CityNet Connect

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[Incoming transmission]

Welcome to CityNet. Your task will be to create and maintain our various internet networks. Thankfully our engineers at CityNet developed a tool to keep you up to date with all relevant information and give you access to our resources. May I present: CityNet Connect.

The eye-friendly blue background enables you to completly focus on the network. You need to build cables, repair them, upgrade them, repair them, and dismantle them. (We would appreciate you not doing all these actions at the same time on the same cable. They do cost money…)

Every week is unlike any other. Grow the network, shrink the network, enhance the network. In short, do everything to satisfy our customers. They require a constant internet connection. (They always complain about having home office and not being able to work…)

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Where is my script?

[background noises]

Start now, here at CityNet with CityNet Connect.

[Transmission end]

Why?

I made the game because I was bored during my second semester. That was when the pandemic first hit. I spent two weeks on the background shader alone but it also the first time I ventured into shaders.

The idea is pretty simple: You build the connections and the simulation, a graph algorithmn, distributes the load across the network. Connections cannot be build through nodes but you could use any physics obstacle. Also there is some randomness influenced by the maintenance factor that breaks certain cables. That logic is not very balanced though. It should model usage based breaking and cascading effects. Like some wear.

I was very keen to make level creation very easy and in fact planned to support custom maps but in the end never implemented the feature. Though the ease of use got a bit terrible as I hacked the tutorial in. But see it yourself (This video is recorded three years after I worked on the game and is sped up eight times to get it under two minutes. But nonetheless this level still took only thirteen minutes to make)

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