The Little Citizens update for Little Cities adds residents to nDreams and Purple Yonder’s VR city simulator.
Unlike the paid Snowy Islands DLC last December, Little Citizens marks the latest free update in Little Cities for all existing owners on Quest. Following last year’s Attractions and hand-tracking updates, Little Citizens adds tiny residents to the city streets, who will interact with your various creations. The new version is available now and you can find the full update outline below:
Little Citizens adds people to the streets of your cities, bringing the hustle and bustle to your mini-metropolises and an even greater sense of immersion to the game. You’ll see residents interacting with your creations in a whole host of ways including enjoying a relaxing day at the beach, practicing yoga in the park or taking in a game at the stadium – they even wave back to you! You’ll also see these Little Citizens grow in number as your city expands.
We came away impressed during our Little Cities review last May on Quest. Calling it “an impressive effort from Purple Yonder and an accomplished city simulator,” we believed it offers a “succinct yet well-designed experience” and awarded it our Recommended label.
It effectively adapts the genre’s traditional mechanics into a distilled format that feels native and well considered for VR. The focus on immersive city design is the right approach, backed up by brilliant visuals and audio. The control scheme and UI fades into the background, as it should, leaving you to intuitively build your city without it ever getting in your way.
Little Cities is available now on the Meta Quest platform for $19.99, or bundled with the Snowy Islands DLC for $23.99. A Pico version is also available, though the DLC and post-launch updates are currently unavailable for it.
After some discussions internally and a few requests from fans, Purple Yonder decided hand tracking support would be the game’s first big piece of post-launch content.
“We really wanted to jump in at the deep end and see what we could do and if we could make it playable with hands and that’s what we’ve managed to do,” he told me. “It was a lot of work to get to that stage, a lot of challenges, but we’re there and it’s working really well.”
To place objects and build roads, you’ll point at an area of the map and use the familiar pinch gesture, found in many other hand tracking apps. However, movement with your hands is a bit unique in Little Cities — you close and drag your hands in a fist to move laterally, while moving fists closer or further apart will let you zoom. Moving fists in a steering wheel motion will rotate the map.
Apart from that, a lot of the remaining buttons and actions transferred from controllers to hands without much modification. The wristwatch mechanic, for example, works almost exactly the same as it does with controllers. “That just works really well with hand tracking because you just naturally look at your hand and that all still works the same way.”
“When you’re selecting things, if you haven’t played Little Cities, the way it works is you have like a build bubble and you pop that with your finger. And then you get a section of other bubbles which shows different options you can build. And that just works really well,” he explains. “We didn’t really have to change much to get that working with hand tracking and it just feels really good, this kind of tactile feeling. Cause it’s not only you kind of popping these bubbles to select things, but it feels like your real hands when you’re doing it.”
The Big Hands in Little Cities update is out now on the Quest platform. Both Quest 2 and the original Quest will support hand tracking, with players on the newer headset being able to take advantage of Hand Tracking 2.0.
Holy hell, Little Cities has broken into the top 10 best-selling games on the @MetaQuestVR! It only launched last week…
You really need to give yourselves a round of applause @PurpleYonder People seem to be really loving our humble little city creator pic.twitter.com/1Y9z6ihLkW
— Jimmy Bowers @ nDreams (@jimmysbowers) May 19, 2022
The list of top sellers on Quest remains pretty stable a lot of the time. Massively popular games like Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Superhot, Onwards, Population: One and Saints & Sinners are almost always featured in the top ten, with room for only a few others to rotate in and out if they sell enough.
For Little Cities to make it onto the top of the list, even for a brief moment, should signal that it’s selling quite well at the moment compared to other staple titles.
Given the level of polish and detail in Little Cities, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a Quest release developed by quite a large team of people.
But speaking to Purple Yonder’s James Howard last week revealed to me just how small the studio really is. “[My wife] Kelly and I both worked on the design,” he tells me. “I did all the programming for the game, so I ended up working out the technical systems for the code and stuff. And then she works on a lot of the stuff like the UI design and getting the levels just right — thinking what each item could be, the different buildings you can get, working all those things out.”
James and Kelly Howard make up the indie UK studio, which is the driving force behind Little Cities. They were helped along by some contracted artists across the development cycle, as well as an audio designer and a composer. nDreams also came on board later in the process, for publishing support, but for the most part, it was quite a tight-knit group.
Could such a little team be what helped Little Cities expertly deliver on a VR-first approach to a city simulator game?
Starting Small, Expanding Out
Little Cities had a curious launch. Sandwiched next to Cities VR, there was an unavoidable risk of being overshadowed on release, perhaps looking like a simplified version of the former. As it turned out, the underdog came out on top; Cities VR failed to fully deliver on its expansive vision, marred by under-performing visuals and overwhelming VR design decisions. Little Cities, meanwhile, came away with a focused approach to the genre that puts intelligent VR implementation first.
But how did this tiny indie studio go from inception in 2018 to releasing a nDreams-supported title on the biggest VR headset of the moment just a few years later?
Long before the days of VR, James began his game development journey as a kid, making games in BASIC. A few years and a computer science degree later, he went on to cut his teeth with opportunities at some big name studios — EA, Rockstar and then, Ninja Theory.
“I did a lot of cool stuff there [at Ninja Theory], and that was where I really started to get involved with VR,” he said. “We had a really small team. I think there was about two or three of us, depending on when it was. But we were just concentrating on VR and just exploring VR stuff.”
He ended up working on the VR version of Ninja Theory’s 2017 title Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. “I did most of the work for Hellblade VR, and mapping that to VR, which had a lot of challenges,” he said. “And then, Ninja Theory got acquired by Microsoft and they didn’t really have as much of a focus on VR, but that was something I still wanted to do.”
As that experience came to a close, he began thinking about pursuing his own VR projects. “Working on something like Hellblade VR was interesting, because people weren’t doing third person VR games, and it works. It works quite well. And it left us with a feeling of like, ‘Well, which other genres could work in VR, which no one’s attempted?'”
He had always been a fan of the city simulator genre — one that, at the time, had yet to be tackled properly in VR — and began thinking about how early inspirations, like the original Sim City and Sim City 2000, might be adapted for VR.
It was at this point, around 2018, that James began work on what would become Little Cities. “I had this prototype that I was working on, and Kelly, my wife, was like, ‘This is something really special here. We should actually take this a bit more seriously. What do you think? What do you want to do with this type of thing?'” They presented the prototype to the UK Games Fund, and the resulting government grant allowed them to kick Purple Yonder, and Little Cities, fully into action.
“We just like went and jumped into the deep end, set up a company. We built [the prototype] up a little bit more and we ended up taking it to nDreams and they loved it too. As soon as they saw the game, they just got it. They just saw what we were trying to do and they were able to give us some support on the publishing side.”
Interaction, Intuition, Innovation
Four years later and Little Cities is available on the Quest platform, a masterclass in made-for-VR design that presents an experience that is equally accessible and enjoyable for newcomers and experts to VR and the city simulator genre alike.
However, early versions of the game weren’t quite as intuitive as the final product. The user interface itself — one of the game’s shining accomplishments — underwent four or five complete redesigns over the course of development. “Really early on, it was just taking concepts like big flat panels, like you’d have in a PC title. It was just like, ‘Well, this isn’t fun. This isn’t really using VR to its best. What else can we do?'”
It wasn’t just clunky PC-to-VR menu translations that were avoided – every traditional aspect of the genre was reassessed and adjusted accordingly for the new medium. “Say you’ve never played VR before and you go buy a Quest and you bought our game,” explains James. “We want you to have a good experience. We don’t want it to be difficult to get into. We wanted it to be really accessible. And the same if maybe you’ve never played a city builder before either [and] you don’t know any of the general rules that you have around these types of games. We just wanted to make it so anyone can pick up and play it.”
Gridlocked Traffic
All vehicles in Little Cities come from seaports or an airport. This includes construction vehicles, which need to arrive at a vacant space of land before construction can begin. “Traditionally in a game like this, you build your road networks, and then if there’s a lot of traffic, you just get like a stat somewhere, like, ‘Oh, the traffic’s bad.’ And you’re like, okay, guess I have to do something about it.”
Little Cities shifts this stat to a visual representation — you can actually see traffic building up and blocking construction vehicles from reaching their destination, slowing your progress. “That’s not affecting the citizens so much as it’s affecting the player. So now they just naturally get that feedback. That’s directly affecting them instead.”
Adapting the simulation language in this way – away from stats and notifications, focusing on a visual-led approach – avoids overwhelming the player with complex menus, budgeting, finance options and the like.
“When you’re building a game based on a simulation, you can go really deep with what you’re simulating — what your citizens are doing and the reasons they’re coming or leaving and stuff like that. But what it comes down to is… If you can’t show the player all those things in the simulation, then it’s sort of wasted.”
Creating Little Moments
When James asked his non-gamer dad if he wanted to try Little Cities, he only expected him to last 10 minutes before taking off the headset and giving some pleasant remarks. “We lost him for like about two and a half hours. He just played until the battery ran out. It was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s interesting cause he doesn’t play games, so…'”
It’s easy to get lost in Little Cities, and the backbone of its immersion is a plethora of small yet poignant details at every turn. A whale breeching, hot air balloons taking to the sky, or a flock of birds scattering around you – these charming moments add hugely important depth to the experience. “We got traffic in the game, working with the cars driving around. And suddenly that brought a little bit more life to the game. And then from there, the next natural step was police cars, fire engines, stuff like that. The game’s even more alive.”
“And at some point, we were like, ‘Okay, these little details are really cool.’ That sort of became like a bit of a pillar in our development — little stories, little cities. The idea that there’s actually a whole subsystem in the code which is working out like, ‘Okay, what’s another cool thing to show to the player?'”
A Strong Foundation, Ripe For Expansion
There’s lots on the horizon for Little Cities. Work has already begun on hand tracking support, set to arrive in June, thanks to requests and feedback from players. The game wasn’t designed with hand tracking in mind, but the existing virtual hand-based menu and watch system feels like it was. “That just naturally translates really well to hand tracking,” says James. “It just fits, it’s great.”
Cosmetic and decorative items, arriving in July, will give players more personalization options with new one or two tile decorative options. “Maybe you can put a statue or a fountain, or there might be things that you can put [like] benches by the roadsides and stuff. Those are the kinds of things we’re thinking. If you ‘re already building a city, but you want to just make it look a bit nicer.”
Purple Yonder has lots of ideas on where else they can take them game, but they’ll also be listening to the community and shaping support around what they hear. “The one thing about Little Cities is that every time someone plays it, they’ve got ideas,” says James. “There’s just so many ways you can build on it and extend it, and we’ve got a whole host of ideas of how we can do that.”
With such a strong foundation, the only way for Little Cities to go is up.
After a couple of previews, it’s finally time to give our verdict on what was almost going to be the first proper city building game on Meta Quest 2, Little Cities. However, low and behold it never rains but it pours, bizarrely seeing two arrive within weeks of each other, the other being Cities: VR. Yet in another strange twist, both videogames sit at opposite ends of the genre, with Little Citiesproviding a far less stressful, almost therapeutic experience for those that want to build without all the finicky financials.
The first virtual reality (VR) title from British indie team Purple Yonder with publishing help from VR veterans, nDreams, Little Cities is just that, build your own miniature metropolis. Rather than a plain expanse of land with a few environmental features all of Little Cities’ locations are sun-drenched archipelagos, so you’ll inevitably have at least one major island to build upon, with smaller islands to expand to.
Whilst you don’t get much choice, to begin with, the aim with each location is to reach level 25, unlocking new areas in the process. Before that, it’s time to get building, with Little Cities featuring one of the easiest and most accessible buildings menus you’ll have seen in a game like this. All the details required for planning, how much money you have, is there enough water/electricity, are the residents happy are found by looking at your watch which is bright, bold, easy to read and minimal.
Almost like a Swedish furniture store, keeping things minimal is certainly at the heart of Little Cities so while those stats are informative there’s no in-depth tweaking. Die-hard construction simulator fans may even be a little aghast at the fact you can’t play around with finances, raising or lowing taxes, diverting funds to build something more practical or taking out loans to create an absurd monstrosity. None of that here in Little Cities. Think of it more like a quaint English village on a Sunday, there’s one pace and that’s with your feet up on the sofa.
Construction wise everything is housed in bubbles, press one to open the utility options to find your water, cell, and wind turbine towers. Or open up the services bubble which houses the police station, fire department and so on. The menu can be swapped between your left and right and in the options menu if you need to.
Like any city builder, roads are your first step with placement in Little Cities a doddle. These are all placed in straight lines – no bendy roads here – so cities always do end up in a similar grid structure. This is also necessary due to the fact that certain buildings like the fire station have a set service area, necessitating a central location for maximum coverage. After that, there are three main districts to build, Residential, Commercial and Industrial. Residents need places to live, places to work and places to spend money, balancing all three creates a booming economy so you can spend even more frivolously. You can’t build homes next to factories as residents will become unhappy and that’ll hit your wallet.
In practice, if you follow Little Cities building suggestions – i.e.when there aren’t enough houses – then you’ll almost never run into an issue. The game balances things so well (almost too well) to maintain its calm, tranquil settings that even as a volcano in the middle erupts, spewing lava and molten fireballs at your city you’ll not be bothered, shrugging it off and replacing whatever’s destroyed.
Little Cities mixes up the gameplay via a selection of environments and region-specific buildings. As mentioned, one area has a giant volcano to build around, not only causing occasional havoc but also blocking network signals and other amenities. Or then there’s the desert location filled with sandstorms that can only be controlled through the planting of trees. As for the buildings, some areas will let you build a theme park or a stadium or a campsite, each having its own bonuses to adjacent buildings.
The problem is once these are built and you’ve hit level 25 to unlock everything you can’t do anything else. You have no option to build a whole row of airports just for the fun of it or see how happy you can make residents building 20 theme parks at once. The only option is to start a new map and see what new buildings there might be; Little Cities really could have done with a sandbox mode of some sort.
Even with that in mind, Little Cities is hard to get annoyed with, each map delightfully engrossing from start to finish. Sure, it does start to grate a little when in the middle of building a new housing complex you level up, instantly stopping you from doing anything until you look at your watch and accept the notification – which happens 25 times per level, of course. But on the flip side, bringing the camera down to street level to see the bustling city is always satisfying.
And because Little Cities has been built for Meta Quest, there are no building pop-ups or graphical glitches that were noticeable. It’s definitely not as visually complex as Cities: VR and it doesn’t need to be. There are nice little visual and audible touches here and there, you’ll hear seagulls squawking or a small plane flying across your eye line.
To describe Little Cities in one word it would have to be ‘pleasant’. Much like an afternoon game of Wordle, it’s the sort of VR experience you want to sit down with a cup of tea and enjoy. There’s no friction to the gameplay, accessible and intuitive in minutes, which makes it great for those new to VR. What it lacks is additional depth and flexibility, not complexity. I don’t want to balance budgets or get into horrendous city planning fundamentals, what I would like is to build my own floating city that’s entirely populated with wind farms and Yurt Villages. Until then, Little Cities provides a straightforward slice of utopian city creation.
Welcome to another VR Drop where gmw3 looks at what XR videogames have been announced for the week ahead. There’s a superb collection to look forward to, from Early Access releases looking for community support to casual titles where you can sit back and relax to some virtual reality (VR) world-building.
Musical Range – Rockhopper Studios
First up is a rhythm action game called Musical Range, coming to Steam Early Access on Monday. This is a rhythm shooter with the rather unique mechanic of being able to bend and distort the notes after each shot. For the EA launch, Musical Range will have a selection of songs to try and achieve highscores on as well as a Freeplay Mode, shooting the notes to make your own music. Plus, there’s a custom song system where you can drop in sound files to play.
This is a title gmw3 wasn’t sure would come to life, but it lives! Announced in 2020 as a reworking of Numinous Games’ much earlier Google Daydream title Untethered, Area Man Lives is part quirky radio drama and part mystery to solve, putting you in the chair of a local radio DJ. In this little bubble of radio paradise, you have to play some music, record commercials and most importantly, talk to callers and find out what’s going on and how you can help.
Developed by British indie studio Purple Yonder and published by VR powerhouse nDreams (Fracked, Phantom: Covert Ops)Little Cities is a delightful city builder coming exclusively to Meta Quest. With various archipelagoes to build on (Desert, Volcano and more), Little Cities is all about balancing the needs of residents by creating enough housing, factories and commercial properties whilst adding essentials like network coverage, power and the occasional airport. Unlike other city builders, Little Cities doesn’t bog you down with deep financial planning, keeping gameplay light with the option of hand tracking support coming in June.
Having launched its futuristic racer Z-Race for PCVR headsets last year, Xocus is back with Omega Pilot. The developer created the entirely new Omega Pilot because Z-Race fans wanted one thing, a cockpit viewpoint, which couldn’t be done due to Z-Race’s control scheme. So now players can jump into the cockpit of these futuristic vehicles and race at ludicrous speeds through winding tubular tracks.
Now let’s finish on a VR genre that loves to scare us all, horror, with the Early Access release for Afterlife VR from Split Light Studio. Play as a young rookie cop who needs to go and investigate a mental health facility and…well, you know what happens; stepping into an insane asylum at night only amounts to one thing. There are puzzles, you have telekinetic abilities and shit is going to jump out at you. So bring a flashlight and a spare pair of pants.
Little Cities, the upcoming city simulator for the Quest platform, is delayed until May 12th. Despite a pushback on launch plans, the team has released a 10-minute gameplay video and post-launch roadmap to get prospective city-builders excited.
Little Cities is fundamentally ready to ship, although release has been a bit of a sticky wicket. Late April was set to the be the month of dueling VR city games, with Little Cities previously scheduled to come out just one week before Cities: VR, the official VR adaptation of Cities: Skylines. That’s until the team decided to take some breathing room and not launch within a week of one arguably its biggest rival.
In the meantime, the team released a post-launch roadmap today that details two future updates: a hand-tracking update in June that will let you ditch the controllers and go hands-on with building, called ‘Big Hands in Little Cities’, and an update in July called ‘Pretty Little Cities’ which will include a new range of buildings and cosmetic items. The team also promises “so much more to come” after those updates.
Created by indie team Purple Yonder and published by VR veterans nDreams, Little Cities is more of a casual city-building experience which abstracts away some of the more fiddly bits of the genre, like having to independently lay down powerlines, watermains, control the flow of traffic. plan bus routes, etc.
Upcoming VR city-building sim, Little Cities, will get hand-tracking support in a post-launch update.
Publisher nDreams confirmed as much today, noting that the game will get hand-tracking integration via a free update in June. Following on in July, a second free update will add new buildings and cosmetic items. More updates are planned following the second content drop, too.
Hand-tracking will definitely be an interesting addition to the game. We noted in our preview earlier this month that the game had a great UI system with bubbles appearing above the user’s hands. It definitely seems like this could work well with hand-tracking, whilst the point-and-click nature of the core gameplay seems like it’d work with the new control scheme, too.
It’s also handy that Meta just launched a huge update to improve the quality of hand-tracking specifically on Quest 2. The headset can now keep track of faster movements, with support for the improved feature already rolling out across select titles.
Little Cities is due out on May 12. It was originally meant to launch last week, but nDreams announced a last minute delay citing the attention being given to the Meta Gaming Showcase. We’ll have a full review next month.
VR city building sim, Little Cities, is no longer releasing this week, but it’s still not far off.
Developed by Purple Yonder, the casual, care-free game was originally meant to launch on Quest 1 and 2 on April 21, but will now arrive three weeks later on May 12. In a statement, publisher nDreams noted that it had been working with Meta to move the date and launching in a “quieter week will give Little Cities the best chance to make the biggest impact.”
Little Cities Delayed
By ‘quieter’, the company is no doubt referring to the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase, which promises to reveal new projects from the developers of Boneworks, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and more on April 20. Not only that but the decision likely has something to do with the nearby release date of another city building sim, Cities: VR, which launches on April 28. That’s going to be showing at tomorrow’s event, too.
“This is purely a scheduling decision; Little Cities is 100% complete,” the statement concludes. “We cannot wait for you to get your hands on Purple Yonder’s charming, cozy city creator on May 12, and the husband-and-wife team is already hard at work on new, free post-launch updates. More info coming soon.”
We thought Little Cities offered a pleasant experience when we tried it earlier this month, though we also wondered if it might be able to satisfy more dedicated fans of the genre. It looks like we’ll have to wait just a little longer to answer that question.
The city builder battle continues, with Cities: VR showcasing new gameplay across an expansive and complex city map on Quest 2.
This latest video from Fast Travel Games gives us some fly-over footage of a “detailed” and expansive city on a map called Northpoint. Indeed, the city does look impressively large and significantly complex.
While we’ve voiced some concerns about the visual quality on display in another recent Cities: VR video, it’s undeniable that the scale and size of the city shown in this new gameplay is impressive, especially running on Quest 2.
Both Jamie and I have been playing around with the other VR city builder, Little Cities, this week (and you can hear more of our thoughts in this week’s episode of The VR Gamescast). While Little Cities is quite satisfying to play and stunning to look at, it also feels a tad limited in terms of design potential and definitely smaller in scale when it comes to city size and management capabilities.
It’s looking increasingly likely that both these games will offer competent, but different, versions of a VR city builder game, then. Based on the footage above, Cities: VR may be the less visually-refined of the two, but definitely looks set to focus more heavily on management and complex city design.
People seem to be really loving our humble little city creator 
