User:Anpang/Drafts/TheoTown

TheoTown is a free with in-game purchases city-building game developed and published by Lobby, formerly and more commonly known as blueflower. It was released in 2019 on Steam, Android , iOS and MacOS.

The game is a single or multi-player city-building game. Players engage in urban planning by controlling zones, road placement, taxation, public services, electricity and water, and public transportation of a village, town, city, or metropolis. The player creates new worlds with a seed which they create their city on. TheoTown has been downloaded over 5 million times.

Development
TheoTown started from the building simulation game called The City Project by Christian Weigel, who began developing it for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS in 2003. For various reasons he stopped the project later. In 2007, he began the development of TheoTown again using Blitz3D. The game was based on SimCity games, but has a lot less complexity in order to be better understood by children. The project was never published and is discontinued in 2010.

Gameplay
In TheoTown, players create new worlds called regions, and regions are be split into various cities which they can start building. The game has 4 difficulties: easy, medium, hard, and sandbox. The game has a currency - diamonds. Paid versions of the game grant the player infinite diamonds, while players playing free versions need to get diamonds from either game rewards or buying.

Like various other city-building games, the game features an in-game tutorial. Players start by building a solar panel, water pump, a residental zone, and dirt roads surrounding the residental zone. People will start to move in. The game features 3 main types of zones: residental, commercial, and industrial, with industrial having 3 subzones: normal industrial, harbor, and farm.

Population in a city is classified as 3 types: poor (displayed in game as ), middle (displayed in game as ), and rich (displayed in game as ). The game features random disasters.

Cities feature a happiness statistic which is the average happiness of the population in the city. Increasing the happiness results in higher population growth. Regions are generated random with a seed. The player selects whether they want mountains/hills, decorations, deserts, or trees in their region.

Other features
On late december and early january of every year, the game will have a christmas theme featuring various easter eggs and texture changes.

Plugins
The game features support for mods called plugins. Plugins are coded in JSON or [PCA and is be used to add new tiles and features to the game. Plugins are on the plugin library which players upload new plugins to using the plugin upload form on the official forum.

Theme
All of the game textures and most UI elements (except text and graphs) are pixelated.

Code
The game is programmed in Java which causes the game to lag on weak computers. It also doesn't support high FPS.