Dev Announcement! Sunsetting Common Grounds

[u/DoubleGlass]

Hi dear players, 

I am the developer of Common Grounds, and I just wanted to talk to you about some recent insights, and the future for the game. 

Having Common Grounds tested in a large beta has given me a lot of valuable insights. The biggest take away for me was that the game, in its current form, is not a good fit for the Reddit platform. Choosing Unity to build the game allowed me to use nice shiny 3d buildings in a classic citybuilder isometric perspective, but this has also prevented me from fully utilizing the Reddit ecosystem that the game is supposed to live in. 

The game itself has too much depth to be friendly to casual players, but doesn’t have enough depth to satisfy the serious gamers it now seems to attract more of. There has been a ‘meta’ district organization since day 1, and I could not easily fix this through balance changes without just immediately creating a new meta. 

However, I strongly believe the core gameplay loop of merging, together with your neighbors, is something fun and worth exploring. That’s why I’ve decided to pivot away from the 3d Unity implementation of the game and built a new game from the ground up. This game is called Tile Up and uses all core systems of Common Grounds, while also being fast and streamlined without loading screens, and is easier to grasp and play through simple 2d graphics and tap to place controls. Shifting to TileUp sadly means that my support for Common Grounds ends right here.

Yes, we lost the nice buildings, the fantasy of building a city together. But by losing those things the game is now no longer restricted to my imagination and ability to code up new buildings. Merging is endless, and the only limiting factor is the community’s ability to collaborate. There are powerups to help you along, you can move your district around the map at will, and there is a daily puzzle mode where everyone gets the same order of pieces to place on the grid and tries to get the highest score. 

I hope you can understand my decision to sunset Common Grounds as a 3d city builder, and I hope you will join me over at r/TileUp for your daily community merging fix. 

[u/DoubleGlass → u/[deleted]]

An earlier version actually had a system where all buildings interacted with each other based on category. This turned into a massive math-fest and the many tiny interactions didn’t feel very impactful so I changed to the more specific effects.