u/Substantial-Deal-382

https://preview.redd.it/3u9rm9uq61jh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=88c45f3205a38e99b64d7d544372498e161fec7d

Skyline Sim is focused much more heavily on actually operating the airline. You plan schedules for individual aircraft, build rotations and multi-leg services, manage bases and outstations, configure cabins, deal with maintenance and crew, compete for demand and slots, and operate in a world where AI airlines are building their own networks alongside you.

We just shipped the 0.7 update, which added/reworked quite a lot:

• permanent bases and outstations
• one-way and multi-leg service chains
• a much deeper Auto Schedule system
• used-aircraft trading and negotiations
• competitor airlines with persistent strategies
• network planning based on demand, competition, runway length and distance
• English and Polish localization

The important part: the Steam playtest is open right now.

You can join the playtest from the Skyline Sim Steam page and play the current build.

We're still actively developing it, so expect things to change and expect bugs. There's an F8 feedback tool built directly into the game, and we've been using reports from players to decide what gets fixed or rebuilt next.

I'm especially interested in what people here think because you're already the exact kind of people who will happily spend far too much time thinking about aircraft, routes and airline economics.

Skyline Sim on Steam: Steam

https://reddit.com/link/1viedmf/video/v9yq2zj201ih1/player

Title: Skyline Sim

Playable Link:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4778770/Skyline_Sim/

Platform:
PC / Steam / Windows

Description:
Skyline Sim is a singleplayer airline management game where you build and operate your own airline. You plan routes and schedules, assign aircraft, manage crew and maintenance, work with passenger demand and pricing, handle finances, compete with other airlines and develop your airline's brand.

We started our Steam Playtest with a relatively small group on July 27, and the feedback from those players has already resulted in a lot of changes, bug fixes and rebuilt systems.

Now we want to test the game with a much wider range of players, so we have opened the Steam Playtest to everyone. There are no keys and no approval process. Just open the Steam page, click Join Playtest, and you can download it immediately. The game is still actively being developed, so you will definitely find bugs, balancing issues and systems that still need work. That is exactly why I'm posting here.

I'd especially love feedback on the first hour of the game.

Free to Play Status:

• Free to play (Open Steam Playtest)

Involvement:
I'm one of the developers behind Skyline Sim and work directly on the game's design, systems, UI/UX, balancing and overall direction. I'll also be reading the feedback here and using it while we continue developing the game.

https://reddit.com/link/1vi3x0p/video/2hfcgoyw1zhh1/player

I mean, Skyline Sim isn’t exactly a traditional strategy game, but I figured some people here might still be into it because there’s quite a lot of resource management involved.

You’re managing your aircraft, crews, schedules, maintenance, money, routes and all the other stuff that comes with running an airline. You also have a board to keep happy so they don’t start getting pissed at you 🥸 We’re currently in the playtest phase, so if anyone here wants to try it, I can give out access through Steam Playtest.

Not sure if it’s exactly the perfect fit for this subreddit, but figured some of you might enjoy this kind of management game.

World globe

Skyline Sim is our airline management simulation game, and from the very beginning one of our biggest goals has been to make the world feel alive.

Instead of spawning air traffic around the player, every aircraft follows its own route and schedule. Planes take off, cruise, land, then continue on to their next destinations across the world.

That means when you're planning your airline, you're operating inside a living aviation network rather than an empty map.

A few things we've built so far:

• A fully simulated global air traffic network where AI airlines operate alongside you.
• Airports that evolve throughout the day, across seasons, and over the decades as the world changes.
• A custom vinyl-style livery editor inspired by racing games, giving you complete freedom to design your airline's identity.
• Full control over fleet planning, route expansion, scheduling, pricing, and day-to-day airline operations.

We're still actively developing the game, and we'll soon be opening our first alpha playtest for our Founding Members on Discord. After we conclude this first playtest, fix any bugs, improve our systems we will release a public demo alongside with new annoumcent for next playtest - this will be our first public one.

It's been a long time since the genre has seen a modern airline management simulator, so we're especially interested in hearing from fans who have been waiting for one.

Feel free, to let us know about anything what is interesting you in the project and just give your general feedback for our game!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4778770/Skyline_Sim/

We're a two person team developing Skyline Sim, an airline management simulator, and today we revealed one of our biggest customization features. A fully custom vinyl style livery editor.

Full video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYUmKhNZvRs

https://preview.redd.it/t0l80ck00nch1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=847a6109d28dd79d6bcee2563c952cf8717d88fc

When planning our marketing, we kept asking ourselves one question:

>What will make person stop browsing to look at our project?

Our game has plenty of simulation systems network planning, fleet management, negotiations, economics but they're much harder to communicate in a few seconds.

A custom livery editor, on the other hand, immediately tells a story. People instantly imagine creating their own airline, and every screenshot becomes unique because it's built by the player.

Instead of relying on preset liveries, we decided to let players:

• Paint any aircraft.
• Add their own logos, text, decals, and shapes.
• Create a completely unique airline identity.

From a marketing perspective, we're hoping this gives us:

• More visually interesting screenshots and trailers.
• Better social media content.
• Player-generated content after launch.
• A feature that helps differentiate us from other airline management games.

We're still in development, so this is one of the first larger features that will drive user generated content as screenshots, workshop content to the game.

Read the news: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4778770/view/676250550367426944

Visit Skyline Sim on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4778770/Skyline_Sim/

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Hi all…first post! I've been working on an airline management sim, called Skyline Sim, and from day one of the project I've had the goal of not wanting a standard spread sheet based interface to manage your airline with.

Don’t get me wrong, I love complex management features!

But most games of this genre, most of your time is spent clicking through menus that always felt a bit “on top” of the world, rather than being part of it. So after months of drawing UI on paper, scrapping it, sketching again, and iterating over the core layout of the game I decided on one big concept - build the entire thing around an interactive 3D globe. This globe shows real world weather, where all your and AIs flights are living, and acts as your interface for planning and managing the airline. Honestly, if I showed you the pre-globe version of this game I think you wouldn’t believe it’s the same game.

However in solving this disconnect between world and menu another popped up - the UI I previously designed for the globe looked completely unnatural. It looked like the typical UI of a generic management game stuck over the actually interactive globe.

This has arguably been one of the hardest parts of developing this project, so back to the sketchpad! This time instead of trying to conceptualize as “screens” I was thinking of the “layers” on top of the globe, and now as you see with these screenshots it’s becoming lighter and more contextual and hopefully beginning to feel part of the world.

The second screenshot shows what direction the livery customization and new identity system is headed - the UI is still very much in development here, but for the first time since I started the game feels like the world and UI belong to each other.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

If you make any type of management/sim games - how do you balance deep systems with player immersion?

https://reddit.com/link/1upyub3/video/bvmtblgiutbh1/player

Hey guys my first post here :)

Soooo, around a year ago I started working on my dream airline management simulator. There was, and honestly there still is, a very big gap in this genre. I'm a huge aviation nerd, so I figured... why not create something myself?

Looking at the game today, it honestly feels surreal. It looks, feels and plays nothing like my first mockups or the very first versions I built. It's been a long journey with countless redesigns, features that got completely rebuilt and a lot of lessons learned along the way.

We're now very deep into development, and one of the best parts of this journey has been meeting so many amazing people who genuinely care about the project. Their feedback, ideas and support have helped shape my game into what it is today, and I honestly can't thank them enough.

This video shows one of my favourite parts of the game - the globe. From the very beginning I wanted it to be more than just a map. I wanted it to become the heart of the game, where you build your network, plan new routes and watch your airline grow across the world.

Throughout this journey I've also written quite a few development blogs, especially about the passenger demand model. To be honest, I think that's one of the most important parts of any airline management game. Without a solid demand model, everything else starts to feel pretty shallow.

It's something we're constantly validating and refining inside our small two-person team. We test it, tweak it, compare it against realworld data and keep improving it every week. We're getting really close to the vision we had from the beginning, and I'm honestly excited about where it's heading.

Thanks for reading! ❤️

I honestly wasn't expecting that too much but response back then was incredible. A lot of people commented and helped me shape the project. Lot of things changed from this time, after i published the post to this r/tycoon, my small one person team got second person my dear friend Igor to help me work on the game.. and from that time we went full time on this. We have spent almost a each day hard working and building stuff for game. To be honest looking back at the stuff we had month ago Skyline Sim feels right now way better than it was back then.

Honestly don't know where to even start because so much has changed.

One of the biggest things we've worked on over the last month is the passenger demand model. We knew that we didn't want demand to just be a random number attached to an airport or a route. If the economy behind the game doesn't make sense, then every other decision the player makes starts feeling meaningless.

We ended up spending waaaaay much time then we initially planned on making it better, our demand right now is 7 layer model where of course each layer influence the final result.

Projected P&L with demand pool on the route and realized pax for player airline.

The first thing that you guys are seeing is PROJECTED P&L. Those numbers are simulation across full year of this route from day you are openning it. Route that is launched in January will also behave differently that one that you will launch in November. Our simulation in this model takes each month into account when calculating this - one of the important layers is seasonality. So, summer holidays, christmas, bussines season and any quieter periods that can happen in simulation.

But like everybody can at this point see seasonality it's not the only one of the layer that is taken into account when showing this numbers. Of course model also looks at pricing strategy, frequency of your flights, airline reputation, competition on the route.. of course also how much people wants to travel beetween these two cities. Big thing in model is also we also wanted to avoid assuming that everyone in demand always flies. If the cities are connected with high-speed rail or maybe driving on this route is convintent some people will take those options and will not take any of the flights on the route.

That's why a route between two cities 300 km apart behaves completely differently from one spanning 3,000 km. Geography, available transport alternatives and passenger behavior all become part of the simulation, making every market feel unique instead of following the same formula.

If you wanna read more: https://www.skylinesim.app/blog/how-airline-demand-works

So going next, we reworked fleet managment. Every aircraft is something you need to properly manage.

Fleet overview

https://preview.redd.it/ycazn755yp9h1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=43a91d0e24a62276f8ade990053380d04d3ed1d6

Fleet overview gives you quick picture of your entire airline operation. How many aircrafts are right now flying, how many of them is in maintance and stuff like that. From there you can drill into invidual airplanes.

Every plane has its timeline where everything is clear about it during the whole day. You can look through its scheduled flights, block hours, status, utilization, configuration, market price and upcoming assignments. It seems like a minor feature, but having access to all the data about a particular plane on its entire working period helped us feel the airline closer. We did not want aircraft to be some abstract numbers in the spreadsheet.

The last thing that i will show you guys here is our living world. Where everything that i wrote about here lives together.

https://reddit.com/link/1ugo7hb/video/v3nh2uvizp9h1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1ugo7hb/video/igaqv0z70q9h1/player

Each one of the planes you can see flying above the map are part of the simulation. The airlines run by AI are operating their schedules, entering new markets, receiving aircraft deliveries, retiring old fleets and trying to attract more passengers just like you are.

Sooo, ending this looong post. I want you all guys thanks for reading and invite you guys to read more about the updates we posted which all also cool things.. like full brand system with lounges and ffp programs or crew system.

https://www.skylinesim.app/updates/road-to-playtest-1-brand

https://www.skylinesim.app/updates/road-to-playtest-2-crew

Our next major event will be our first closed playtest scheduled for 17th July 2026, which is available exclusively for our Founding Members only. Following that, we have an ambitious plan for mid-September of the same year when we will organize a much bigger public playtest that everyone can join in.

If you wish to track the progress of the game, feel free to chat with us or just join our community on Discord and enjoy being surrounded by aviation and management game enthusiasts. We are creating Skyline Sim with the help of the community, and most of the features were born there.

Discord: discord.gg/Js3mEb5sjB

Website: skylinesim.app

Our Steam page will also be launching next week, and it feels pretty surreal knowing that we have spent a whole year and even more time creating the game. We cannot wait (nor are we nervous) to show off our hard work. Thank you once again for reading my post, and as always, I’ll see you in the comments section!

AI DISCLOSURE: We are running automated localization, automate testes for UI and engine features

Hi r/tycoon - longtime reader here. I've been working on a singleplayer airline management sim called Skyline for about the past year, and I think it's finally at the point where it's worth showing publicly.

Part of why this project exists is because I bounced off AirlineSim a few years ago. I loved the depth, but I couldn't sustain the daily login economy and always online structure.

There's a gap between "deep airline simulation" and "playable single-player strategy game," and Skyline is basically my attempt to live in that space.

A few things already working in the current build:

The simulation engine is deterministic and pure-functional. Same seed means byteidentical outcomes. You can replay saves and test alternative decisions while keeping the rest of the world fixed.

Demand is modeled per origin/destination pair using a gravity model calibrated against US DOT T-100 data and Eurostat avia_par filings. Aircraft performance uses BADA methodology, which is the same framework used in real route planning and fuel-burn modeling.

The world simulation includes historical macro conditions:

• fuel prices
• FX rates
• GDP
• interest rates
• historical events

So if you start in 2007 and play through 2008, demand actually collapses. Oil shocks affect airline economics. COVID hits in 2020.

Fleet acquisition is probably the system I'm happiest with so far.

Aircraft production slots are real and tied to delivery dates. You can option aircraft, firm them up later, lock engine selections at production milestones, and configure cabins closer to delivery. Financing matters too. Right now there are six financing paths:

• cash
• finance lease
• operating lease
• sale-leaseback
• EETC
• export credit

Each affects your balance sheet and cash flow differently.

There's also:

• a used aircraft market
• condition gradings
• multiple lessor archetypes
• AI airlines competing for slots and financing

The founding flow is already playable too. You choose:

• jurisdiction
• funding structure
• network strategy
• airline archetype

Those early choices propagate forward through the simulation. The goal is for decisions made on day one to still matter decades later.

The AI airlines run under the same rules as the player. They expand, retreat from weak markets, negotiate aircraft, overextend, and sometimes go bankrupt. New entrants appear if market conditions make them viable.

A few things that are NOT finished yet:

Connecting passenger flows are not implemented yet. The next major work block is the passenger route-choice model:

• nested logit
• frequency preference
• connection penalties
• hub dominance effects

That's the layer that really differentiates hub and spoke airlines from point to point carriers.

Cabin classes exist structurally, but revenue differentiation is still WIP.

Seasonality currently uses a handtuned first pass model. Full calibration against historical residuals is deferred for now because I'd rather ship something honest and iterate on it.

No cargo yet either. Belly cargo on widebodies is something I want in. Dedicated cargo ops are probably further out.

And no, I still don't have a great answer for late-game micromanagement scaling. That's one of the harder design problems left.

A few things I've intentionally decided not to do:

• no multiplayer
• no progression-locked eras
• no airport builder
• no real airline branding in the base game

You pick any era from the 1990s onward and just start.

If anyone wants to follow development:
Devlog: https://skylinesim.app/blog/why-skyline
Discord: https://discord.gg/HsqucsgsGd

I'm probably 14-18 months away from a closed alpha. That's my honest estimate, not a marketing estimate.

Happy to answer questions about any part of it:

• simulation architecture
• calibration
• AI airlines
• passenger behavior modeling
• airline economics
• scheduling logic
• whatever else people are curious about

And genuinely open to criticism or pushback too. That's mostly why I'm posting this.