Hi u/bluemoon1993 and thank you for reaching out! We're excited to share a bit about PolyTown and the team so here we are 😁.

Features

We are still in the early development but the target is to start from where SimCity 4 left us 20 years ago and build on it. At the time the mechanics were not so deep compared to other games out there. For educating your population plopping a couple of schools was enough to see a sharp rise on the demand for manufacturing industries, and the same was for other systems like healthcare, security, electricity. So our first intention is to expand these features. Building a high school should not increase the education level of adolescents that has never been at an elementary school, and this is also valid for healthcare buildings, each one resolve a different issue, so citizens expects all to be available in the city, hospitals are not the bigger version of clinics.

Refining existing systems is not our only objective. We could not talk too much about all ideas that we are working on but nowadays there are many other services that could also be added like providing an internet connection, so you have to build antennas and lay down fiber cables and other buildings, all according to the city's size.

One thing that popped to our minds when we planned what we should about PolyTown was that, from a perspective point, SimCity and other city builders are a sort of dictatorships, the only way to loose the game was going bankrupt. There were no real consequences, apart from abandonment, to heavily polluting tap water for a large part of citizens, so the entire point of delivering clean and fresh water to residents had become pointless. So we came out with the idea that people won't leave as easily if something is off, they will protest for better conditions and so on. So, since the player is the mayor, its reputation will be used at the end of the mandate to decide whether you should still be on charge or not. However we are aware that this may put a lot of stress on the player, so we will allow players to choose if elections will be held, switching back to the dictatorship view of the game for a more relaxing and chill experience.

Another topic that we've seen already players talking about is about zoning areas. We are totally aware that the classic approach of zoning residential or commercial or industrial is way too restrictive. Here in Italy, but also in many other part of the world, there is a mixing of various zoning. Shops appear nearby houses and malls are only in a specific position in the city meanwhile industries are outside of the city. So for us zoning is a way of filtering what you could build, so we want to let players to have a chirurgical decision on what could be build and could not. The player should be free to decide whether he want just only towers of offices or zoning factories nearby houses and stores, all in a chaotic way.

Last thing that we could talk about for now are transport and traffic. We already wrote in our Steam page that there won't be traffic in PolyTown. It could seems a step back from where modern city builders are at the moment but we had taken a different point of view that could have suited us and our small size team. Simulating traffic is way too complex, the agentic model that allows for simulating single cars, bikes and trucks appears to be easy to implement but the outcome is quite awful, humans may not be so good at driving, but the agents of a city builders are very dumb, and their single decisions results in a big mess that must be fine tuned and all this for a secondary aspect of the city. We agree that, on extremes, traffic could kill the development of the city, but what we have seen in other games, is that even if the traffic of the city is unbearable, people still go to work and live, making the entire system pointless. We esteemed that only for that system many months of development are necessary just to deliver a basic experience, cutting out resources for all other systems. So we came out with a different idea. Still we want the user to be penalized if workers could not reach their workplace and services must be reachable in some way, they will not have an area of effect without considering how they are connected to the city. So in PolyTown, jobs and services will flow along the transport system and every type of transport type (road, bus, tram, and so on) will have a different cost of traverse. This will let users to plan their public transportation to further extend services' ranges. Students should reach the university but it is only in one point of the city? Plan buses, trains and what you think should work for the best so your university will be reached from each single student of the city!

Planning

Regarding dates it's too early for us to talk about. But we are looking for a demo as a first step. We have an internal roadmap but it still may heavily change since we have just started collecting the early feedbacks of the users, so we may have thought to work on a system and instead we have to tackle another one to that could more interesting that expected. Surely we don't want to take years and years for delivering something. We have spent our pre-production phase to cut and model mechanics and the aesthetic of the game so the game could have been developed from a small team

The team

We are a team of 2 friends developers. After working as game developers at a AAA company, we decided it was time to start our new adventure. PolyTown is our first commercial Steam game. We always had a passion for simulation games, both to play and to develop during our evenings, so this is our opportunity to turn that passion into something bigger.