I've lost more weekends to Transport Tycoon than I'd like to admit. Locomotion, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Cities in Motion, Age of Empires and Empire Earth too. You start with a dirt road and a few settlers, look up three hours later, and it's dark out.
Nobody makes these anymore. The big studios went 3D, mobile went to energy timers and gacha, and the dense little 2D world you could read at a glance just stopped being made. The good ones left are 20 years old and look it. When I was asked what bugged me, this is what came out:
I just can't find games like this that are modern and beautiful and engaging, that I can spend hours playing, with good graphics and 2026 relevance, that aren't made in 2005 or some mobile gacha grab. This genre is dying :-(
So I built one. Partly to see if I could, mostly because I wanted to play it.
It's called POLIS and it runs in your browser at polis.adya.one. It's free, there's no login, and it works on a phone. You name a capital, pick a land and a terrain, and it builds you a world:
Founding Nova Lisboa, recorded straight from the live game.
Why 2D
2D gets treated as the cheap option. For this kind of game I think it's the right one. It's light enough to draw that you can put a lot on screen at once: thousands of buildings, trains, boats, planes landing on actual runways, seasons changing. And it still runs smoothly in a browser tab.
I set two rules at the start and kept them:
- Everything is drawn in code. No sprites, no 3D models, no asset packs. Every tree, sheep and chimney is a few lines of canvas drawing.
- It has to open by double-clicking
index.html. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No framework, no build step, no server.
The first rule paid off more than I expected. Adding a new land or a new kind of tree took minutes, because there was no art to commission, just a function to write. The whole game is about 6,250 lines across seven files.
How it got built
I built it with an AI agent in one long session, which is what the Lab is for: seeing how far this way of building goes. It started as a brief for a 90-second demo and kept going.
The loop was simple. Play it, screenshot something I didn't like, complain, repeat. My notes were not polite. A few real ones from the transcript:
amazing. some farms and sprinkled/randomized desert cacti shit too would be nice. add more asset forms. but QA all of them. this makes the game rich.
its functionally better but looks basic and hides the game. which i dont love. anything we can do to get best of both worlds?
wtf is that? did we break the edges...?
commit work. beautiful.
Most of the work was that loop. Clouds that looked bad, got removed, then came back as a single wisp marking where a town could go. A start menu I sent back three times. Trains driving through airports, boats sailing over bridges, planes landing at ridiculous speeds. Each of those started as a screenshot.
Two notes changed the game more than any others. The first was "make it a working game", which turned the demo into something with zoning, money, services, happiness, pollution, fires and saves. The second was "the game is done in 5 minutes, I need 1–2 hours." That one got me the research tree with 41 projects, era gates, 36 goals and random events.
To check the pacing, a bot plays the game on its own at normal speed after every balance change. Right now it reaches Town in about 10 minutes, City in 36, Metropolis in 61 and the Future era in 96. Close enough to the 1–2 hours I asked for.
Things I'd do again
Saves only store what you changed. The map itself regenerates from a seed, so when I changed how coastlines are generated, old saves got patched on load instead of breaking.
The terrain stays blocky on purpose. Those stepped cliffs are the look, so I never smoothed them. Only roads and railways get ramps.
You only run the capital. The other towns grow on their own, send you 20% of their taxes, and tell you why they're unhappy if you click on them.
The map only labels land worth buying: somewhere a town is waiting, or somewhere with room for one.
Where it ended up
Six lands (Mediterranean, Nordic, East Asian, Desert, Alpine, Tropical), each with its own trees, crops, buildings and a soundtrack that's generated as you play. Four terrains and four map sizes. Five eras from a 1975 village to a Future city, each with a tech choice that changes what the map looks like.
There's day and night, seasons, animals, people walking around, tunnels, viaducts and level crossings with gates. Taxes, loans, exports and tourism. And a photo mode, because I kept stopping to screenshot things.
This is the one I keep coming back to. 267,968 people, nine cities along one coast:
It's not finished. Traffic, transit lines, disasters and a minimap are all on the list. But it's playable, and it's the game I wanted.
Go play it. It autosaves, so name your capital something you won't regret.