--- title: SimCity, but with Permits | daily.dev description: 'Permit Pending' is a free city builder about zoning, hearings, lawsuits and reelection. Every improvement creates opposition: new housing lowers rents and... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/simcity-but-with-permits-xbqtvm6yk twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: SimCity, but with Permits | daily.dev og:description: 'Permit Pending' is a free city builder about zoning, hearings, lawsuits and reelection. Every improvement creates opposition: new housing lowers rents and... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/simcity-but-with-permits-xbqtvm6yk og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/XBQtVM6yk.png og:image:alt: SimCity, but with Permits og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # SimCity, but with Permits **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary 'Permit Pending' is a free city builder about zoning, hearings, lawsuits and reelection. Every improvement creates opposition: new housing lowers rents and angers homeowners, new industry brings jobs and smog, and better transit attracts development, and development attracts opponents. Fixing one problem creates a new group of angry voters. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 131 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-20). **TL;DR:** Discussion largely pivots away from the game itself into a long, contentious debate about zoning, density, housing shortages, and democratic process, with real-world urban planning disagreements dominating; a smaller thread covers bugs, UI complaints, and tech-stack curiosity about the game itself. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 35% mixed · 45% skeptical **The case for** - Some find the game a clever and accurate simulation of the frustrations of real city planning and permitting. - The concept of simulating zoning/permitting friction resonated as a fresh, thought-provoking idea for a city builder. - A few appreciated that it captures the 'drowning in interruptions and paperwork' feeling of being an actual city planner or mayor. **The pushback** - Several reported the game is broken or unplayable, citing WebGL rendering errors or being stuck on the initial setup screen. - Some found the onboarding overwhelming, with too many UI elements and systems thrown at the player immediately. - Immersion-breaking inconsistencies were noted, like petitions referencing nonexistent locations or population numbers that don't add up. - A few dismissed it as likely AI/vibe-coded and were skeptical of that approach's quality. - Minor UX gripes like non-standard close-button placement and lack of an obvious music toggle. **By community** - hackernews (heated): The thread splits between a large, contentious macro debate over zoning, density, and housing economics unrelated to the game, and a smaller set of direct reactions ranging from praise for the concept to bug reports and UI criticism. **Hottest debate:** Whether increasing urban density and transit actually worsens or alleviates housing shortages sparked an extended, heated back-and-forth citing cities like Paris and Houston. **Open questions** - Is there a way to simulate or discover an 'optimal' set of zoning/permitting rules rather than relying on ad-hoc accumulated regulation? - Could generative AI or game data templates fix the immersion-breaking inconsistencies in petition/event text? **Highlights** > I think the overwhelm is kind of the point. If you want a well-balanced video game, where everything is optimized to help you learn the ropes and to get you into a flow state, the classic versions of SimCity provide exactly that. But this game's implementation of a full-fledged city builder is quickly drowned out by the fact that it's shoving resident petitions and requests for variances in your face every 20 seconds. It's an attempt to put the player into the shoes of an actual city planner, mayor, or city councilor that is drowning in interruptions and paperwork. > — [proggy on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171392) > 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. > — [sdellis on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171199) > 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. > — [goda90 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171672) > 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. > — [zamadatix on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171235) > 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 > — [bel8 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171596) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50170593) · 215 points · 131 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't](https://daily.dev/posts/a-city-building-game-in-which-the-city-would-prefer-you-didn-t-mqxqiqfw4) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Build & Govern Cities in Citystate Metropolis, Upcoming Urban Builder](https://daily.dev/posts/build-govern-cities-in-citystate-metropolis-upcoming-urban-builder-5orh8bll0) · 80 LEVEL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Turn the Whole City into a Giant Parking Lot in Car Park Capital](https://daily.dev/posts/turn-the-whole-city-into-a-giant-parking-lot-in-car-park-capital-tm6261pyu) · 80 LEVEL · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#gaming](https://daily.dev/tags/gaming) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/simcity-but-with-permits-xbqtvm6yk) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"SimCity, but with Permits","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/simcity-but-with-permits-xbqtvm6yk","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/simcity-but-with-permits-xbqtvm6yk"},"datePublished":"2026-10-20T19:29:54.753Z","dateModified":"2026-10-20T20:50:33.774Z","description":"'Permit Pending' is a free city builder about zoning, hearings, lawsuits and reelection. 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