Metropolis 1998 lets you design every building in an isometric, pixel-art city (2024)
Hey HN!
I'm the developer of Metropolis 1998. Unfortunately the launch date in the article has come and passed, but that's how things are in game development world. :D
Some tech talk:
- Custom engine (C++) using SFML for the graphics framework, and SQLite for database/data oriented design
- True isometric engine. No 3D models, everything you see is hand drawn sprites (made to look like a 3D render ha)
- Since sorting sprites is O(N^2), I figured out a way to create a depth map for each sprite to depth sort on the GPU
- Tons of work went into the pathing code to make it efficient, since this is the traditional bottleneck in these types of games. The game can handle around 100K units and vehicles moving around (on one CPU core)
- The team is just me and a couple part time contractors for the art and buildings.
- Most recent update (some cool skyscraper construction): https://x.com/YesboxStudios/status/1978928991663776224
- Fun fact: the entire game is currently 27 MB.
- Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
Love to see it! I think it's terribly unfortunate that we've left the isometric art style of the 90s behind. I'm sure this has been written about and thought about in deeper ways in different spaces, but there has to be more than mere nostalgia to the idea that the art and feel of everything from SimCity, to Age of Empires, to cRPGs had some specific affirmative artistic and aesthetic values that mattered in their own right and were not just a matter of being the best we could do in a given era.
Roadmap [1] last updated in June 2025, so a reasonable chance that the project is alive. Though the status colours indicate there's a good percentage of development left to do even before early access.
Was a little thrown reading
> You’re putting your time in now, so you’ll be ready to start fresh when the game releases into early access (“ETA sometime between Q4 2024 and Q2 2025”).
'till I went back and looked at the publish date for the article. Might be worth appending a [2024] to the title.
Looks like lots of fun though, mellow and very zen. Suspect it's just the right time to learn about it too, with the release date considered and the amount of polish that implies.
Not the same vibes exactly, but a pixel/voxel-ish city builder I've been enjoying recently is Town to City
As an old school TT/TTD fan this gives me so many good vibes :) Been fun watching the progress and I do recommend people check out the demos on Steam if you just want to have a good nostalgia break even if the game isn't fully there yet.
One of the only recent games I've seen that have almost completely captured the style of the time. Looking good.
love the art style. if they support mac, I'll happily purchase a copy.
in development since 2021, and in pre-alpha? So a release date in 2030?
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