How Cities: Skylines uses a stock-market analogy to drive almost everything in the game
I wanted to find out how Cities: Skylines drives the constant motion you see in a growing city - residents looking for jobs, tourists visiting attractions, garbage trucks doing their rounds, even cims looking for love - and I couldn’t find much written up about it. So I decompiled the game and dug in. What I found is that almost every interaction in the game runs through a single, elegant system: a stock-market-style trading market.
---
I wrote this post a few years back, and recently updated it to add detail to areas I thought lacked sufficient explanation.
I found it really interesting to explore how Colossal Order built such a versatile system, I hope it will be an interesting read to anyone involved in game development.
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions! Thanks for reading.