Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp
This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.
Micropolis/SimCity Clone in Emacs Lisp is a city-building simulation game built in Emacs as a week-long project. It targets developers interested in exploring functional programming architecture patterns and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
- 1AA
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com · its alternatives →
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SimCity, but with Permitsfree▲930A free city-building game in your browser. You are the mayor. You know what the city needs. Now get it past the zoning board, the neighbors, the appeals court and the next election.
3d ago · permit.petercai.com · its alternatives →
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A isometric city builder in JavaScript. Contribute to victorqribeiro/isocity development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 5IR
Years ago I stumbled across a basic version of this concept and it stuck with me. I knew if I was ever going to take on such a project, it would need to be flawless, but without coding experience it was just another idea that would never happen. By the end of 2024, as AI coding tools exploded everywhere, I finally had a way to make it real. I started from zero knowledge and spent months collaborating with AI agents as a learning experience. Every pixel and every function went through me. The AI translated what I asked for into code, but every decision was human. I didn't use existing OS…
2025 · mitchivin.com · its alternatives →
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It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam. So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.
Dec 2025 · microlandia.city · its alternatives →
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This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10IW
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca · its alternatives →
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San Fran Sim▲300An isometric startup-tycoon game. Ship features, squash bugs, survive the burn rate — and keep the kombucha stocked. Play free in your browser.
Jul 2026 · sanfransim.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Took a break from the falling sand simulation blog posts this week to work on another small project. It's a little pixel world generator- each time you visit, you'll see a new little world. I really like this stuff and had a blast building it yesterday!
2022 · jason.today · its alternatives →
- 13
Grab a drink, go full-screen and enjoy a free and 100% relaxing game of Mahjong Solitaire!
2020 · jongmah.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’m a chemical engineer and I manage logistics at a refinery down in Texas. Whenever I try to explain downstream operations to people outside the industry (including my kids), I usually get blank stares. I wanted to build something that visualizes the concepts and chemistry of a plant without completely dumbing down the science, so I put together this 5-minute browser game. Here's a simple runthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-moBz6upU. I pushed to get through a full product pathway to show the V-804 replay. I am not a software developer by trade, so I relied…
Mar 2026 · fuelingcuriosity.com · its alternatives →
- 15MP
I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →
- 16
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I created this because sometimes I want more than rlwrap but less than emacs. icl aims to hit that middle sweet spot. It's a terminal application with context-aware auto-complete, an interactive object inspector, auto-indentation, syntax colouring, persistent history, and much more. It uses sly to communicate with the child lisp process and aims to be compatible with any sly-supporting implementation. I hope others find it useful!
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20IF
The point of this seemingly useless exercise was to stress-test my elisp-eval MCP https://github.com/agzam/death-contraptions/tree/main/tools/... AI hands it a string of Lisp, it runs inside live Emacs session, poking into it via emacsclient. Behaves like a REPL the LLM can drive - state persists between the calls. Emacs is a Lisp machine. Buffers, files, network, subprocesses, games, major modes, the UI itself: every feature is already an elisp function. Hand an LLM a way to run arbitrary elisp and it inherits the entire Emacs API for free. No…
Apr 2026 · imgur.com · its alternatives →
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A city planning deck building game!
2015 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
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micro-gl▲101Run vector graphics on any computer (without GPU or FPU)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 24AS
FYI, I try to release something random on the 1st and 15th of every month, this was my latest. you can see my full list of projects on my twitter: https://twitter.com/lisperati/status/1543003744161484800
2022 · dreambookgame.com · its alternatives →
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