QUEST LOG #12: TOWNSCAPER (DEMO)
Playing Oskar Stålberg's indie sim and other browser creations.
I have been magically transformed into an old man these past two weeks. No, it's not my greying and disappearing hair, nor my revulsion to modern culture, nor my general personality traits and the fact that I would rather be sat at home than out having so called fun. No, this time it was a series of infections and a bout of pleurisy. I woke up unable to move unaided and thus have been perched on the sofa for a couple of weeks. To add to my ancient visage, I'm also relying on an old walking stick to navigate the flat. You might be asking why I have a stick at all - good question. I found it near a bin on a walk a few months ago and decided to keep it... Who's laughing now? Well it isn't me, because my videogaming has been servery impacted. As playing games is somewhat key to writing posts here, it was inevitable that there would be some decline in my output, so as I’m just sat here drifting in and out of sleep, I thought that perhaps there was something I could play in my browser on my laptop. Not my favourite means of gaming, but needs must and all that… I googled browser games, and was expecting the sort of shit that we used to play at high school during lunch breaks. Some 2D flash rubbish, something where you attempt to stop a mountain biker from snapping their neck off or something similar. I was surprised then to see a browser version of Townscaper on a PC Gamer list of best browser games. I had seen some videos of it before and it had piqued my interest then. I was eager to see how it would play in a browser, and with a trackpad no less! Was I about to have a terrible time? Was I about to get repetitive strain injury? Possibly! Lets see...
After clicking the link I was met with a small loading bar, followed by a weird error message. Good start. I refreshed the browser then and the loading continued. Phew! The logo flashed very briefly and then a small house floating in a vast endless ocean loaded it. Game on, it seems!
Playing the game is actually very easy, even with the limitations of a trackpad. You left click to add a block, right click to remove it. Simple as that. You can also pick the colour of your town pieces using the colour palette on the left, but other than that, there isn’t much else to the experience. Clicking on the cog on the right gives us a few more options however, revealing that rather than a lite version of the game, it's actually the demo. That's fine, but it’s a little limited in scope (as you’d imagine). If you click the grid option, you'll see the extent of your building space, and if you make a tall tower, the overall grid will shrink. So we can make a narrow but high (ish) city, or a shallow but wide (ish) one. Good to have constraints when trying to be creative I suppose. Other than the grid, we can change the rendering of the city, it can either be flat, lit (with shadows), or untextured. The last option is quite nice actually and makes me think I'm in Blender instead.
Even with the stripped back demo version of this game, time just drifts away. The art style, the simplicity of gameplay, the attention to detail, it all combines to create a peaceful and charming experience. Little things like the satisfying sound effects when adding or removing tiles, or the seagulls moving when you change a roof tile. Watching the birds circle the town and settle elsewhere is a lovely addition.
Once you've filled your space with a variety of odd looking buildings, you can play around with the position of the sun to create a whole heap of screenshots. Setting the sun will plunge your town into darkness, and the little windows will glow warmly from within, creating a very cosy atmosphere. Make it midday, and you'll feel as though you're about to walk down to the seafront on a bright summer day with an ice cream in hand. So much time could be spent capturing the essence of your town in the perfect light and at the most pleasing angle, but as with all things, the fun must come to an end. Like I said, the demo/browser version is restrictive in terms of its grid. It gives you a taste, but that is all. It's a great taste, but it leaves you wanting more. I do have slightly numb fingertips after playing it for a while, but it was worth it. If you’d like to have a go yourself, click here and load up a fresh world.
I was wanting more browser based action after all that, so I took a look at what the creator of Townscaper - Oskar Stålberg (find him on twitter and bluesky) has made in the past, and it turns out you can play more of his creations in browser by visiting his blog oskarstalberg.tumblr.com. The first I tried is a forerunner to Townscaper called House. It’s a much simplified version with a very small grid and allows for the player to create a little slice of a city in their own way, adding and removing scenery blocks in the same manner as with Townscaper. It’s more of a technical toy than a game, but it’s fun to play around with. It features a randomise mode, and a display mode for taking more exacting screenshots.
Another of his 'technical toys' is his City Generator, which allows for the random generation of a city map. This is another delightful, albeit rather limited tool. It features a reset button, the ability to zoom, and, well that’s about it. You generate chunks of the map with the click of a button, and once you've filled the map you’re done. Some areas are dense, some are more sparse, and you can fill in the gaps with additional clicks. There isn't a lot more to say about it other than that, but it's very clever and I very much like it (I’m a map liker after all).
If you still want more from Oskar in your browser, you can give his next thing a go. I call it thing, because I still don't think it quite falls into the game category, but it's more comprehensive than City Generator or House. Planet loads in with a cosmic background in front of which a small planet hangs with a little moon orbiting in the background. To the left you have your palette, this time with the option of adding forests, frozen tundra, cityscapes, and grasslands. Below these you have your brush size options, these being large, medium, and small, and to the right, you have your options of the size of your planetoid, four in total, quite big to quite small. There are nice little touches where the roofs of the houses in the city will be snow covered if near an ice tile, but as with these curios, there is a limit to how long you'll be able to mess around with them. Don’t get me wrong, they are fantastic and delightful, and clearly show how Oskar's skill and creativity has led to the likes of Townscaper and Bad North (the latter of which I have yet to play, but is on my list).
After going through Oskar’s web based creations, I popped back to the Townscaper demo and had another go. It really feels like sitting down with a bucket of random lego pieces. The fun just sort of happens, and in my second go, I went for the tower approach and ended up with something out of a Studio Ghibli film. More fun with screenshots was had. If you’ve got a few minutes spare, definitely give this game a go. Better yet, buy the full game - it’s less than a fiver! I will definitely be picking it up when I’m back to my PC.
Have you played Townscaper or any of Oskar’s other creations? What did you think? I found another one of his projects available on his blog called Island, but I was unable to get it running in my browser. Unfortunate, as it looks just as much fun as the rest of tools/games. I’m very much looking forward to getting the full version of Townscaper and having a proper look at Bad North in time. I’m all for smaller games at the moment!
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