TLDR: Check out my new game! (for desktop, not mobile)
Little Victoria
My ten year old asked me to make her a game in which she builds a city. In trying to do so, I found this really cool website that had a set of open source Victorian buildings for making games. I can only assume that the artists (Liberated Pixel Cup) were intending these to be for murder mysteries or something like that. Nevertheless, I decided to turn it into a city builder with some sneaky educational elements. I got so excited that I bought a domain[1] and started working on more sneaky educational games using all this cool open source game art. While it's geared towards a ten year old girl, I find it pretty fun too, so I'm sharing with you.
Here are a couple postcards from the city I'm building:
Here's the link to play: Little Victoria
Heavy zaps for anybody that can find historical inaccuracies or anachronisms that i need to fix.[2] I'm going to keep adding features too, so let me know if you've got any suggestions.
Anywho, enjoy!
Yeah, the hub website is currently sloppy. The games are not though! I've actually put a ton of time into making sure it's as accurate as possible and really fun to play. ↩
Real problems, not stupid things like, "that particular building doesn't look right." I'm looking for issues that are clearly teaching something important in which I really got part of the info wrong. Finding typos would be helpful too though. ↩
I got pretty drawn in. Nice job!
Nice town! I really like your central market by the clock tower.
If you want to take a photo without all of the other stuff on it that you get from a screen-shot, click the camera emoji in the top right and you can have a little postcard from k00bville.
It looks quite interesting. I have an 8-year-old daughter, so I'll show it to her to see if she likes it and to get her opinion. I'll also test it and give you my thoughts on the game.
Right on! I hope you guys enjoy!
I hope so too.
I was just describing simcity to my boys. They sounded intrigued, but I hadn't yet gone out and looked at getting a copy running. I think I'm going to start them on this and see how they like it. I doubt they will find any anachronisms though, not being big on the Victorian era (they much prefer ancient Greece and Rome).
First pass: it looks great! I can see them having a lot of fun with this!
I hope they dig it. If not, I had so much fun with it that something more for boys should be in the works. This was definitely geared towards a girl. I avoided all the gothic horror, Jack the ripper, mystery novels, and other fun guy stuff from the era for my daughter's sake. That said, I've been having fun playing it. lol
try Cities Skylines
Hey this is awesome. Like the educational thingies throughout too!
Thanks! I've put a lot of thought into what to include and how to include it. If I did it right, the player will absorb some trivia randomly (Scots Pine being Britain's only endemic pine tree), but they actually can't get ahead in the game if they don't learn about the problem with rats in the urban 19th century or the changes in child labor laws during the industrial revolution.
I spotted the rats and was wondering where can I get a DDT factory but had to actually get back to work around 110 population. lol
In the game, the rats are intentionally hard to control. I've heard that Warren Buffet might be able to help you find some (rat poison)2 though...
This looks amazing and like a lot of fun.
Thanks! I was really hoping you'd check it out. You've got kids in the target demographic, right? I'm curious what they think if you let them try it.
Already showed it to my wife and daughter and they loved the look of it. Will give it some gameplay later as my daughter is doing school work right now.
Right on!
The game looks good
Thanks!
So cool! Will check it out this week.
Thanks, have fun and let me know what you think!
gonna add lightning to it? (yes it would be a total anachronism, but maybe there's a way to do it right?)
Nah, probably not on this stuff. On the site that I setup to post games like this, I put a little donation solicitation using lightning, but I don't anticipate it will get used much.
I put all sorts of lightning integrations into this game, but it's both much more ambitious while being much less developed.
Hard to play on mobile
This isactually amazing!! Just tried and built some buildings too! I am sure that you have spent lots of hours creating Vaderville :)
Thanks! I'm pretty happy with my town. It's interesting to see how different the members of my family approach urban planning.
This is properly researched, especially the cholera run. Snow in 1854, the Great Stink and Bazalgette in 1858, then "where the sewers are done there is no cholera" in 1866. That's the real order it happened in, and making the player sit through the decade of doctors laughing at Snow is a great touch.
Also worth saying up front: the whole thing looks great, and the nerd-level detail is the best part of it, not something to apologise for. The Liberated Pixel Cup Victorian art was a smart pick and you have placed it with real care. It is obviously a lot of hours, and it shows. Nothing below is a knock, it is just the stuff you asked for.
Three things I caught. Two are date slips, the third I would argue is a mechanics fix.
Bandstand in 1837. The cast-iron park bandstand is an 1860s thing. The usual "first" is 1861, in the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at South Kensington, and once the Glasgow foundries got into it they spread fast. Before that a park band played off a raised wooden platform, often just called the orchestra. Your 1846 mission ("a Bandstand or Hedge Maze by 1849") asks for one more than a decade early. Gating it to about 1862 fixes it.
Fire-Escape Tenement in 1837. The building itself is fine, but the external zig-zag iron fire escape on the front is the anachronism. Those are a late-century feature and mostly an American one, coming in with New York's tenement laws after 1867. A tall tenement in 1830s Britain didn't have a bolt-on iron staircase down the outside.
The Water Pump gives +health from turn one, and that quietly spoils your best scene. Your 1854 entry has Snow taking the handle off the Broad Street pump because it was killing people. It sat next to a leaking cesspit. But in game a street pump is a flat health bonus from 1837 on. A shared shallow-well pump before piped water and sewers was a gamble: sometimes clean, sometimes draining the churchyard into the cup. If pre-1854 pumps gave happiness or convenience but not health, or carried a small risk near cesspits and tenements, then "The Mystery of the Pump" in 1854 would actually change how you play. Right now the player already had the health, so the reveal is just a caption on a bonus.
One maybe: 1839 as the first Grand National is the standard line, but Aintree ran the race in 1836 to 1838 too, and some historians count those now.