Times of Progress (tuxdb.com)

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“Times of Progress” is a City Builder game set during the Industrial Revolution.
You control a city that is going through rapid change, due to the new technologies available and the leaps in productivity that they bring.

BUILD YOUR CITY

Place industries to extract the natural resources that the land offers. Connect them with the transport infrastructure and make sure that they have access to the local workforce. Progress towards providing secondary goods and services to your population, while balancing the issues that arise from the expanding city.

TRANSPORT MATERIALS AND GOODS

The transport infrastructure needs to evolve as the city grows. Goods are automatically transported by cart, but that is slow and inefficient. Build roads and railways to optimise the various routes, or reach new resources on the map by building harbours or tunnels.

SATISFY THE NEEDS OF THE POPULATION

As towns turn into cities, the needs of the population will evolve. Citizens at first need food and employment, but then will want consumer goods and services. Find the balance between their needs and the resources needed to satisfy them.
Resources on the map are limited, so being able to trade with nearby cities will be essential for the sustainability of the city.

HIGH REPLAYABILITY

The game offers randomised starting conditions, upgrades and rewards to choose from, while the maps are procedurally generated. If a city doesn’t thrive, learn from the experience and retry with different conditions on a new map. Each run is a new learning opportunity towards the mastery of the game.

FEATURES

Procedurally generated maps
Randomised starting conditions to choose from
Quick and intuitive road and railway placement
Automatic order and dispatch of products
Modifiable terrain to reach new areas
Trading mechanic with AI controlled cities
Randomised goals and rewards to choose from
High replayability

Gameplay implications of procedurally generated maps

Lets talk about procedural generation in this latest update.

As mentioned on its Steam Page, Times of Progress features procedural map generation. But how does it work exactly?

Whenever a new run is started, the map is procedurally generated just from a few high-level variables. These variables will be tweak-able by you in sandbox mode (although not in the beta).

Setting these variables determines how many Water, Rocks, Hill, Mountains, Forest etc etc tiles that can be found on the generated map. There will be some imbalance, but all resources will be found in some quantity on any map.

This imbalance in turn will determine which industries will be better to develop in the game. Being strong in a certain industry will help with trading with external AI-controlled cities later on to get in exchange those resources and materials that are not readily available or producible locally in your city.

Not everything is procedurally generated though. For example each Foresttile will always yield the same amount of Wood. Why? Because I dont want you to spend time min-maxing forever the Wood yield by checking how much of it each Forest tile on the map (thousands of them...) will provide. Instead, deciding where to place the Sawmill should depend on roughly how many Forest resources are in range of it (which is easy to see), as well as how to connect it to the transportation network and find workers nearby.

Hope these choices will make sense in the upcoming closed beta! If you havent signed up already for it, you can do so here: https://subscribepage.io/pressingthumbs .

I have an extra dev update note: I have added some wave effects near the coast and some trails behind ships. This is how they look:

They may be a bit faint due to the GIF resolution and compression, but I am hoping they will add to the chill feelings and keep you in the flow during play!

Until the next update! Have a good one in the meantime.

If you want to stay in touch or have questions you can find me here: