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MicroCity
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About the game
MicroCity squeezes a whole city-building simulation into a pocket computer with a 128×64 black-and-white screen. You start in January 1900 with $10,000 and an empty landscape, and the town grows as you plan it: zone land for houses, shops and industry, connect it with roads, bring electricity from a power plant and keep people safe and happy.
The simulation runs month by month. Residential, commercial and industrial zones only develop when they are powered and reachable, and they push each other forward: homes need jobs, shops need customers, factories need workers. Police and fire stations cost money every year, fires can break out and spread, and the budget screen lets you raise or lower taxes to keep the treasury healthy. There are several terrain types to start from, with rivers and lakes to work around (roads and power lines can cross water as bridges).
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open credit-card-sized handheld: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in the Ardens emulator. Click Play, press X on "New City", pick a terrain with the arrows and confirm with X.
The game has its own save slot: open the toolbar, choose Save/Load and save your city there. It is kept in this browser and survives reloading the page. F2 also saves the state of the emulator at any moment, and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Arrow keys | D-pad | move the cursor on the map; choose in menus |
| X | B | build with the current tool; confirm in menus |
| Z | A | open the toolbar (pick a tool, Save/Load or Budget); close menus |
| Left / Right on the budget screen | D-pad | lower or raise the tax rate |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Power and roads first. A zone does nothing until a power line and a road reach it. Put a power plant down early and run lines to every block you zone.
Watch the budget. Every police and fire station has a yearly upkeep, and taxes pay for it. If money runs short, nudge the tax rate up on the budget screen; the Save/Load menu also has an option to let the game handle the budget for you.
Save often. Use the toolbar's Save/Load menu to keep your city between sessions; F2 is a handy extra for trying something risky and rolling back.
Credits and licence
MicroCity was created by James Howard, who wrote the code and drew the graphics; its small 4×6 pixel font comes from a font published under the MIT licence on Hackaday.io. The game is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3. The build served here was compiled from the author's v1.3 release with the Arduboy2 library (BSD) and the Arduino AVR core (LGPL); their complete source code is hosted alongside the game, and the licence texts are linked from this page.