Hi r/tycoon

I wanted to share with you this little trailer for Factory Default: Build, Trade, Repeat. It basically tells you that FD will be available on Steam in Early Access on September 8th!

In Factory Default: Build, Trade, Repeat, you manage a company across a 3D hex globe featuring 105 real countries and unions. Each has its own market, taxes, resource fertilities, and workforce demands. I tried to make the supply chains feel realistic. You navigate global geography and politics to secure resources for large-scale projects like a new continent in the Pacific, a space elevator, a space station, and as you can see on the roadmap, eventually much of our Solar System.

Published by MicroProse, and entering Early Access on September 8th!

If any of that interests you, you can check out the Steam Page where I go into much further detail.

Thanks!

-Chett

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3901610/Factory_Default_Build_Trade_Repeat/

AI Disclosure: No AI was used in the making of this game.

So I've been building a browser game called Verticopolis that's supposed to have complete parity with the original 1994 SimTower, and you can also flip on a more "modern" variant when you start a new tower for stuff the original couldn't do.

The game is at https://verticopolis.com/

There's a help page too if you want to get your first tower going: https://verticopolis.com/help

It runs right in the browser, no install, and you can also download it as a PWA on Android, Mac and PC to play standalone... no internet required unless you want to grab updates when they come through.

A few things I'm kinda proud of:

Every room type has its own art, you can see them all here: https://verticopolis.com/gallery

The little voices when you zoom in on people are literally me and my kids babbling in gibberish 😅

The save-file conversion works both ways now! You can take a .tdt save from the real 1994 game and load it in the browser, AND export a tower from the browser back into the actual 1994 game and it'll load and play. I've round-tripped a big 4-star tower (~1,900 rooms, 15 elevator shafts, full basement with metro + parking) through both games and back 🎉🎉. Still always happy to get more real .tdt saves to test weird edge cases though, so send 'em my way!

It's open source too, contributions welcome (GitHub is linked in the help section).

Please let me know what y'all think, what's missing from the original, and what you'd want added in the "modern" variant!

Oh, and since r/tycoon requires it, here's my AI disclosure, no sugar-coating: a lot of this game is made with AI, with me directing and iterating heavily (I didn't just ship the first thing it gave me). The code is written largely by AI coding agents (Claude Code) while I do the design, balance and testing. The pixel art is AI-generated too. I iterated on it a lot to get each room right. The music and ambience I made by going back and forth with AI until the balance felt right (no staticky, annoying AI noise). The one fully-human part is the little character voices when you zoom in on people, which is literally me and my kids making noises 😁. No ripped assets anywhere, and it's all open source so you can see exactly how every bit of it is made.

I really want to jump into another tycoon game like the ones in the title, which I played so much of growing up. However, many modern tycoon games appear to have so much DLC on top of the base price or are just abandoned. Any recommendations where all DLC comes in one package and is finished?

It’s an isometric arcade management sim where you build and run your own arcade. You build and customize an arcade, manage its daily chaos, expand the business, hire a recurring cast of employees, deal with strange customers and dynamic events, maintain an evolving collection of machines, and actually step inside those machines to play mini-games yourself.

I coded it myself, drew everything myself, and now the systems are set. It took me around 17 months to build all of this. The biggest challenge was the FSM (finite state machine), which turned into an extensive coding lesson.

I’d really appreciate feedback, especially about what feels confusing, which systems need better explanation, bugs you encounter, and what parts of the game you think have the most potential.

AI Disclosure:
No AI was used in making of this game.

Link to the game:
https://cola-powered-gamer.itch.io/coin-op-empire

It's really janky but hoping it conveys the gameloop. You buy planes, add routes, and then adjust based on competitors' actions.

AI disclosure - no AI was used in the making of the game, the trailer or this post.