Ville Saalo, moi! 👋 Profile Photo

Ville Saalo, moi! 👋

Interested in tech, reading, LEGO, and some such random stuff. ("moi": Finnish for "hi", "hello")

games

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    City builders

    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.

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    How to build an airport in TheoTown

    A while back all the windows in our apartment were replaced, which necessitated that we clear the space in front of the windows. This included the table on which my desktop PC is located and that my kid uses to play Cities: Skylines II, so we needed a temporary replacement city-builder for mobile. I had heard of this game called TheoTown and went with that, and it turns out it feels immediately familiar for those who have played city-builders, especially of the older type like SimCity 2000, which is nice.

    In the game I, for some reason, found it very unintuitive on how to build an airport. You cannot just plop it down and be done with it, no, you need to place all the runways and individual buildings separately. So, in case you’ve ever wondered how to build an airport in TheoTown, here’s a set of detailed instructions on how exactly to do that.

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    Elevator Saga game

    What should happen if you’re on the tenth floor of a building and push the button to call an elevator? Obviously, the elevator should come to you. But what if it’s going up at the 11th floor at the moment, as someone told it to take them to the 15th floor? Well, do that first, then get to the tenth floor. But what if, meanwhile, someone calls it to the 14th floor, wanting to go down? Maybe pass that floor when going up, but stop there on the way down to the tenth floor. But what if you, on the tenth floor, want to get to the 16th floor? Maybe pass the person waiting the 14th floor after all. And what if there are multiple elevators in the lobby, which one should be dispatched and where?

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    Robot Battle, an old Windows game

    In the 1990s and early 2000s I played this great game called Robot Battle by Brad Schick. It’s an open-ended programming game where you use a programming language called Robot Scripting Language (RSL) to program battle bots to shoot at each other. The bots look like tanks, consisting of a tracked body, turret, and radar. The arena is viewed from top-down and, in addition to the robots, would also contain mines that you would want your robots to avoid, and cookies that give you more energy. The game relied heavily on its community, initially connected via the Robot Battle Mailing List (RBML), later via the Robot Battle Registry web forum.

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    How NetHack got me into the Battlefield series

    NetHack is a notoriously difficult game that some people play for decades and never win, even if they have all the spoilers available. I used to play it a lot some twenty years ago.

    The game may not look like much; in fact by default it consists only different characters and symbols of different colors: you are the @ symbol, a grey d is your dog, a purple capital letter is some highly dangerous monster, a brown % is food, and so on. It takes a bit of imagination, but once you’re fully immersed into the game, even looking at your own email address may send shivers down your spine because it looks like you’re in a narrow corridor surrounded by monsters.A screenshot of NetHack, borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. Distributed under the NetHack General Public License. The image shows a typical in-game situation in a dungeon.

    The goal is to descend down a perilous dungeon, retrieve a powerful magical item called the Amulet of Yendor, come back up, get to the Elemental Planes and the Astral Plane, and finally offer said amulet to your deity, who will grant you the gift of immortality in return. This called ascending the game, i.e. ascending to demigod(dess)hood.

    So, how did NetHack get me playing the Battlefield series, then? Battlefield is a series of first-person shooter games that has always been bragging with some cutting-edge graphics, so it couldn’t be much farther away from NetHack.

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    Wordle

    Today I reached a streak of 100 in Wordle. 😃

    Wordle 1,352 4/6

⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
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⬛⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

WordleBot
Skill 90/99
Luck 46/99
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    Clash Royale

    Supercell is a successful Finnish mobile game company known for Clash Royale, a strategic real-time card game where players use various units to defeat opponents' towers.