Concept
The pitch · Setting and genre · The name · Why one city · Inspirations · Pillars ·
A palimpsest is a page scraped clean and written over, where the old writing still shows through.
The pitch
A bounded patch of land, a valley with a river, a few hundred metres on a side. A dozen people arrive with axes. Over the next several hundred simulated years they build a town, wall it against raiders, outgrow the wall, tear the wall’s gates open for carts, pave over the ditch, and put a glass tower on the footings of the old granary. The wall is still there. You can see it in the street plan and, if you cut the ground open, in the stone.
Nothing in the city is placed by the game. Every voxel in every building was carried there by a named person who wanted it there.
Setting and genre
A medieval-to-modern settlement on a temperate coast: a river with a ford, hills with stone and iron, woodland, arable flats, an island offshore. The genre is a management simulation with the management taken away: the player is a governor, not a builder, and the town is the protagonist. It is watched more than it is played, and it is meant to be worth watching for six hundred years.
The name
Palim is short for palimpsest. The full word was already taken as a name, so the project is Palim and the idea keeps its name: the town is the page, and nothing on it is ever scraped so clean that the old writing goes.
Why one city
One city, one site, never more. The city is always individual people and individual voxels, never a summary once you zoom out. The site is the character: this river, this hill, this wall. About six hundred years, medieval to modern, and then it is a metropolis. The player is a pressure on the city, not a hand in it.
Breadth is cut so that depth is affordable. The whole simulation budget goes into one place, and every rule is written for the one town it has to be worth watching.
Inspirations
Ordnance Survey maps laid one over another; the archaeology of a city section; the way a European old town’s ring road follows its wall. Dwarf Fortress for the idea that a story is something the simulation leaves behind. The Sims and Banished for citizens with a day. Nothing of any of them is copied.
Pillars
The site is finite, and so is everything in it. The mountains hold a countable number of voxels of stone, iron and coal; the flood plain holds a countable amount of clay; the woods a countable amount of timber. Nothing is topped up. A city that digs for six hundred years will run the ground out, and the only two ways past that are trade and the city’s own fabric.
Every voxel has an author and a date. Construction is a physical process. A mason walks to the quarry, mines a stone voxel out of the cliff, carries it, and sets it down. Every placed voxel stores the year and era it was placed in, which is what makes the rest of the game possible.
The city is written over, never erased. There is no bulldoze. Buildings are abandoned, burn or collapse; what is left is rubble and footings; new buildings are founded on whatever is there because it is cheaper than quarrying.
Nobody is given a finished building design. A building’s shape comes out of a small network that is bred, not written, and what the building is is read back off the finished shape by measuring what it physically affords.
The city grows, the player leans on it. You set policy, spend a treasury and absorb the consequences. The city has its own momentum and will frequently do the opposite of what you wanted.
The outside world is arithmetic. Foreign cities are rows in a table. They exist to be a market, a source of migrants, and occasionally an army on the horizon.
History is the content. There is no tech tree the player clicks. The era advances when the city’s own numbers say it has.
This chapter is docs/design/01-concept.md in the repository; the site renders the file as it is.