SimCivic

Players can gather here and propose solutions for the city, voting together!
An old abandoned park that looks ugly.
A city that's been repaired, with beautiful plantlife and a park!
The local school - it looks nice now!

Inspiration

Most of us have never been in a city council meeting. Most kids definitely haven't. And yet the decisions made in those rooms about parks, transit, housing, the environment, they shape every part of our daily lives.

We wanted to change that feeling of powerlessness into something that feels like play. Because learning to participate in your community doesn't have to feel tedious. We built SimCivic with younger audiences in mind, but the truth is anyone who hasn't been exposed to policy-making or sustainability concepts, and anyone who's felt unheard in big systems can enjoy our game. Your voice matters. And when enough voices come together, cities actually change.

What it does

SimCivic is a co-op multiplayer city simulator where players inherit a city that's struggling with pollution, poor infrastructure, and unhappy residents, and have to fix it together. Here's how it works: Explore. Players freely roam a 3D city and discover its problems firsthand. Propose. Anyone can submit a proposal to fix something. Vote. The whole community votes. Majority rules. If a proposal passes, the city changes visually, right in front of you.

How we built it

We built SimCivic in Unity, a brand new territory for us! Our stack: Unity, C#, Netcode for GameObjects, Git/Github, VSCode (MSPaint for some UI assets. Scrappy, but it works.)

Challenges we ran into

Building the multiplayer server
The camera system
The proposal system within the game

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that we set out to make this and it runs - as a team that had never used Unity before, we came in knowing we wanted to build something ambitious, and we built it anyway. We are proud of what we created, and we hope to add even more features in the future!

What we learned

We got hands-on with Unity's Netcode and learned how to build multiplayer tools from scratch. We learned how to work under real-time pressure as a team. That meant learning to let go of features we loved, protecting the ones that mattered most, and constantly communicating with each other about what was worth fighting for and what wasn't.