Komachi

A town you watch more than you manage.

Komachi (小町, "small town") is a cosy city diorama on a small island. You draw streets and zone the plots beside them. Builders arrive by train and everything else happens on its own: families move in, shops open and change trade with their custom, commuters catch the morning train, a car ferry brings the cars over, and the kōban light stays on all night.

Every system is visible. Water works mean watered gardens. A substation means steadier light. A quiet shop puts up its shutters, a busy one gets a striped awning and crates outside. There are no bars to fill and no failure states. Nothing can go wrong.

Days, seasons and weather. A day takes about four minutes. Rain brings umbrellas and puddles, snow settles on the roofs in winter, cherry petals fall in spring, and the summer festival ends with fireworks over the sea.

Small ceremonies. The hill opens with a lantern-lit path to the shrine. A fox visits at dusk. The town keeps a chronicle of its own firsts, and you keep an album of the photos you take.

What you get now (version 0.2)

• Streets-first building on a generated island: pick a seed and a theme

• Homes, shops, workplaces, civic buildings and farms in one- to three-cell sizes

• Residents with households, jobs and shifts, errands, bench chats and speech bubbles

• Trains, bikes, taxis, a car ferry, a tourist bus and service rounds

• Weather, seasons, a market morning, a summer festival with fireworks

• Landmarks: lighthouse, bridge, pavilion, a shrine on the hill, fish market, stone jetty

• Photo mode with a per-town album, named saves with export and import, an opening scene, background music

About the price

Two dollars is the launch price for this first version. The price goes up as the major updates land, and everyone who buys now keeps the game at what they paid.

What's next

• A guided first town, so the first ten minutes explain themselves

• Fishing off the jetty as a small game of its own, with a fish album

• Room editing: step inside and furnish the homes

• Smoother towns past a hundred residents

Platforms

Windows (installer or portable exe) and Linux (AppImage). The game is not available for macOS. Saves and photos stay on your own machine.

Windows SmartScreen may say "Windows protected your PC" the first time, because the game is not code-signed yet: click More info, then Run anyway.

Made by Saiss. People, cars and boats by Kenney (CC0). Music from Pixabay, credited in the game.