I like my city builder games as much as the next guy. I’ve played them since SimCity 2000 and earlier this year wrote about TheoTown already.

Last week I stumbled upon this guy jamessimo on YouTube who’s creating the city builder of his dreams: a game with no grid whatsoever, with parcels of land of arbitrary shapes and sizes. Traditionally these games have been strongly grid-based, even if Cities: Skylines popularized a method where your roads can curve freely, yet the buildings next to them are always placed on a (rotated) grid.

I really like jamessimo’s clear and calm explanations of the systems in his game. He’s an experienced software engineer by trade and has already been working on his game for a couple of years. There’s a part 2 of his series already available as well, detailing his traffic simulation model.

While looking into city builders I discovered there is, of course, a city builder subreddit, r/CityBuilders. There, someone had recently announced a new game called Traffic Architect which I ended up playing on my phone for quite a while. It’s a sub-category of city builders, I guess, where you only focus on making the traffic flow as efficiently as possible. New buildings pop up, new pieces of the map open up, and you unlock new road types. Eventually the game ends once your road network is gridlocked enough. The game reminds me of Mini Metro, or maybe more accurately Mini Motorways. Traffic Architect is also coming to Steam as an improved version, but the browser-based game will stay free, the author says.