🖥️ PC1993MaxisHARDSimCity 2000 rebuild deck
HARD
You will have zoning, power and a budget running in a day and it will be boring, because the game is twenty years of tuned feedback loops inside numbers Maxis never published.
You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts.
The single hardest genre to vibecode well, and the most instructive. An agent gives you a working city builder in a day — zoning, power, a budget — and it is boring, because SimCity is thirty years of tuned feedback loops and you have written the loops but not tuned them. Ask for the data-map overlays early; they are how you debug a simulation you cannot see.
- Difficulty
- HARD · 3 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 30 team-years
- Released
- 1993 · PC
- Genre
- Simulation
Build an isometric city-building simulation in the SimCity 2000 tradition. Canvas 2D, isometric projection, vanilla JS. Requirements: - 128x128 tile map on a 2:1 isometric grid with correct depth sorting and terrain height. Terrain generated with layered value noise, then smoothed, with water at low elevations. - Zoning: residential, commercial, industrial, painted in rectangles. Zones only develop if they have power, road access within three tiles, and demand. - The simulation is the product. Model it as separate layers updated on different tick rates: - Power: flood-fill from plants through conductive tiles each tick; unpowered zones flash and decay. - Traffic: cheap per-tile congestion from a distance-weighted count of nearby developed zones, not full pathfinding. - Land value: a blur of proximity to water, parks and low crime, minus proximity to industry. - Pollution and crime: diffusion fields spread outward each tick and decay. - RCI demand: three floating values that respond to what is over- and under-built, driving development. - Budget with tax rate sliders per zone, funding sliders for police/fire/transit, and a yearly ledger. Raising taxes above 9% should visibly hurt. - Growth animation: each tile developing through building stages, not popping in fully formed. - Data map overlays with a keyboard toggle: power, land value, crime, pollution, traffic. Definition of done: I raise taxes, watch demand fall, watch buildings abandon, and understand why.
- Twenty years of simulation tuning — the numbers are the game and they are not published
- The isometric art, which is thousands of hand-drawn tiles
- Scenarios, disasters, and the advisors that gave the city a personality
- A simulation that stays interesting past hour three
Scalar influence fields that blur and decay
Pollution, crime, noise, fear, smell, danger: all the same object, which is a grid of numbers with sources, one blur pass and a decay per tick. It is the cheapest way to make a world feel like it has consequences, and the overlay that draws it is the only way you will ever debug behaviour you cannot otherwise see.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build an influence-field toy as a single self-contained HTML file, Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. A 128x128 float grid. Click to place two kinds of source: emitters that add a fixed amount to their cell each tick, and sinks that subtract. Every tick at 10Hz, run one separable blur pass over the whole grid, then multiply everything by a decay constant slightly below 1. That is the entire simulation — no particles, no per-cell agents. Render the grid as a heatmap overlay with a keyboard toggle: off, field A, field B, both. Field B uses a different blur radius and decay, and must visibly behave differently for that reason alone. Add twenty wandering dots that sample the field beneath them and steer down the gradient, so the field can be seen causing behaviour. Blur radius, decay and tick rate as live sliders. Definition of done: I delete an emitter and watch its plume spread, thin and vanish over roughly ten seconds.
Not a clone — SimCity 2000 re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.
Evacuate One Room
SimCity 2000, but one level, done properly, set in a disaster movie. Rendered in clean product UI 3D.
Build a browser game called "Evacuate One Room". The pitch in one line: a simulation in the spirit of SimCity 2000, but one level, done properly, set in a disaster movie. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of SimCity 2000 — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else One level, done properly. A single space, built to a finish quality you could not sustain across twenty. Every prop and every sightline is deliberate. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME A disaster movie. A clock to impact, a map of exits, and ordinary people making ugly choices under sirens. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK Clean product UI 3D. Soft studio lighting, muted brand palette, UI chrome that looks shippable, and zero grit — intentional polish. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
- Micropolis — the original SimCity, open-sourced by EA
- micropolisJS — Micropolis in the browser
- OpenTTD — a transport tycoon done properly, for reference
Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 30 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is SimCity 2000 to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and SimCity 2000 is HARD (3 of 5). You will get the loop working. Then the real work starts. You will have zoning, power and a budget running in a day and it will be boring, because the game is twenty years of tuned feedback loops inside numbers Maxis never published. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 30 team-years Maxis spent.
What makes SimCity 2000 hard to rebuild?
You will have zoning, power and a budget running in a day and it will be boring, because the game is twenty years of tuned feedback loops inside numbers Maxis never published. That is why it sits at HARD rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is scalar influence fields that blur and decay — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a SimCity 2000 clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds SimCity 2000 — the original took Maxis on the order of 30 team-years, released in 1993 on PC. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about a project, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own SimCity 2000?
Twenty years of simulation tuning — the numbers are the game and they are not published. The isometric art, which is thousands of hand-drawn tiles. Scenarios, disasters, and the advisors that gave the city a personality. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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