Overview
A cross-section tower-building game in the lineage of SimTower and Yoot Tower -; SimTower-accessible on the surface, Yoot-Tower-deep underneath. Build offices, condos, hotels, shops and restaurants up a glass cutaway; route tenants through elevators and stairs; and keep everyone happy enough to climb the star ladder. Under the hood it’s a deterministic simulation wrapped in a classroom.
Background
It started as the “should this exist?” question lurking behind the old Skyscraper Elevator Optimization notes: elevator dispatch is a genuinely deep scheduling problem, and SimTower already smuggled queuing theory into a game kids will actually play. Tower Sim is the attempt to build that on purpose -; a real engine you can see thinking, not a black box.
How It Works
The architecture splits a deterministic, headless engine from a separate renderer across a fixed contract, so the simulation is reproducible and testable on its own. Two design bets keep it “easy but deep”: progressive disclosure (the elevator quietly upgrades from autopilot to full manual control at your first star, unlocking zoning and express runs) and placement as strategy (a comfort model scoring noise, view and adjacency, so where you put things matters).
The centerpiece is the Glass Box: the dispatcher is swappable from a registry, the scheduler emits a plain-language “why” trace, and a metrics stream measures wait times, queue lengths and throughput -; so you can change the algorithm and watch the numbers move.
# swap the elevator brain from a registry, on deterministic rails schedulers = [ "sweep", "naive-nearest", "collective-full", "fifo" ] # ...then read back wait / queue / throughput and compare
Layered on top: a second location, vacation_resort, with a live seasonal economy (summer peak) that punishes the office-heavy strategy that won in the city; a housekeeping loop where maids are routed agents that path-find to dirty rooms via a staff-only service elevator; a security & disasters layer (patrol bands, plus seeded bomb threats and spreading fires with a SimCity-style “safe mode” toggle); and a structural Floor tool for building over empty space. Every run is recordable as a Scenario that replays byte-identically.
What It Teaches
The classroom track uses the Glass Box as the lesson: queuing theory and scheduling algorithms (by swapping dispatchers and measuring the difference), systems thinking and feedback loops (comfort, economy and traffic all couple), basic economics and ROI (the seasonal resort), and data literacy (reading the live metrics to decide what to build next).
Current Status
Working build at v0.7. The vertical slice plus build-specs 02-;07 and the art layer are all implemented and green -; 51 tests pass, and npm run dev runs the living tower in “Golden Hour” styling across both locations.