They seem like perfect locations. There must be a bunch more no brainer lots around the city like these.
> “huge apartment buildings … 10 floors”
It’s kind of mind-blowing to remember that what’s the basic residential building standard everywhere else in the world is already “huge” in most American cities.
I'm not sure this comment is very useful. It is much too generic. Look at most "old cities" (think Hanseatic era) in Western Europe. Over 10 floors is a huge residential building in central, old areas. Residential buildings in the central arrondissements in Paris are rarely more than 5-6 floors. Same for London. Same for Hamburg. Same for Amsterdam.
The only place in San Francisco that has many residential buildings more than 3-4 floors and is building more/new is SoMa (South of Market) and Rincon Hill. (I have not lived there for 10+ years, so please correct me if I am wrong.) Sure there are some odd ducks in Russian Hill or Nob Hill, but they are from 1960s/70s. Nothing new is built there now, except billionaires doing a tear-down/re-build.
Wild idea: What if we build 4x fifty story apartment blocks on those four blocks that I mentioned at Mission District BART stations? You could do stuff like bottom 3-5 floors are all retail (small biz plus chains), then next 30 floors are middle class housing, and the upper floors are unlimited for the rich. I think it would be a good mix. The hardest part of the build might be creating enough car parking spots for the luxury units at the top. We might need to do something bizarre/exotic underground, or buy adjacent lots to tear-down for a multi-story parking lot. To be clear: I am not excited about building new parking garages in 2020s in urban San Francisco, but it is a reasonable compromise for selling luxury units at the top of the tower. All together, this mega project could be easily a 1B USD build. Another bonus: One floor in one tower near the top could be reserved as an observation deck/floor. That would be very cool, like a modern Coit Tower for the 2020s.
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SF is not much of a city
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And Paris.
They’ve been trying to build housing there for a decade and it keeps getting blocked. https://sfist.com/2023/12/06/former-monster-in-the-mission-n...
Not my original joke:
The United States is a command economy, where the only command is "no".
We need one for HS2 where every time you try and build a small section of track, they demand a bat tunnel or a newt ramp or a fox power plant.
This was a good reality check about the bat tunnel controversy: https://www.bats.org.uk/news/2025/04/hs2-bat-tunnel-dangerou...
Dunno, if you are dumb enough to try to build a high speed line through an area where endangered species are protected then yeah you’re going to have to avoid killing them.
It looks like a good idea. It didn’t need to cost £100 million.
What a predictably one-sided take from... one of the sides.
Your link claims, technically correctly, that the bat tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife protection laws. What it does not ever admit is that those laws forced something to happen, and that it was already known more than 10 years ago that the least expensive "something" was the bat tunnel.
Specifically your link says regarding the tunnel:
> HS2 Ltd, a government-owned company, proposed the structure. You can read what they have to say about it here (https://www.hs2.org.uk/building-hs2/environmental-sustainabi...).
That link says, under the section "Which other options did HS2 look at?":
> In 2021, a ‘first principles’ review was undertaken by the Department for Transport, DEFRA and Natural England, but did not identify any better solution that was able to both fulfil the requirements of the relevant legislation relating to species protection whilst also reducing cost.
> The most feasible engineering options were also subject to an additional independent design review by the consultants Arup, which concluded that the solution now being taken forward provided the best balance of value for money and risk mitigation, from the four viable options that were shortlisted.
> Choosing any of the other options would have opened-up the risk of legal challenge, delay and subsequent extra cost.
> Options considered included a bored tunnel beneath this area, a shallower ‘cut and cover’ tunnel and rerouting the railway away from the wood altogether. Consideration was even given to permanently slowing down trains as they run past the area.
Regarding my earlier "known 10 years ago" claim, it says:
> The need for the structure was identified by HS2 Ltd more than 10 years ago, following extensive surveying of bat populations by our own ecologists.
Finally, it also says:
> Despite the passing of the 2017 Act, HS2 Ltd still had to gain almost 8,500 environmental or planning consents along the 140-mile route from London to the West Midlands.
8500 consents. Your link claims that other causes, like "underfunding" and "bad project management" are to blame for cost and time overruns, and that environmental consents are being used as a scapegoat. That would be easier to believe if that consent number was, say, two orders of magnitude smaller.
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The UK should stop the genocide of badgers too
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Very nearly half of HS2 - 64 miles - is in tunnels. This happened because the Conservative government was terrified of upsetting the Conservative voters along the route. The bat tunnel was nuts, but it's not that significant overall.
That is partly true but it's a downstream consequence of the ultimate cause. Those running and pushing the project in the early stages desperately wanted it to be a 400+kph route for "prestige" reasons.
If they hadn't been so focused on that, they could have built the new rails largely alongside the existing West Coast Main Line which would have been quicker, cheaper and much less controversial.
But because they wanted those very high speeds, the route had to be flatter and straighter than the existing WCML, which means many more tunnels, longer and more complex construction, more people objecting, inconvenienced etc and ultimately much more cost however you look at it.
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Yeah it's more because they wanted the high speed trains to go super fast because bigger number is better, in reality it dramatically increases the impact of the track you build - corners have to be wider, gradients have to be avoided, and offsets (and the land you need to purchase for them) need to be bigger.
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> a bat tunnel or a newt ramp or a fox power plant
Source? (To be clear, not doubting you.)
https://martinrobbins.substack.com/p/i-visited-the-infamous-...
https://www.hs2.org.uk/sustainability/environmental-sustaina...
> The estimated cost of the structure is c. £95 million in 2019 prices. This can also be expressed as £114m in 2022 prices.
Bat tunnel is real, it cost millions. The others riffs on the theme I expect
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My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.
Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio, though
> Beijing has a substantially worse median price to income ratio
As would, I’d think, San Francisco under a similar system.
It’s not a good solution. But for the preferences San Francisco’s residents seem to be expressing, it’s the only way. (Fortunately, it’s probably unconstitutional.)
Agreed.
Open immigration for rest of the country from around the world but closed for their city from rest of the country is what these “progressives” seem to want by their actions.
That system leads to an oversupply of single men in rural areas and single women in big cities.
Explain?
Love the idea!
I started something similar as a meme game, but I'm just too busy to keep working on it: Data centre slumlord - https://binary-mirror.itch.io/data-centre-slumlord
Whoever made this, I love you and we should be friends.
It does have the blue angels flying over the city at one point
The Nuclear option is an interesting choice the game has locked up.
The only winning move is not to play.
what's the nuclear option?
Literally that. Drops a nuke on SF.
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I would love to provide a version of this for my city. I think the council could do with a way to practice without destroying what we have.
Want to share the Code? I would adapt it to the German situation and add to it - the first YIMBY Simulation
Took me back to sim farm. The aesthetics are awesome
Needs more strawberries and oranges.
Maybe some cotton, also herbicides and pesticides too, with matching trucks or planes to spray :)
Damn I got rekt, crazy to read all the regulations and neighbors just dog walking me :'(
I'm just jamming out to the music
Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?
This is the inverse of a cozy game. Stressed me out.
I'm a unclear on what high "The Neighborhood" scores mean in the right panel before approving the project, is it good or bad?
This game is rigged by pigs at the trough.
I can't find it now, and I'm pretty sure it was featured on HN, but there was a board game like this where you had to cooperatively add housing to the Bay Area under all the constraints you have to operate under, and, when playing, we discovered that the only way to do it was to massively upzone some remote East Bay city.
You win by not playing…
I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting.
Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.
Would you include the part where almost every technology you researched in the past made life worse or would they just hate technology for no reason in the game?
So, "If only you could talk to the monsters" but at the level of this genre?
I mean that's kinda how Civ works already. Some civs get bonuses for education & research, others in combat, etc, and focusing on the things incompatible with your civ will "punish" you.
It sounds like you just don't agree with how they've implemented America lol.
What would prioritizing education mean in Civilization? The game's model is fairly simple:
1. There are three resources: food, industrial production, and commercial activity;
2. As the player, you can divide commercial activity between three categories: research, state revenue, and local "luxuries", which in this context just means tax relief;
3. Scientific progress occurs when you've produced enough research to learn a new technology;
4. The only appearance of "education" anywhere in the game is that there is an expensive building called a "university" that increases local production of research. (The predecessor building with the same effect at a lower cost is the "library".)
On the other hand, "there is always division and infighting" is one of the most important and fundamental mechanics in the game; if your city grows beyond a quite small population cap, new citizens are automatically unhappy and will shut down the whole city unless pacified somehow.
I think you missed the point. I was pretty clear about not focusing on Civ specifically.
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Because I don't know enough about the internal divisions in other countries. But I can tell you Americans will fight progress at every turn.
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The only way to beat this game is to not play.
Reminds me of tax forms. Good times.
what a throwback feel, nicely done
how do you complete a tutorial when you cant mute this fucking music
There is a button on the top right to turn off the music.
thats inaccessible while you are in the tutorial!
Gah! Thanks for that, I didn't know there was music.
Davis, CA. lol
Some context, because it is definitely an insider joke.
Davis had a long and contentious civic debate on whether or not Target should be allowed to build a store in Davis, eventually Davis held a city wide vote on the matter, which did pass [1].
Davis voters reject Measure V, spiking plans to build Village Farms housing [2].
Just a couple of examples where growth that most cities would approve without thought became a city wide civic issue that the community actually voted on.
[1] https://localwiki.org/davis/Target/History [2] https://www.abridged.org/news/davis-measure-v-election-updat...
Personally I feel we need more of this. Turns out that unchecked growth isn't all its cracked up to be.
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This misses the HN guidelines by a wide margin. Please review and consider a more constructive critique.
[dead]
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Regarding the comments about the jargon file...
Something definitely changed around the dot com crash. The channels I slummed around in of EFNet went from excited hacker archetypes to the same people doing jobs I was am in retrospect surprised about [0]
[0] - Im general, emulator devs working for bigger corporations. But most specifically one that wound up doing stuff around customs intrediction tech, major shift from their pre emulation work.
Money destroys everything it touches eventually.
I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb
Line at the end of the in-game "rulebook":
> Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play.
Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude. This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
EDIT: I'll link to an example of what I think this game should have been: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
A game made with intent, that is easy to pick up, respects its player's time, and makes its point effectively.
This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't. If he wants to make a spreadsheet simulator or something targeted at people who like complex interfaces he can do that. I point at ASCII-UI Dwarf Fortress, one of the great games of this century, as evidence that a game does not need to be accessible to be true art.
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
Except Dwarf Fortress is an actual game, and I've sunk a lot of hours in it. Same with the city builders TFA is trying to mimick.
> Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
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> Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI?
My guess is that's the point - now you understand how San Francisco property developers feel.
> Who is this for??
Like most vibe coded projects, it is for the person who created it. And usually only them.
These people should, instead of posting the game, just post a video of them playing through the game, as most people have no interest in playing other’s slop but may just be curious to watch someone play and provide comedic value.
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It's a throwaway joke about NIMBYism, not a triple-A blockbuster production.
You've completely missed what my comment was trying to convey. If it's throwaway, why is it so damn complex to play? I've seen AAA games with less features.
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I think that may be exactly the point.
No, I do not think fighting the UI is part of the point this game is trying to make. I'll give a good example of what such a game should be: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html
There's no reason a "housing crisis" game couldn't have been done like that, with simple choices and immediate reactions. A game that respects the player's time, is easy to pick up and makes the point effectively.
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Eh, your example is a different kind of game. Not into linear choose-your-own-adventure games myself. I think the UI of this one accurately models the many moving parts and forces in the process it's simulating, and I didn't have a problem picking it up though I skipped the tutorial. It has a sense of humor (read the speaker comments at meetings, and the news articles), and hits you with the real world outcome each development is based on. Made an impact on me.
"I didn't understand this, so I had an AI make this so that you couldn't understand it too"
> Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for??
Tell me you never played the old TUI dwarf fortress without telling me.
Well, you should seek a better tell because I've played ASCII Dwarf Fortress quite a bit. Re-read my comments, I only have an issue with TFA's complexity, in the context of it being a throwaway educational game. It shouldn't require as much involvement from the player as it currently does. And certainly, it shouldn't even occur to people to compare it to Dwarf Fortress, which happened twice already.
You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.
> maybe you could take the hint
Locked supply. Affordable housing. Growing standards of living (or population). Pick two.
If you lock supply and want taxes and wages to grow, you're choosing unaffordable housing. That's San Francisco's current policy choice. Over decades, it filters the poor to San Francisco's "outer boroughs" or onto its streets.
For what it's worth, my friends who lived in San Francisco "took the hint" and moved out when they chose to have kids. They didn't sell their place, however, since the above policy mix together with California's property-tax system strongly disincentivizes that.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
That's of course an option too.
I haven't played OP's game but hopefully it accurately models the plummetting quality of life and rampant homelessness created by doing what you describe in the real world.
Or you could look at the massive number of homeless people and take the hint yourself
Reminds me of this: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1259638112688304129
I have absolutely no idea what that means related to my comment, but I’m really enjoying seeing my opinions getting roasted for being out of touch.
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Yeah, how DARE people under 40 want somewhere to live!
I remember before COVID I was debating with a friend of mine whether or not private property is justifiable and it's ironic that the discussion was made obsolete by nobody being able to afford private property anymore
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I mean, stopping housing construction hasn’t stopped the new money from pushing out the old soul. Given the US enshrines the free movement of people in the Constitution, it’s make room or have someone outbid you for yours.
Yes, lets turn everywhere into the shitty place we grew up in.
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let me guess, homeowner in SF?
I’m a single family homeowner in SF and as YIMBY as they come. And contrary to my goals of development even if it deflates home prices, development lags and home prices are getting more out of control.