I love a city building game. My wife and I have spent countless days just sat playing Cities: Skylines together, building up a city for an entire day, then watching it evolve over time as we discover where the businessmen like to come for extreme sports in the summer (it’s always the leisure district). I’ve never seen a city builder that allows you to delve into the nitty gritty of the food that’s coming in. Yes, you can set policies to only allow certain produce, but you can’ get down to the farm and set the standards. Well all that changes with Food Industry. The game is currently looking for funding on Kickstarter (check out the campaign here), and it’s really quite gripping.
Manage The Food Industry
The game’s premise is pretty simple, manage the food industry of a small town as it evolves into a bigger city. You start out with a farm, growing your own produce, checking in with the chickens and cows, and selling it to market goers. As you earn more money, you’ll be able to develop new fields, grow more crops, and have more animals to create various food products with. Of course, as you grow, so does the town around you, which will consume said food.
You can go into some extreme levels of detail with Food Industry. The marketplace will be filled with people selling your goods, so you can choose which of their displays sell what, and spend hours making them look perfect. As the city gets bigger, there will be more companies with more people that need you. It’s also possible to use the local marketing company to help promote your goods to a larger consumer base outside of the city, and then you’re into international shipping.
The game’s creator has some big plans for it, as long as enough funding is acquired through the campaign. Ultimately you’ll be managing an entire city, working on all the normal farm stuff, but also looking into the factories that optimise the production of essential goods like milk and flower. You can set up the machines in a style similar to Big Pharma, and then leave them working away as other automated systems arrange for the milk to be delivered, the flour sent to shops, and much much more.
As a tease, there’s even the potential for us to be able to manage the interior of a supermarket. I would be in heaven if this was possible.
How’s It Looking?
The campaign has just started, and sits at £97 of the required £8,625 so far. But this is just the beginning. Kickstarter have marked this game as a project that they love, and I can see it getting more than full funding before the end. City managers are one of the best game genres, and they almost never go without funding for long. The reward tiers are almost entirely digital, but there is a nice t-shirt you can nab yourself. This is a project to keep an eye on, and maybe throw some money to if you’ve got some to give this month.
Sometimes we write about Kickstarter games like Food Industry, whether they get fully funded or not. If you liked this look at Food Industry and want to read about some other Kickstarter games, head here.