Cute Town 

Welcome, mayor! Cute Town is a cosy little girly city builder. Help your residents like in the kind of town they'll love, decorate your office, and build the town of your dreams.

Designed to be played on desktop/laptops with multiple mouse buttons.

Features:

• Every game is different with three types of procedurally-generated maps and different characters to meet
• People upgrade their homes when they are happy, based mostly on their own unique goals; their goals may change when they do, too
• Make an efficient town layout to help people reach the stuff they like as they wander around the town
• Make different types of buildings to maximise your town's friendship, beauty and fun (will your advisors ever be satisfied with your town?)
• Collect cute stamps and office decorations

Controls

• When you launch into a game, note the mini-map to the bottom left. This gives you an overview of your town, with its name and current population. There are two buttons here - one to open your office, the other for the in-game menu.
• The main map can be moved with right-click, WASD, or edge scrolling. The HOME button re-centers the map.
• Click and drag to build paths; holding down shift while you release the mouse button lets you plan out a city design by building multiple paths.
• When you click to build a house, a popup will ask you whom to build the house for. Read this carefully and try to match up people with the things they want from their area. New immigrants spawn here periodically.
• Right-click to cancel the current building command.
• Click on a building for more information about it.

Tips

• The most important building in the game is the house. Houses and most buildings are always 2 by 2 tiles in size, so you can make predictable grids (except around water).
• Buildings can be accessed from any direction via a path, even diagonally
• Some buildings (eg churches) call people to them every so often, while others work best with maximum path access (eg ponds); read the popups carefully when placing them. For buildings that want maximum path access, building them on intersections can be a good strategy.
• Don't just spam more service buildings - check if your existing buildings have many people going to them first. Many buildings - especially community spaces - are more effective when they are popular.
• Don't forget to collect the first stamp from the Mayoral Postman (otherwise you can't get the trophy for having the biggest stamp collection)
• Deleted houses cause their occupants to go back into the pool of people who you can build a house for. Don't be afraid to delete buildings that are now getting in the way of your perfect town.

Layers

The theme for the game jam was layers. My first thought on hearing the theme was the map overlays on old city-builder games. I extended this idea by having the mayoral office be a whole other layer to the game. I also tried to make people more complex by having them discover new interests and so forth as they spend time in your town, provided you keep them happy.

Backstory

I built Cute Town over a week (for the Girly Game Jam), shortly after I lost my teaching job, with the support of my girlfriend and stepdaughter. I was trying to do something positive for myself to bounce back. Unfortunately, during this week almost all of us have been sick, and two of my relatives ended up in hospital. But I still tried my best to make and finish a fun game.

I haven't done a game jam in a long time. Historically, art has always been my weak point in game jams, so I made a real effort with this. I hope it does ok, but even if it doesn't, I'm still proud of it. Now I guess I'll be going back to trying to find a job.

Implementation

• Per the rules of the Girly Game Jam, no generative AI has been used to make this game; all the tools I used are listed in the in-game credits.
• The game engine is completely my own work. I did use some base code from other little projects I've done over the years but I'm proud of this anyways.
• I've never done a project with any 3D elements before. I'm using plain old WebGL as it's what I'm familiar with from my 2D work, but had to learn a lot of new stuff. One particular challenge was loading 3D models. I created my own nonsense file format to handle this.
• Likewise, JSON just wasn't good enough for save files, so I had to make my own format for serializing arbitrary game data too.
• I did have dreams of making this mobile compatible and stuff but after a week I'm kinda tired.

Hope you enjoy playing Cute Town!