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Greetings. I decided to push for something playable that I can share, instead of building more and more features. Even though it's very basic, and most of the game is not there yet, I think the feedback that I'll get is worth it. You can find the first "playable" build here

Added from my latest update - The Tech-Tree (finally), the map is complete, a main menu - to make it look like a game, and lots of bug fixes and balancing.

If it peeks anyone's interest please try it and let me know first if it's even running! and how? How is the technical performance, any crashes anything not working? And even more important - what do you think about it? is it fun, what would you change, add, remove? any bit of feedback helps. Thanks for reading :)

Thanks, your feedback is highly appreciated!

It seemed like a good idea to put coat of paint on my city, so it doesn't look like Lego blocks anymore. Luckily I found a great free city tile pack by Kenney and here's the result

I also changed the mechanic of the HQ, after buying or renting office space, in addition to buying technical equipment, you can buy rooms for employees (tech teams, researchers etc..), which determines how many of that unit you can hire. You still need to hire them though. Later, employees will get grumpy if you place their office right next to a huge noisy teleswitch, so it will make sense to get separate buildings for each, which is more expensive.

Working on my isometric project I'm now realizing a challenge with things hiding behind taller structures. I'm thinking about two ways to solve it in the future: one is to being able to rotate the map, the other is to give a transparent view to the mouse pointer so moving the mouse over a tall building would make it, or the mouse area semi transparent. For my game it's not super important to see what's happening behind my buildings, but for you, placing the belts and building the tiles it's much more important, so perhaps the 2d top down approach is not a bad idea, it worked rather well for "Factorio". I would try the isometric view but keep an open mind that it might need to be scraped at the end. 

Thanks for commenting! Yes it's possible to make multiple connections all around, however it's very tricky to get the right numbers. For example 20 customers are connected to two different LDFs (10 to each) some of them are trying to call to the other LDF and others want long distance calls or international through several teleswitches in between. The teleswitch needs to know how much bandwidth to send to each connection and if I don't want to develop a whole new routing protocol (which currently I don't) I'm sort of guesstimating the numbers

Ok so some mechanics to manage customers have been added. There's an HR page where you can hire Tech teams, Sales reps, Researchers and Customer support. 

Sales reps will slowly acquire customers, provided you established an infrastructure next to their home. Other than money, customers will generate complaints, so it's a good idea to hire a few customer support folks to assist. If you won't have enough, customer satisfaction will plunge and customers will disconnect from your network. 

The second major addition is the overhaul to the connections. Now a connection between buildings or components have a logical path (a straight line between two points) and a physical path which is the actual path of the link through the city. Connections at the moment are copper wires, and in the future will be fibers and radio links. copper wires and fibers usually go on telephone polls alongside roads or in tunnels right next to a road. Occasionally a disaster can occur, a tree falls on a telephone wire, someone decides to dig a trench next to his shop or other shenanigans... Those will most likely break all the connections running on that road, cause huge traffic outages. That's why it's wise to have connections with different routes. In the future I will add the option to create protected trails over those links with main and protection paths, and they better go over different roads!

So naturally I haven't done anything from my agenda, instead of the tech tree and marketing I focused on the Communication Room. The main room where most of the equipment will be placed and will be responsible for routing the heavy loads of the traffic in the network. I created a separate layout for the room where you can buy components, place them, and send tech-teams to install them.

Every components has a power requirement, generates heat, takes space and of course costs money, so it's a trade off between them all. I also added some HR features where you must hire tech teams before sending them.

Next on the Agenda: 1. Start the tech tree 2. Options to acquire customers :)

Sounds like a cool idea, not too complicated, but fun enough to try. I'd think about perhaps not giving the player direct control over the sheep but let them run (panicked) from threats, and move away from the shepherd or the dogs, which the player does control directly.

So this is what i got so far. Game art is definitely not my strong suit so everything is pretty much a place holder. Starting with the old school land line telephone. 

3 buildings to set: build a LDF (Local Distribution Frame), send a technicians team to set it up, and connect the near by homes, Build a PBX (Private Branch Exchange) for business customers, by taking a contract and connect all the required customer locations to each other. and lastly the TeleSwitch, which will connect to the LDF and PBX and switch the necessary calls. 

Next on the Agenda: 1. Start the tech tree 2. Options to acquire customers

Hi Guys and Gals, I'm Benny, started working on a new project. A 2D isometric management game where you begin as a CEO of a small telecom company somewhere in the 90s. Build the infrastructure, connect homes to your telephone network, launch marketing campaigns to get customer, grow. Research new technologies to improve and innovate, progress to mobile and internet technologies while competing with other companies in the market.

I'm building with unity, quite new to game development. Hoping to send weekly updates to get feedback but mostly to arrange my thoughts and goals.

 Cheers