SimBlob

• Screenshots
• Ideas for games
• The original SimBlob pages

Overview

SimBlob is a strategy game with simulation of the environment and economy affecting your quest to conquer neighboring towns. The setting is an early (green) Mars, with blobs being the most intelligent life form on the planet.

The plan was for the SimBlob project to include two (or more) simpler games instead of one very complex one. The games would have shared the basic map structure (a hexagonal grid map), environmental simulation (water flow, erosion, fires, tree growth, etc.), and user interface.

The first game, BlobCity, is a single player game where you are playing against the environment. In it you try to build a town in a world that has fires, floods, volcanos, and so on.

By the end of 1999 only one game was implemented, on OS/2. See " Ideas for games " for some suggestions for simblob games. A porting from OS/2 to Linux was started 2002-Aug.

Playing the Game

The play in BlobCity is "Blobs vs. Nature" (single player) instead of "Blobs vs. Blobs" (human player vs. computer players), which had been planned for the second SimBlob game. Like SimCity, there is no predetermined goal; instead you set your own goals. You are building a town and seek to conquer the elements.

Try to build your towns to withstand floods, yet be near sources of water.
Try to build your towns to withstand fires, yet be near forests.
Try to achieve 600,000 population without auto-build mode.
Try to have more food than people in your town.

Hints:

1. If you want to create irrigation channels, start at a water source on a mountain. Build a walled channel that slopes gently downwards. Along this channel, build gates. Outside the channel, starting from each gate, build a trench. This trench will receive some water from the main channel, but due to the gate, will not take all of the water. Note: This works better if you can put several water sources inside the walled channel.
2. To protect against fires, put fire watchtowers in spaces that the blobs aren't going to build in anyway. For example, a common road pattern is a hexagon with seven spaces inside; with this, only six will be used by the blobs, and the middle hex can be filled with a watchtower.
3. To protect against floods, either build flood trenches that will catch and divert flooding, or place trenches in open spots that blobs don't build in. The first solution will keep flooding from occuring; the second solution will drain water away if your town does get flooding.
4. To get the most from a water source, force the water go go down a gentle slope. On a steep slope, water will flow faster, and your river or channel will be shorter, so fewer farms will benefit.

The Simulation

Farms, houses, and markets will be created automatically near roads. Markets must be adjacent to a road; houses can be two spaces away; and farms can be three spaces away. Markets make more money in city centers; houses are better near the city center but it's not as critical as it is for markets; farms prefer being near water and aren't really interested in paying higher land prices for areas near a city. As a result, farms near cities will be bought by people building markets or houses, and houses near the city center will be replaced by markets.

Anything that needs to be built will be marked with a hexagon, and then a builder blob will go there to build it.

Water will flow downhill. Trenches are 50 feet deep, so water will flow into them. Walls are 120 feet high, so they block most water. Gates are also 120 feet high, but they allow a small amount of water to pass through. You can use gates to build spillways or controlled release points on dams; or you can use them as openings on the sides of an irrigation canal, to let out small amounts of water to side canals.

Economic simulation involves determining how many people are able to get to work and how much food can be delivered to homes. To do this, network flow algorithms make people "flow" from certain points (houses) to markets to other points (farms). The same algorithms are used for making food "flow" from farms to houses. (Both workers and food must travel through a market.) For now, workers producing food forms the entire basis for BlobCity's economy. BlobCity will probably not have any military simulation and is unlikely to have any political simulation; these two are more likely to be in the second SimBlob game.