AdvertCity

• Title — AdvertCity • Developer — VoxelStorm • Publisher — VoxelStorm • Platforms — Microsoft Windows, Linux, OS X • Released — 17 April 2015 • Genre — Tycoon game • Modes — Single-player • Programmer — Eugene Hopkinson, John Turner • Composer — Alexandre Caelles, Dorian Pilato

• Illustration — Megacorporations seen in the cyberspace view. Gameplay in AdvertCity involves selling advertising to client megacorporations; the player does this by moving around the city from a first person god-view perspective, selecting buildings and sites in cyberspace as targets for their advertising. Advertising technologies are unlocked progressively depending on reputation with various megacorporations, and range from flyers to billboards and blimps. A key mechanic in the game is the ability to switch between meatspace and cyberspace at any time, which is required to perform different actions in each space and to orchestrate advertising effectively. The goal of the game is to take over the city, and to do this the player must gain the trust of the various megacorporations they interact with. The game has a roguelike save system to increase the level of challenge - there is only one savegame available, the player has no choice but to save their progress when exiting, and the player cannot reload to a previous state if they make a mistake.

Development of the game began when an early version of the game was built in 7 days for the 2014 Cyberpunk Game Jam. After receiving positive feedback during the jam, the developers decided to continue work on the game to create a full-scale release. The game sought crowdfunding via Kickstarter on 25 March 2014, and was fully funded on the second day of the campaign, going on be overfunded by 373% at its conclusion. AdvertCity was submitted to Steam Greenlight during its Kickstarter in 2014 and was eventually greenlit after an unusually long delay in April 2015. AdvertCity entered a period of closed beta testing during development after its kickstarter; the final release was announced on 17 April 2015, and by June it had appeared on Steam and several other stores.

Every city in the game is procedurally generated. The procedural city layout is positioned on top of a procedurally generated landscape, which it conforms to and evolves around. The developers considered using the industry standard SIGGRAPH 2001 paper by Parish and Muller as a basis, including the subsequent work on tensor fields, but rejected the use of L-systems on the grounds of their design being unsuited to cities, which "don't grow like branches on a tree". The system instead uses: "...maps calculated on a mix of realtime procedural projection and cached data about population layouts and terrain features (such as different terrain types, gradients, altitudes, population densities, whether the region should be considered urban or rural etc); the result is something that has the subtlety of the tensor field system, yet generates much larger cities than are feasible with the L-system at a far higher speed than possible with that design. The AdvertCity generator is an object-oriented system of roads, junctions and buildings that can be adjusted on the fly to interact with their immediate surroundings, so roads meet and cross at specific junctions, branch and fork (something not used in the L system design), and can also spontaneously degenerate from paved roads to footpaths etc as appropriate, due to terrain or other aspects of the landscape. Different classes of road or path can also have entirely different rules and code for how they react to different terrain types and other features, so it's possible to build a much more dynamic overall city map with those."

AdvertCitys soundtrack is a full-length score, unusual in that it is presented in two "sides", one for meatspace and one for cyberspace, with each track on each side having a beatmatched equivalent on the other; when the player switches between meatspace and cyberspace, the music smoothly crossfades between the two soundtracks. A bespoke sound engine was developed for this purpose, with EBU R128 2011 support and HDR capability.