Note: these design diaries were originally published in spring/summer of 2025. The design, and definitely the screenshots, have changed a lot since then! I hope you'll find them an interesting look in the design and development process, and an insight into what does or does not change over the course of development. - nic
City builders invoke friction for the player in various ways. Many have systemic values like happiness or pollution that, through the actions of the player and system, go up and down. The player needs to balance whatever goals they have with maintaining these values. Other common sources are geographic features and terrain, both elevation but also water features or natural resources.
This kind of friction was at the front of my mind at the early stages of Amberspire's design, simply because I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to represent in the game. Put differently, the game didn’t really give the player a reason to place buildings in any specific location or otherwise engage with the 'building' part of the city. Up until this point I was focused on the dice rules primarily and overall technical aspects of getting the game functional.
Anyway, the design needed an active pressure on the player; a reason to build a building in one spot or another. My goals were for a system to do that, provide a little friction so the player had some decisions to make, and provide little seeds for a narrative they could tell about their city. This narrative was a key goal for me, as I wanted the city to feel like it had a history that the player could see come to life as they played.
The Ecology of a Moon
The solution to these goals that I arrived at was an evolution of the auto-houses and cellular automata, which I started calling algorithmic terrain.
In Amberspire, the ecology and wildlife of the moon is represented with these terrain tiles, which take up space on the grid. They are giant blooms of rust, pockets of viscous floodplains, patches of silica grass, and dense fog. All together they represent the organic elements of the world that would respond to the player by growing, moving around, and generally operating on the map around the player’s city.
These are driven by weather dice, which cue the behaviors of the terrain tiles in the world by growing and spawning in specific patterns. The auto-houses are an expression of population for the city, the algorithmic terrain is an expression of the world around the city. It is a semi-random, ecological environment that sometimes is out of your way and sometimes disruptive.
They are not fully cellular automata driven, but closer to an [L-system]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system). The game has stored patterns for how each terrain moves, and patterns are applied over existing terrain, so a balance is struck between random growth in predictable patterns. More exciting, when terrains touch one another, they 'explode' into large and unique patterns.
Inertia of Cities
The terrain also tie together in how they are cued up by the game, in that providing resources to buildings can increase your population or reduce nearby terrain tiles. Instead of having more abstract systemic values the player has to balance, these are represented in the world, as population and ecology. How your city 'is doing' is visually apparent, and responding to problems to achieving goals is limited by the buildings and resources you have nearby. The game does not allow you to buy your way out of a situation, and the inertia of your past decisions is strongly felt.
This sounds hard and imposing, but it's not! The outcome of these situations is not failure, but an interesting history for a neighborhood in your city.
My goal is to make a citybuilder that places your city in an environment that is alive and not totally frozen in time I want your city in Amberspire to feel like a real city, shaped by people but also chance and the environment.