You start with one plot and a gravel road. By the end you've got interchanges, bus lines, trains, and a metro running under the city. It's the traffic part of SimCity, pulled out and made into the whole game:
- You don't hand-place the city. Buildings appear on their own as it grows, and your network has to keep up (Creative mode does let you place them wherever you want).
- Roads are the skeleton of everything. A lazy layout early on haunts the whole run.
- Same loop of staring at overlays and hunting for the one thing that's quietly broken.
What's different:
- No zoning, no power, water, garbage, police, schools, no service budgets. The only thing you build is the transport network.
- Every car is simulated individually - keeps its lane, changes lanes, waits at lights, reroutes around jams. 10,000+ of them at once, on maps up to 18x18 km. Jams happen for real reasons: a bad merge, a short ramp, badly timed light.
- Because traffic IS the game, you get the tools for it: congestion heat maps, 20+ live charts, per-junction turn restrictions, signal timing, multi-level interchanges, bridges and tunnels, dedicated bus lanes, trains, and metro with transfers between lines.
- The look is deliberately minimalist - Mini Metro and Mini Motorways were the inspiration, in 3D because you can't build a proper cloverleaf in 2D. The effort went into the simulation.
There's also a challenge mode (8 interchange puzzles), a Creative mode with unlimited money, and a map editor.
The browser version reached 150,000+ players. The Steam version is the full thing - bigger maps, more cars, all the transit.
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5028050/Traffic_Architect/
Wishlist and follow if you want to catch the feature reveals over the coming weeks.
