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What Is This Project?

miniTown is a 2D simulation-management game, or more specifically, a farming-and-village simulation game.

It simulates the development of a village. The player controls the village chief, issues or destroys money, and uses those monetary operations to influence the village and make it prosperous.

Why Build This Project?

1. I wanted to understand the role and meaning of money and prices by simulating the development of a village.
2. I had played many farming and management games, and I liked them.
3. It was also the required team project for everyone in the Software Engineering course.

How Is It Built?

Food and sex are human nature. - Mencius, Gaozi I

We assume every villager has two desires: eating and reproduction. Each desire has multiple levels, and villagers work in order to satisfy those desires.

We wanted to make a primitive game, and the technology stack is also intentionally primitive:

1. We use a self-developed game engine. The low-level rendering uses GDI, and audio playback uses MCI. We do not use DirectX or OpenGL, so the project has fewer environment dependencies and is easier to install and run.
2. All images are hand-drawn by ourselves.
3. A simple self-developed UI is used for interaction.
4. All sound effects come from the free online sound-effect community Aigei. The background music comes from the paid soundtrack of Kingdom. It was purchased and was not used commercially, so there should be no copyright issue.

GitHub Repository

miniTown

References

Black Dun Village, a detailed record of many aspects of an ordinary village in Shandong.

Game Engine Architecture, a systematic introduction to game engines.

Dream Journey: Windows Game Programming from Scratch, an introductory book on Windows game programming.

Evolutionary Psychology, which deeply inspired this project.

Banished, a similar farming-management game with an IGN score of 8.3.