Simbizilla

A game for those who love to balance a checkbook.

The Big Idea

My cousin and I always loved making up games growing up. We gravitate toward a particular type of game in which you strategize growing a small business into a conglomerate. It may be fancy graphics-free, but it’s also ad-free and there’s no waiting required unlike today’s mobile games where you have to check back every 45 minutes to make any real progress.

I wish I had more time to work on it, but it’s coming along slowly. To be real honest, I just wanted to build this again because it’s nice to have a clean slate. Every time I build it, it gets better and better. And it’s great practice so I don’t get rusty.

Development

MERN

I’ve built and re-built this game so many times over the years using different stacks. I had to look up the last one. In 2016, it was an Ionic app. This time it’s a MERN app; the back end is a Mongo and Express API The front end is React with Redux — just for the practice (not because it needs it).

Creativity

Bare Bones

I’ll be real honest: there’s not much conventional creativity put into this. But there is a lot of character building and object modeling. So there’s that…

Strategy

Too Much?

Beyond the playing of the game, every bit of planning I possess has been put into how the game should work and how enjoyable it should be to play it.