🏙️ Verticopolis™: a browser SimTower clone

Play it: verticopolis.com · How to play · Engine docs · Release notes · Sponsor

A from-scratch, browser-native homage to the classic SimTower (1994): a vertical metropolis you build floor by floor. Wire it with elevators, attract tenants, set the rents, keep everyone happy, and climb the star ratings all the way to a coveted TOWER.

The simulation is a Rust engine (engine-rs/) compiled to WebAssembly, and it is the only engine the game runs. Everything around it is TypeScript on the Excalibur.js game engine (camera, scene, culling and the render loop). A procedural soundtrack built on Tone.js changes depending on which part of the tower you're looking at. No external art assets: every sprite is drawn in code.

Day	Night

What's in it

• Two ways to play. Classic is the 1994 game, rule for rule; Modern keeps it and adds what the original couldn't do. (Classic and Modern)
• Every room from the original: offices, condos, hotels, shops and restaurants, the cinema and party hall, services, the metro and the Wedding Hall, each one drawn on the Rooms pages of the manual.
• Stairs, escalators and three kinds of elevator, with cars and stops you set yourself. (Elevators)
• A living tower on one game clock: rush hours, quiet nights, people riding the cars, lights in the windows, the metro train pulling in. (People)
• Stars, events and the TOWER: fires, bomb threats, the VIP and the final inspection. (Stars and the TOWER, Events)
• Your towers, kept: autosave and save slots, .vctower files, and the original game's .TDT saves (opened here, and written back out from a Classic tower). (Saving and loading)
• Installable and offline on desktop and phone. (Installing and updates)

Where a Classic tower differs from the original, on purpose or not yet, is on Differences from the 1994 game; the developer's checklist is PARITY.md.

Quick start

npm install
npm run wasm:build   # build the Rust engine package (needs the toolchain in engine-rs/README.md)
npm run dev          # open the printed localhost URL

The game cannot start without the engine package. On x86_64 Linux, bash scripts/build-engine-wasm.sh installs the pinned Rust toolchain and builds it in one step.

Learn more

Playing	Building it
Your first tower	CONTRIBUTING.md: setup, quality gates, tests and coverage, versioning, review
Controls (mouse, touch, keyboard)	ARCHITECTURE.md: source layout, the frame loop, input, saves, the PWA
Rooms	engine-rs/README.md: working on the simulation
Map and windows	docs.verticopolis.com: the engine package, crate, API and conformance
Importing and exporting	docs/canon/tdt-format.md: the .TDT save format
The whole manual	docs/screenshots.md: the screenshot gallery and how it is rendered, including the 1★ to TOWER ladder

License

The source code is MIT (LICENSE); the original art and audio are CC BY 4.0 (ASSETS-LICENSE). To get involved, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Verticopolis™ is the project's trademark. Neither license covers the name: you are welcome to copy, change and share the game under its licenses, but please give your copy a name of its own.

Verticopolis is free to play and nothing in it is locked. If you would like to help keep it going, you can sponsor it on GitHub.

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Built fresh as a clean-room clone. None of the original game's code or assets are used.