Growing up, we dedicated a frankly obscene amount of time to playing classic sim games like RollerCoaster Tycoon and SimCity 2000 on our old PC setup. So, being the nostalgia-minded individuals that we are, we're always on the lookout for new experiences that pay homage to these types of games, while providing their own unique take on the genre.
This explains why we were so excited when we first came across screenshots and GIFs of Hilkojj Interactive's upcoming Steam game Car Park Capital on Twitter earlier this year.
Car Park Capital is a new title that is coming to Steam (no release date has been announced yet) and features retro-inspired isometric graphics along with a tongue-in-cheek plot about turning neighbourhoods into car parks and brainwashing the public into using them.
I didn't want to go with something as mundane as a parking garage simulator. But since I couldn't come up with any better ideas I decided to just do it, but with a twist.
According to the developer Hilko Janssen, the game has its origins in a project from seven years ago that he was working on with two other people at university, where he had to make a desktop application that simulated a parking garage and ended up giving it graphics like RollerCoaster Tycoon. But it wasn't until two years ago, when he was looking for a new game project that he picked up his already-made custom game engine and got to work on expanding the idea of a parking garage simulator into a proper release.
"I was unsure about what the gameplay should be like," Janssen tells us. "I didn't want to go with something as mundane as a parking garage simulator. But since I couldn't come up with any better ideas I decided to just do it, but with a twist. That twist is to make it chaotic and funny, just like how The Office (TV series) is fun to watch despite it being about a company selling paper."
According to the Steam page, Car Park Capital will be a real-time simulation with hundreds of vehicles and citizens, and will also feature per-person behaviours that you will need to play into to create demand for your car parks (or as Janssen puts it "each person is different, except they're all bald"). The game will also be highly moddable. It is being built using tools like Blender for the 3D models, and GIMP and Aseprite for the textures, and is being written in C++ and Lua, on a Linux desktop.
We asked Janssen when people can expect to be able to play the game, but from his response, it still seems to be a long way out.
"The game is early in development," he says. "So the first chance for people to play it is when I open up playtesting to random people online. I'll invite people through Twitter/Reddit and the Steam community page."
We'll keep you posted as more information is revealed.