How to play
You own a bare lot and a little cash. Everything else is up to you: what you build, who you rent it to, and whether the elevators can carry the people you invited in.
Rooms
Floor 1 is the ground floor and holds the lobby, which every tower must have. Floors climb from 2 to 100 above ground, and there are ten levels underground, numbered down from minus 1. There is no floor 0.
The lot is 375 tiles wide. A room takes a fixed number of tiles across and one or more floors up, starting from the floor you place it on. Underground rooms grow upward from their floor in the same way.
A floor only exists where you have built on it. There is no empty slab waiting for you: the tower is exactly the rooms and shafts you paid for.
Stairs and escalators are two floors tall and join a floor to the one above it. An elevator shaft takes its own columns for its whole span, and no room may overlap it.
Elevators
There are three kinds of shaft: standard, service and express. An express shaft is for the long haul only, stopping at the lobby and the sky lobbies rather than at every floor. Each shaft covers a range of floors, stops where you tell it to, and runs one or more cars.
A car keeps going in the direction it is already travelling while anyone ahead of it has called or is waiting to get off, then turns around. A car with nothing to do returns to its home floor after a while.
When somebody needs to move between floors, the game sends them to the nearest shaft that stops at both ends of the trip. Cars have a capacity: a full car passes a waiting crowd by, and those people keep waiting, which is where most of your trouble will start.
Tenants and stress
Every person in the tower carries a stress value. It rises for each minute they stand waiting for an elevator and falls again once they are settled in a room.
You can see it in their color. Calm people look normal, then they turn pink, then red, then black. At black they give up on the trip entirely, and the reason is written to your log. If that person was a tenant, their room is marked for leaving at the next evaluation.
Noise matters too. Offices, condos and hotel rooms want quiet. Fast food, restaurants, shops, cinemas and party halls are noisy, and a quiet room loses rating for every noisy room near it on the same floor, or directly above or below it.
A room's rating combines the stress of its tenants, the noise around it and whether it has been left dirty. If a room sits below the leaving threshold for a full day, the tenants go and tell you why: an office falls vacant, a condo goes back on sale, and a hotel room simply stays empty until the next guest.
Money and the quarter
One tick of the simulation is one minute in the tower, and the clock shows hours 0 to 23. A quarter is three days: two weekdays and one weekend day. Four quarters make a year.
At the start of each quarter, at five in the morning, rent comes in and upkeep goes out, and every room is evaluated. There is a smaller daily charge at the same hour on the other days.
The rest of your income arrives as it is earned: hotel rooms pay when the guest checks out, shops and restaurants take money per customer, and a condo pays once when it is sold. Spend faster than the tower earns and you go bankrupt.
Time runs at one, two or four times speed, and between 23:00 and 06:00 the tower runs itself at eight times speed unless you have paused it.
Stars
Your rating is a ladder of stars. It is driven mostly by the number of people in the tower, with a few gates that population alone will not open.
Stars are what unlock the rest of the build palette. Anything you have not earned yet is shown locked, with the star it needs, so you always know what the next rung buys you.
Saving and exporting
The game saves to a slot in your own browser as you play. Nothing leaves your device and there is nothing to sign in to.
You can also export the tower to a file and import it again later, here or on another machine. An import is checked first: a file from somewhere else, or a damaged one, is refused with a plain reason and your running tower is left exactly as it was.
A new game can be started from a seed. The simulation is deterministic, so the same seed and the same moves always produce the same tower.
Controls
- Move around: drag anywhere with the mouse, even with most build tools selected. The lobby and elevator tools drag to size, so pan with the right button, scroll, or keys while they are active. Scroll the wheel to move up and down, hold shift to move sideways. On a trackpad, two-finger scroll moves the view.
- Zoom: hold ctrl and scroll, or pinch on a trackpad. Plus and minus keys also zoom.
- Keys: W A S D or the arrow keys move the view.
- Place a room: pick it from the palette, then click where it goes. A click that does not move places; a press that moves pans.
- Speed: 1, 2, 3 set the clock speed, Space pauses.
- Escape drops the current tool.
If you have asked your system for reduced motion, the game honors it: no inertia on the camera and no drifting particles.