after town

# About This Game

I wanted to build a game using swiftui for mac. my initial goal was to focus on using specifically apple ui design frameworks but that quickly went away after banging my head a few times and tossing my computer around with trying to maintain and expand on it. turns out fighting the framework is less interesting than working with what it can give you.

## how this started

the first time i submitted to a game jam, it was a text only interactive fiction game. barebones. text only. but i found that to be kind of liberating actually. i find that i sometimes spend countless hours trying to figure out different systems for rendering, a practice i do truly enjoy and find thrilling, but those are more often proofs of concept for me rather than having larger goals.

this was an interesting challenge. a city builder game with no graphics.

the limited palette of the swiftui tools kinda helped to push me in this direction. while the use of claude code allowed me to express certain design themes without using traditional rendering pipelines.

## on using llm tools for this

i know that there is controversy surrounding using llm tools for game, artistic, and narrative development but these have been really interesting to use for exploring various design languages, for exploring how to communicate different themes and forms of programmatic expression. the tool for me is a way to iterate quickly on narrative voice, on how a city can speak of itself, on what it could means for infrastructure if it were to have consciousness. all of this done in a way that i can experiment with language styles that spawn from my own concepts but spawned into stylisitc preferences that i enjoy exploring.

I find llms to be places for incredibly dense creative expression but i respect (and kinda envy) those who do not.

## the themes

anyway, i think there are some interesting themes and ideas that can come out of this game. while it's not an ideal representation of the story i'd like to tell, it does lean in that direction.

these themes include urbanism, memory, engineering, and the moments in which people experience a city.

is a city alive? does it think? does it watch? Can it hear?

so often in my field, urban planning, we lose sight of the literary expressions that are contained in the urban grammar. we calculate densities, we promote equity, we model efficiencies (all good things). but we rarely use that more hyperbolic language style to explore the poetry of a city. that cities are made of small moments. the person who takes the wrong train and meets someone. the corner store that holds a neighborhood together.

i hope that this can offer some insight into how we can understand how we as actors, cells, organs, veins, in a city help to construct its autonomy. we give it life through our patterns. our routines become its heartbeat

## what the game is

this is a narrative driven city consciousness game. you interact with a city that is learning to be aware of itself. it asks you questions. it shows you moments. you make choices about what to preserve and what to optimize away.

the city remembers your choices. it changes based on how you relate to it. do you treat it as a system to perfect? or as a collection of stories to protect?

every choice shapes not just the city's infrastructure but its personality, its trust in you, its ability to exist without you.

there are multiple endings. some about harmony. some about independence. some about what gets lost when we optimize everything. some about what breaks when we try to hold onto too much.

## on the constraints

the game is text based because that's what the constraints allowed. but also because cities speak in fragments. in overheard conversations. in signs on poles. in the names of streets that outlive the people they were named for. a gust of wind.

the terminal interface became the city's voice. clean. direct. sometimes poetic. sometimes technical. always aware that someone might be listening, or might have left the simulation running and walked away.

## what i learned

building this taught me that limitations can be generative. that fighting your tools is less productive than asking what they want to make. that narrative and code structure can mirror each other. that a city builder doesn't need graphics to make you feel it.

## play it if you want to

think about what cities remember. think about what we erase when we make change things, or when we oppose change. think of decisions we make and don't make. Think about your place in the city, when you drive through it, walk in it, or sleep within it, and when we die and are burried in it.

the city is waiting for input. it has been and will always be waiting. it will keep waiting whether you open the app or not. if you start over or not, if you keep things the same or if you destroy it.

that's all kind of the point.