The various decisions/petitions that pop up can break the immersion by mentioning details that don't fit the city(petitions with signatures from >250% of the town population, traffic issues at the "4-way intersection in front of the feed store" when no such place exists, or the new building causing shadows when there's nothing around it). It would be great if more text was turned into templates that pull game data for accuracy, and if the simulation were able to feed definitive descriptions of the town layout into generative AI prompts to make the text talk about scenarios reflected in the game.

Kind of like this one[1] which made the rounds on HN a few weeks ago. Looks like the social commentary from them are similar: "Real life is worse than SimCity because of rules and the public getting a say." and/or "Why can't we in real life let the mayor use the Bulldozer Tool to just wipe out any property he doesn't like and put up whatever property he likes in its place?"

1: https://smackernews.com/item/50036864 HN

I haven't tried the game, but this is slightly hilarious and awesome.

I've often wondered about this kind of thing. When I go to an airport, it seems strange to me that each one is different with some of them having elaborate train systems, or multiple runways.

The engineer in me says "surely there is an optimal solution, so why are they all so different?". Is there a simulator?

Sim City was a fantastic simulation from the stand point of a game, but I'm curious; if you build a city simulator and let it grow organically (game of life style) can you put in sufficient regulation/parameters that get you to where we are today?

And if so, is there a simulation that shows us a way to get us to a better tomorrow?

The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.

But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.

This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.

Coming from a family owned construction firm, this is funny and sad in a way. Any how, Ive added it to the HNArcade https://hnarcade.com/games/games/permit-pending

I would actually love a Sim City designed for realistic economic experimentation. A population of 1000’s of professions all acting self-interestedly with their various characteristics, motives, social and economic arrangements.

With a proper SimCity interface and the full complement of fun natural disasters of course!

I suppose this is the result of a hundred years of democracy, aka having to keep everyone happy all the time.

Municipal rules, zoning, community feedback and so on all operate in the space of keeping people happy. No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained. We all want no traffic, and lots of parking, so low density please, but that creates housing shortages and limits the usefulness of public transport.

So a rule is added here, a process there, and everyone is fighting everything all the time. Can't build this because traffic. Can't build that because impact on the neighborhood.

But yay, democracy? We can do anything as long as no one is subjectivly harmed.

And when nothing at all gets done, we blame politicians for being lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.

A little too much going on all at once in the beginning. For a complex game like this I think you have to start small and slowly introduce functionality. Why are so many buttons available to me from minute 1? I'm not using them.

I think I read somewhere that they kept that type of thing out of SimCity to make it fun.

And TBH they were right! I watch a bunch of city meetings that Boulder posts online (https://www.youtube.com/@CityofBoulderGov/videos) and it's exhausting the amount of back and forth nitpicking and NIMBYism that goes on. It's surprising anything gets done at all. The cynic in me thinks the rich get their way because they can pay people to keep fighting for them - everybody else gets fed up with it and stops participating.

Screen turns largely black after a short bit of loading the city with these errors:

  .WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_OPERATION: glRenderbufferStorageMultisample: Texture total allocation size is too large.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  228[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElementsInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  11[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawElements: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  10[.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArrays: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glBlitFramebuffer: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glClear: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 [.WebGL-0x15bc15784800] GL_INVALID_FRAMEBUFFER_OPERATION: glDrawArraysInstanced: Framebuffer is incomplete: Attachment has zero size.
  play/:1 WebGL: too many errors, no more errors will be reported to the console for this context.

I've been enjoying this for a few hours. One really buggy thing though is the road system. You can build streets anywhere that's empty, but the unpaved road tiles that are generated at the beginning of the game can't be zoned. They just remain empty unless you put streets on them. On the other hand, you can actually zone over streets that are placed anywhere besides those unpaved tiles. If it has street access elsewhere, the sim will just plop a building on top of the street, but it won't recognize that street itself as giving access, if that makes sense.

So basically any road that isn't on the suggested unpaved tiles is useless, and the unpaved tiles can't be zoned.

[edit] It would also be nice to be able to find schools, police stations, etc. with an overlay view. There doesn't seem to be a data view for that.

This is brilliant, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to spend time playing it as a game. No one in my town wants to run for mayor since it is a thankless and impossible job that pays a fraction of the cost of living here. There is no fun or joy or escapism in being hated by everyone and not being able to please anyone.

It complains that my screen is too small and "a tablet or computer shows the whole city hall", whatever the city hall is, which I obviously don't know yet. But I am on a tablet. I think what it means is "you must hold your tablet in portrait", otherwise the data views button gets hidden underneath the end of the other toolbar.

Further gripes: I don't understand what I'm seeing. The first "data view" shows a heat map of population, but which are the dense parts? Is beige denser than blue which is denser than icy grey? Where's the actual population figure for that tile, is it "district population"? That seems to be per-tile, so is a building a district? Why does the park have a population of 49, and why do the 49 people living in the park give me a mayoral approval rating of 56%?

It's missing a few critical "features" that make it even more realistic. Redlining, block busting, eminent domain, mortgage discrimination, public-housing segregation and siting, and restrictive covenants mechanisms.

Was it inspired by this?

https://housing.over.pizza/

Looks good, I could not try it completely but my first impressions are positive because of the detailed game design, customization capabilities of the city. Also you can add a map start from empty world.

Error when loading a new game:

Permit Pending error report Code: PP-SIM-F99D Step: running the simulation Error: Error: The simulation could not start. Build: 2e99342ba03e Time: 2026-10-20T21:37:28.780Z Page: https://permit.petercai.com/play/ Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Machine: screen 1920x1080, window 1920x911, pixel ratio 2 memory 16 GB, cores 16 touch points 0 game screen menu, map quality setting AUTO, drawn at ?

Graphics: api WEBGL2 renderer ANGLE (NVIDIA, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (0x00002184) Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0, D3D11) tier high MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE 16384 MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE 16384 MAX_SAMPLES 8 EXT_color_buffer_float yes EXT_color_buffer_half_float yes OES_texture_float_linear yes

Stack: Error: The simulation could not start. at e.onerror (https://permit.petercai.com/assets/play-DYe3blxS.js:10:25790...)

Recent log: 21:37:28 failed to load script https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/vce70182... 21:37:28 error Error: The simulation could not start.

Is there an option to split property tax into separate land value tax + improvement tax?

I checked under "Data Views", but couldn't find a simple zoning overlay (i.e. that just shows colors based on the underlying zoning category residential, industrial, commercial, etc).

Also it would be nice if popular menu options (like Street, etc) showed keyboard shortcuts.

And, is anyone else having trouble demolishing recently built streets?

Couldn't get past the new city screen where I'm choosing "Blank Slate" or the other one. I assume theres a button to press odd I scroll down, but scrolling is locked. Fun idea tho. There's a Factorio Mod where the biters attack you with paperwork instead of trying to kill you directly that this makes me think of.

They should add a LA mode where you spend $9,000 in permits for a home extension only to have it burn down in a wildfire.

For those who are curious, this is what I could gather:

    - Three.js for rendering
    - react 18+ UI built with Vite
    - charts are custom, no libs
    - main bundle size is a js file of 1MB (290KB gziped)
    - No router, no redux/zustand
    - saves using indexedDB + service-worker

Is there the opposite side of the problem of too much permitting? Unpermitted rapid growth with bad construction controls -- so the supply of stock becomes dilapidated or the building goes bananas and you have an oversupply of junky condos nobody wants?

This is beautiful rage bait of a game.

Reminds me of the North Berkeley board game [1]

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/347552/north-berkeley

So, when I start the game - I don't understand what my purpose even is. That is, what do I want to be doing? Even if I choose an implicit goal - increase my apporval percentage for example - the best I have is some vague metric of cocerns, and the main concern is "neighborhood change", when: (1) I haven't changed anything yet! and (2) The only thing I can even do is propose more neighborhood change. And I'm not even sure the thing to is aim for increasing my approval rating. So, I feel stumped before ever have taken a single action.

One of the biggest shortcomings of our current modality of housing planning is that our grandchildren / great grandchildren don't have any representation at these zoning meetings.

The experience was quite overwhelming, but in a learning experience way. I couldn't believe my contractors were bombarding my emails about residents not understanding how a 4-way stop sign works...also trying to think about what I want to build and then someone emails me about what to name a raccoon they found in the attic. So much responsibility just to make everyone happy, it's pretty much impossible. It really did a good job of presenting that.

I really don't get why zoning didn't solve this. Isn't this the point of having zoning that it dictates what types of things can be built and what they can be used for? I don't know why I need separate approvals if I'm building within the rules that zoning allows. There should be no discretionary objections allowed - if you buy a house next to a commercial lot then you know what you're getting yourself into.

Isn't this the opposite of escapism? I want to play games precisely because I don't have anyone giving me hassle (well, maybe a little). This just triggers me because my working life is dealing with "politics" and certain people who don't know what they are doing.

I'm fascinated by the politics simulation within the game. Is there a red state vs blue state angle? How much of the mayor levers affect political campaigning, alignment, bill signatures, etc. this could be done as much as a political sim as much as a city planning sim.

This is very cool - one minor issue, when I zoomed out on a Metropolis it hung for a very long time at the several block radius and then after say ~20-30s it then was able to load the full city.

After that it still did it on various different views but it was much faster.

When (20??) they finetune GPT to be running a government this will be the most saught after dataset for training.

Can this be tweaked to model an actual city or town, akin to the digital twin model? Imagine our policymakers running a simulation or backtesting on historic data. If someone optimised quality of life at this scale, that could do some good.

This is rare: a game whose very description makes a bold and valid point. Even without playing the game, it's existence is amusing and thought provoking. I can't think of any other games that have done that.

I gave a solid laugh. I heard in Saw XI , they're going to make them play this. It honestly for a certain type of ppl is probably actually insanely fun. For me I like some rules and regs, but gall dang, I might have had a minor stroke when the side panel popped up.

I loved SimCity 2000. But the game became nonsense (for me at least) when it came down to the pipes under the city. That stuff never made any sense to me and so I moved on to other stuff. Maybe I was just not doing good? Who knows such things.

It’s interesting to see so many people demanding that home owners have less influence.

My observation is, that whenever residents have little say in how their area develops they dissociate. Trash on the streets and decay and follow.

Even without the game, the website itself is excellently droll.

What city is everyone thinking of when they read the description?

I was daydreaming about building sandcastles on the beach or the playground but with heavy machinery, strong concrete foundations and, of course, permits. Signed by the townhall

"free, because you are loved"

And because LLMs are making love cheaper.

Yoo, its good aside from the bug that I can spam some proposal in order to stack amount of support and basically manipulate some value

its all gucci

Idea, digitize a town/city and apply all current codes, permits restrictions etc, and then run simulations based on permitting changes

Am i missing something? How do you add power poles?

All I get is "City Hall can't load here. Error loading the game: PP-LOAD-1C59."

I can't tell if this is a real error or satire, lol

Not sure how it plays, I havent tried it yet. But the concept sounds very interesting and well… real!

Great, now could someone revive the old Command and Conquer Javascript project to life?

https://github.com/adityaravishankar/command-and-conquer

Guys please just add a line to your Claude.md "never use bordered cards" to avoid the vibe look

Why is it that many of these games have continuous popups. I get enough approval fatigue during the day!

wow... you made this with claude?? i think.. it's so great! because... i'm also coding with claude, but so hard for me..

I'm on month 3 of getting my permit approved for a...fence

Love the graphics style, and the idea to it.

something like this not built for mobile should be a sin. Just spend a few tokens to improve usability, geez.

New game scroll broken on mobile safari

Somebody get this to Ezra Klein.

With all respect intended to the author, point taken! Within 60 seconds I realized that this game is less enjoyable than most people's actual work. Trying to please a bunch of random jackasses, many of which have made it their sole purpose in life to fight with another faction of the population, some of which are willfully ignorant, and the rest of which are apathetic. Any accomplishments you might have, a significant group would consider a bad thing and attack you. I would not want to be a mayor.

this project won first price at a hackaton organized by the european commission

Parks and rec, the video game

How do I turn off the music?

In the footer: Permit Pending is not a joke. Is this a joke to you?

Love it, I hope this becomes the most popular game on the internet so folks get to experience the Byzantine level of complexity we've made doing business in industries with physical stuff.

We had another person vibecode a very similar thing few weeks back: https://smackernews.com/item/50036864 HN

Both are similarly unplayable, but I guess it's the thought that counts.

It’s interesting how all of these problems are due to misaligned incentives.

Unpopular opinion: cities should be private, for-profit corporations. Leasing land from the government and charging subscription fees. Like a very big hotel.

First, it is always important to remember that representative democracy has known fundamental scaling problems from a game-theoretic perspective, and we can enjoy the consequences globally across the developed world today. Establishments and incumbents getting back to old good populism and enforcement, no matter left, right, or center. Representation works as a bootstrap mechanism, but it should be treated as something to be transformed into efficient direct democracy, otherwise we are doomed. And here we come to the practical "efficiency" of governing local communities. It seems especially important to discuss possible solutions here on HN, because much of the solution space clearly lies in tech.

So all in all, small communities do not fail because online participation is impossible. They fail because obstruction is cheap and accountability is absent: one person can repeatedly delay a decision, while everyone who supported a controversial decision simply moves on. I think we are in that point in history where participation could be dramatically improved by LLM in pipeline (and there are real works behind it https://github.com/AIObjectives/tttc-light-js https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq2852)

- Chat and voice messages becomes a source-linked with signed summaries (llm definitely can help most ppl structure their thoughts into words)

- disputes are classified as factual, distributive, value-based, procedural, or rights-related

- it becomes more real to agree on explicit success (or dealbreaking) criteria for every decision

- votes and objections also accounted as "prediction market" bets of their voting power.

- evidence is more reviewable with LLM

- and what's most important the outcome updates domain-specific reputation that weakens future vote weights of those who sabotaged, or joined to crowd for populist decisions proved to be failure.

If a blinded LLM assessment and the community votes agree, the decision proceeds. If they disagree, at least it is much rare occasion and interesting to consider the causes. The key innovation is an auditable path from messy discussion to decisions, evidence, outcomes, and consequences. Reputation becomes the non-monetary cost of being confidently wrong or strategically obstructive. I hope to see more of such platforms and survive experiments. Current situation feels like desperation

Brilliant idea. Welcome to the real world and your annoying neighbours.

Good one!

Cool!

I’d love to play this on a flight lol

Next up, Stardew Valley with an HOA

Please god stop making the x to close windows on the middle or the left. Majority of people who using computers are using Linux or Windows where it's on the upper right and it's a muscle memory. You aren't being clever or helping. I get that in some cases you may want people to read the information you have and pause a bit more, but it just irritates me and does not make me want to engage with whatever it is if I have to waste so much more time closing every window as a result. It literally wastes an exponential amount of time.

If this was an installable, moddable game, this would be cool. Further, I'm not sure why they could not add this as an existing module or feature within SimCity 3000 itself. It's a nice little wanna be clone. But playing a browser game just doesn't feel like a game.

Cool project!

Tangential: Elon was tweeting recently about how he blames bureaucracy for the NY-DC Hyperloop corridor's failure (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2112102304782680107). Whether that is ignoring other major problems with the plan or not, there's been bi-partisan criticism of how the traditional western democracy has severely slowed down infrastructure investment (see, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...). I see a lot of people going to China after being oblivious to it for years mostly due to western propaganda and being in awe with how fast the country has advanced its industry and public infrastructure with superior high speed rail, power grid, and other investments. I wonder if the west will ever find a way to adapt the dynamism that an autocracy affords to its system of government (which sadly has been increasingly described as an aristocracy/plutocracy/corporatocracy/kleptocracy).