South Philadelphia · 1947
Family Business
A city of fifteen blocks, built from primitives and a single seed, that runs in the tab you are already looking at.
Grow it, cut it, and sell it to people who want it. Forty customers, four rooms, three runners, and a beat cop who wonders what is in your coat. Runs in your browser. Saves stay on your machine.
Keyboard, gamepad or touch · No account needed
- Fifteen blocks
- Four hundred metres by two hundred
- One seed
- Twelve draws for two hundred buildings
- Forty customers
- Seventy-nine people on a street
- Sixteen ingredients
- Sixteen effects
- Seven ranks
- Three runners
- Four fronts
- Fifteen hundred and five tests
- Three megabytes of assets
- Everything else generated
Four places, drawn the way the city is: shapes and code, no photographs
- 01 The market
- 02 The church
- 03 Under the El
- 04 The street
01 / 04The city
Fifteen blocks, generated from one seed
About four hundred metres by two hundred, identical every load, so a saved position still means something a week later. The layout is generated and the buildings on it are Kenney's; everything repeated is instanced, which is why two hundred buildings cost twelve draw calls.
01
The market
In the dead centre, so it is on the way from anywhere to anywhere. Forty trestles with striped canvas, crates underneath, and a fire in a barrel at each end that is the only thing in the city that flickers.
02
The church
A tower three times the height of a rowhouse, and a rose window lit from inside at night. It stays visible past the range where everything else takes its jewellery off, because it is what you navigate by.
03
The square
Railings with a gap in each side to walk in through, gravel, and six trees. Opposite the market.
04
Under the El
Three brick warehouses with loading bays and fire escapes, a train that runs the deck above them, and a trolley line at Philadelphia's own 5 ft 2 1/4 in gauge.
02 / 04The three jobs
Finishing them is the start, not the end
Three jobs, each asking for something different. They hand you a room over the grocery and three names, and everything after that is a business.
01
The Package
A run to the Delaware and back with a crate on the seat.
02
The Tail
A grey sedan you have to stay behind without sitting on his bumper.
03
The Numbers
Four street corners and two minutes, and you pick the order. The clock does not start until you reach the first one. A perfect lap, driven headlessly with the real control law and the real colliders, is fifty seconds.
03 / 04The business
Rooms, a product, and people to run them
Five rooms to own and one nobody wants, and they are places rather than pages: a door on the pavement puts you inside four walls with a ceiling on them.
01
Production
Buy seeds and soil at the market and a pot at the hardware store. Plant, water it, come back in four days. Cut the crop onto a drying rack, take it down a day later, and you have something with a grade on it.
02
Mixing
Sixteen period ingredients against sixteen effects, up to eight on one product. Every ingredient has a downside somewhere in the table, which took a test asserting the whole set at once to discover.
03
Selling
Forty customers derived from the world seed, each with three effects they are after, a grade they will not go below, a budget, and a trade that decides which hours they are out of the house. A refusal tells you what they would have paid.
04
People and money
Three runners who keep a fifth, and twelve people looking for work in four roles, each needing a cot and a wage. Two piles of money, and four fronts that convert one into the other at a fee up to a daily cap.
04 / 04The law
Nothing rises at all when nobody is looking
Suspicion rises for reasons that add up rather than multiply: running, being out after the nine o'clock curfew, standing on a corner, and above all having just handed something over on a pavement.
01
What you are carrying
It counts by how well it hides, which is the first thing that makes packaging worth a slot.
02
The beat
Cops walk block loops at a stroll, one per two blocks by day and twice that after nine.
03
Three answers
Turning out your pockets, a bribe priced off what they are about to find, or running, which always works right now and puts twice as many shoes on the street for a week. A chase is time out of sight rather than distance, and a door you hold ends it.
Controls
Everything the city answers to
Click the street to give the game the pointer, and press Escape to take it back.
- WASD
- Drive or walk
- Mouse
- Look around
- E
- Get in, get out, take, talk
- Shift
- Run
- Space
- Handbrake, or a hop on foot
- Ctrl
- Crouch
- Tab
- Pockets
- B
- The book
- M
- The book, at the map
- L
- Wages and the wash
- 1 to 8
- What is in your hands
- V
- First or third person
- C
- Camera distance
- R
- Radio: a band, something slower, off
- Esc
- Pause and save
Three megabytes
The city is not modelled
The city is not modelled. Fifteen blocks, the streets between them, where every lamp stands and which windows are lit are all generated from one seed, and so is every texture on them.
What is downloaded is three megabytes of models and sound from Kenney: the buildings, the cars, the people, the furniture in the rooms, the footsteps and the doors. All of it is CC0, so there is nothing to license and nobody to pay.
The engine and the radio are still synthesised, because both have to answer to the simulation: two oscillators pitched off the car's speed, and a walking bass line pushed through a band-pass and a soft clip.
Saves
Your progress stays on this machine
Saves live only in this browser. We never send your game data to our servers. Clearing site data or browser storage pressure can erase saves, so export a backup.
There is no account, no sync, and no endpoint that accepts a save. Export sits next to every slot.
- ?tier=low
- Force the quality tier. Also medium and high.
- ?debug
- Draw calls, instance counts, input state and position.
Whose this is
Connor Maze
I build software: web platforms, internal tools, and the occasional thing that has no business being in a browser. This site is the latter.
The rest of it is a portfolio, a few things written down, and a dashboard that is invite only.
Fifteen blocks, one seed