Well, at least a virtual one! I just finnished adding disasters to CitySim, and that was pretty challenging, but also really fun! The disasters that are available are:
- Volcano
- King Kong
- Earthquake
- Meteor Shower
- Crime Wave
- Outbreak
Each one of them brings what I hope are unique challenges to the game, but also an element of fun. I'll break down each one here:
Volcano
A small volcano errupts somewhere on the map! Lava then spills over, creating small blazes in a random pattern around the mountain. Ultimately, it can "damage" up to 24 tiles, but this one is rather contained to one area. That means it densly damages a small area.
King Kong
This one was my absolute favorite to build, hands down. King Kong, the oversized gorilla shows up on your map and meanders in a wandering path accross your map, with a fun "walkingish" motion, leaving rubble behind in his wake. In theory, he can damage up to 32 tiles in a "wandering road" kind of line.
Earthquake
The most massive damage of all of the disasters, totaling up to 64 squares of rubble and ruin dispersed throughout the map. A fun note about this disaster is that I leaned how to send flickable commands to the board holder, as if you swiped back and forth on the screen, to immitate a small earthquake with a shaking motion.
Meteor Shower
I feel this one is a bit of a letdown, and I hope to fix it up better later. As it stands, overnight your town gets pummeled with up to 24 meteors, leaving rocks and craters all over the landscape. I wanted to have some sort of animation, though, so I hope to come back to this.
Crime Wave
Gangsters move into your city and start causing mayhem. Your crime rate doubles, and if you don't have enough police coverage (through police stations), every day there is a random chance that the criminals will destroy one of your buildings.
Outbreak
When there is an outbreak, your hospitals become overwhelmed and people leave your city. The duration of the affect depends on how many hospitals you have available. The more you have, the quicker the outbreak ends and things get back to normal. In the meantime, your population is lower than normal, and it is harder to upgrade your residential areas.
My hope is that each one of these events provides something unique to the game. Unfortunately, I think the Meteor Shower may not do that very well, which I also why I want to work on that one some more. I was thinking that it could be the go-between of the volcano, which is dense damage centered on a spot, to the earthquake, which is damage spread out over a wide area. I was also considering adding some sort of financial crisis, like inflation, but I decided against it for now.
Either way, the game is shaping up nicely, and all that remains are the sounds and the scenarios. You can check it out on my gitlab[1] if you are interested.
Linux - keep it simple.