Here it is, after far too much dithering

Right then... This game has been mulled over for years, and I mean genuinely years. Notes and scraps of paper that have since gone missing, scribbles in the corner of a page and who knows what else lost along the way. A couple of ideas I'm pretty sure I jotted on a receipt that went through the wash. And the game itself? Well, it waited for the right time to develop – which, as we all know, never actually exists.

Sometimes the whole project slipped my mind, sometimes there just wasn't time, sometimes the idea of what it should even look like kept wandering off... Something always pushed the project back.

And that's how it got going

A year ago a thought struck like lightning from a clear sky: "right, I'm actually doing this." And out of that thought grew the first prototype. The ugly, clumsy kind where residents mostly stared at walls, occasionally vanished underground, and one strolled calmly straight through a house as if it weren't there. None of it worked all that far – but it lived, in its own wall-staring way. And that's where building the real thing began.

Now, a year later, I decided enough dithering at the doorstep: Taajama opens to the public – as a very early version. Bugs, gaps and all. Otherwise it'd be in a drawer for another five years, at least. And that drawer is getting pretty full.

What development focuses on now

The game's foundation has been built over the past year, and from there follow all the parts and pieces – economy, residents, education, work, traffic, waste management, health. So from here on the work shifts toward two things:

Emptying those notebooks – all the ideas scribbled down over the years finally start flowing into the game. (The ones that didn't go through the wash.)
Balancing – so the numbers feel fair and the whole city doesn't collapse because one tax rate is 2% off, or money piles up endlessly while you do nothing. These too are still on the way...

And honestly, I consider graphics secondary. What matters is that the gameplay and the simulation work. The pixels can be polished later – first we get the city to actually live. And the residents' wall-staring isn't quite so common anymore.

The whole point: residents really live

This is the core the game started from. Every resident lives their own life on the server – not random statistical noise, but a real individual with real choices and real bad decisions. For example:

Reino dreamed as a kid of becoming an engineer, went through vocational school, graduated – and ended up working at the landfill, because your city didn't have a single factory. Reino is not pleased. Reino writes about it in the suggestion box. Every. Single. Week.
Aino fell in love with her neighbour Eero, had two kids and passed the surname Mäkinen down to them. One of the kids also inherited mum's "Eternal Sniffles" and dad's "Magnetic Misfortune" – a double jackpot, good luck out there.
Pentti got stuck in traffic again, because you planned the roads a little hastily. Pentti mentions this in his diary. Every day. Pentti has started using capital letters.
Someone slipped face-first into the planer at the sawmill, and the whole block's local paper ran it on the front page – embellished a touch, naturally.

Residents have dreams, genes, heredity, opinions and utterly absurd improvement suggestions ("build a bridge to the Moon, thanks"). Townsfolk are born, study, get jobs, fall in love, get annoyed, send you feedback and eventually… well, every story ends sometime.

Welcome to the town. Enjoy it, find bugs and throw suggestions our way – there's a lot more coming!