Capital City is a city building and business simulation project. Inspired by the City Building Series developed under Impressions Games and Sierra, the player takes charge of a company town and runs the local industry. Proles move into houses and demand gradual improvements of life at pace with the rest of the world. The player hires these proles to work at mines or industrial sites or retail stores, etc.

Central to Capital City is the (social) labor theory of value. The value of a commodity as it is produced depends upon the average time necessary to produce 100 items of this commodity. Producing under this average time basically allows the player to generate more profit per commodity because it is being produced faster. The opposite situation occurs as well: the slower that a commodity is being produced, the more profit that the player is missing out on. Average production times are computed every financial quarter.

The main gameplay loop, besides town development, is to increase profits by producing faster than the social average. At the same time, as the average production time plummets, so does the value of the commodity being produced (being composed more and more of existing value from 'ingredients' like steel and coal from machinery). Transitioning from manual labor to automation decreases production times, but causes less value to be created because of the reliance on machinery. Increasing the length of the workday may compensate for producing below the social average time, but causes worker dissatisfaction and even workplace accidents (and costs more wages).

Below is an early-stage town with houses that do not even have access to water.

With grain in the granary, we can build a bakery to produce and sell bread to the proles. We have also provided a water fountain and a street cleaning service to provide hydration and hygiene, respectively (and to stall the spread of cholera!).

This menu displays the market value of all items in the game world, per 100. This is based off the average time it takes in the world for a firm to produce an item. It costs 64 hours of work and 100 units of grain to produce 100 units of beer, so 100 units of beer costs $250. Firms who produce faster than the social average time generate more value per unit of time, but by replacing labor with machinery they ultimately generate less new value per unit of the commodity itself.

The player trades with other firms to make a profit, because by selling only to their own workers they necessarily make less money back than they spend in capital. Later on, I will make external markets more shaky so the player must constantly find new markets to sell to... or else lose consumers.

This menu displays the quarterly finances of the player's company town. Just as we've made it out of the red, a house catches on fire! A fireman is on the move to put out the flames before they spread across the neighborhood.