Georgetown

Georgetown is a WIP browser-based multiplayer persistent online town building game.

The primary motivation is to see how different policies (ex. land value taxes and universal basic income) affect player motivations and game play.

Play it here.

Tell me what to fix or build next on Discord.

The Game

The goal of the game is grow a thriving town. It's a puzzle of making the best use of the available resources - economics!

It is not about amassing the most cash (try it - it will lead to an economics collapse of the island; not on purpose, but as of yet, cash is in fixed supply).

• Islands

  • there are multiple islands
  • each island is independent, no transfer of resources
  • a player can play on multiple islands
  • multiple players can play on an island

• Lots

  • an island has lots
  • lots can be owned or unowned
  • a player can purchase a unowned lot (by paying an ongoing tax, whose rate is self-decided)
  • a player can purchase an owned lot, by paying a higher tax than the current owner (plus the cost of existing improvements on that lot, which go to the current owner)

• Improvements

  • an improvement can be built on a lot, for a given cost
  • current available improvements:
    • house
      • offers 2 shelter for a player-decided price
    • farm
      • offers 50 food for a player-decided price
      • requires 100 labour for a player-decided price
  • improvements can be demolished, but only half the cost is recovered
  • some offers are prequisites (ex. jobs at a big-farm), if they are partially filled, then the production of the other offers is reduced (ex. only 50% of jobs on a big-farm, thus, only produce 50% of the food)
  • if a player cannot afford to pay their money supply offers (ex. jobs at big-farm) then all their offers are scaled pro-rata to what they can afford

• The Simulation

  • the game ticks 1/sec, 1 sec real world ~= 1 day in game
  • Sims
    • an island has a population of citizens ("sims")
    • sims require
      • 1 shelter per tick
      • 21 food per tick
    • government redistributes its tax revenues to sims (as a citizen's dividend)
    • sims have savings
    • sims seek food and shelter from markets
    • sim will work to meet their needs for food and shelter (with savings to cover future needs)
  • Population
    • sims have a fixed chance of dying
    • new sims arrive if there is capacity (and faster if there is more time spent on leisure)
    • sims will leave if there is insufficient capacity (food or shelter)
  • Markets
    • there are markets for food, shelter, and labour
    • players create offers inside of their improvements (ex. 10 food for 10 dollars)
    • based on available offers, and demand for a resource, the "best" offers will be accepted (cheapest offers for food and shelter, best paying offers for labour)
    • offers can be partially filled (ex. offer for 10 for 10 dollars, but market only purchased 5 food for 5 dollars)

Future Plans

• most notably, the ability to have islands with different policies

Development

• stack

  • Front End
    • Clojurescript
    • Reagent
  • Back End
    • Clojure
    • Datalevin (datomic-like graph db)
    • Tada
    • Omni (unreleased SPA web framework)

• the core loop

  • front-end ajax long-polls for a single island's state
  • on database changes, all connected clients are sent new data (public and private)
  • back-end ticks every second, calculating new state (sending updates)
  • front-end user actions send an ajax request (changing database, triggering updates)

• getting started

  • install java, clojure
  • clone the repo
  • create a config.edn

    • {:http-port 9365
       :environment :dev
       :db-dir "data/datalevin"
       :website-base-url "http://localhost:9365"
       :auth-cookie-secret "0123456789123456"
       :auth-token-secret "0123456789123456"}
      

  • lein repl
  • (start!)