Cities: Skylines Studio CEO Talks Development, Mod Community, And Six Years Of Success

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The 2015 release of Cities: Skylines delivered something fans of the mid-'90s city builder titles had been sorely missing: a modern, yet faithful reimagining of the genre. While Cities: Skylines was every bit a modern entry in the genre many grew up loving, it forewent the negative aspects of the modern formula, while embracing the community wholeheartedly. The result is a game that today, six years later, still has a dedicated community playing the title and delivering a vibrant mod scene.

 

When the team started development on Cities: Skylines, what inspirations did it look at and pull from for the initial concepting? 
We had some serious SimCity fans in the dev team and wanted to achieve a spiritual successor to SimCity 4. Naturally, the ambition was much greater than our resources at the time, so we had to prioritize on the amount of content and different features. Visual work such as day and night cycle and seasons were out of the question and we would have loved to create more variation for the assets. We tried to focus on making the game feel bigger than it actually was by allowing as much freedom for the player as possible and supporting modding as extensively as we technically could.

 

 

What about the city-builder genre made this an even more attractive project than Colossal Order’s prior projects? Did the team take any learnings from the Cities in Motion titles into Skylines?


This was the dream from the start! We founded Colossal Order with the intent that one day “Colossal Cities” would see the light of day. This was back in 2009 and we were five people with limited funding, so we decided to start with something smaller to build toward greater challenges. Cities in Motion games were really a stepping stone for us, a focus on one aspect of a city builder: mass transit. 

 

 

As you look back at the first six years of Cities: Skylines, what do you see as the biggest successes? Do you identify any missed opportunities or room for continued growth and improvement? 


It has been absolutely fantastic, challenging, tiring, and yet always so rewarding to work on Cities: Skylines. I’m a big believer in continuous improvement and it's at the core of our development process at Colossal Order. I think we all regret our failure to get proper seasons in the game, but it was simply not feasible at the time and we decided to live with the winter maps feature in the Snowfall expansion. The game has evolved immensely over the years with improvements and new content and features, but the absolute biggest success is our relationship with the community, our endless source for inspiration. 

 

 

What does the future hold for Cities: Skylines? Do you have plans for a follow-up game, or are you looking to continue developing upon the existing base?


Cities: Skylines, with its community, is the most important game Colossal Order has created. Beyond that, there isn’t much further we can say at the moment.

 

 

 

Source: Gameinformer

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Alex
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