Using Deno as my game engine

Summary

Using Deno as my game engine September 26, 2025 A little backstory Microlandia “the brutally honest city builder” is a pet project that I started several years ago. I can’t pinpoint exactly when, as the project has gone through multiple rewrites and long periods of abandonment. The idea was to clonemake a game inspired by the original SimCity, but with a totally different approach to the engine: Instead of simplifying the simulation to adapt to small machines and fun gameplay, I wanted the simulation to be as detail-obsessive and precise as possible. But what’s really going on inside is not as realistic as they would want to believe: because of its nature as a game, and the constraint that it must run on low end home computers, it tries to fool people into thinking it’s doing more than it really is, by taking advantage of the knowledge and expectations people already have about how a city is supposed to work. Implication is more efficient than simulation. Don Hopkins on the original SimCity The purpose: to find out what it is like to play a city builder with variables that reflect real world data, like the cost of healthcare, life expectancy of urban citizens, greediness of landlords, or the likelihood of people cheating on their partner with a co-worker. There is a myriad of sociological studies where I can obtain this data from and feed it to the game mechanics. As a kid, I was obsessed with the original SimCity on Super Nintendo—though I eventually discovered it took some serious liberties with what 'simulation' actually meant. What is not a goal is creating a commercial product or even a fun game. I want to be as real as possible, and find out if I can finish it without going insane. The initial approach The first version was developed in Go after establishing goals: I want to iterate on a lot of data and be as granular as needed. I don’t need the overhead of object oriented programming because the world can be simulated with a nifty pattern of systems operating...