This reddit is a bit confusing. It seems like there are many user created adaptations of the original but most are abandoned or not ready. Are there any modern versions of the game one can actually purchase and play?
Thank you.
I've been reading this sub for a while, enjoying the tower sims people are building. I've been making a 3D one on my own since late last year, and it's on TestFlight now for iPad and Mac.
The idea was a tower whose shape is actually yours. You grab the corners of a floor plate and move them: taper it, round a corner, push a floor out over the street. The mullions bend around a rounded corner properly. The offices re-plan themselves when you do it, desks and partitions rearranging to fit the new shape. Height isn't free either. Past 30 floors you buy air rights from neighbouring buildings, the way FAR works in New York.
The code is written almost entirely by Claude Code, and instead of using a game engine like Unity I've been writing my own in Swift and Metal. No generated images or audio anywhere in the game: the geometry is procedural and the textures are CC0 from Poly Haven. Sound is mostly placeholders for now, still working on it.
So, the question. 2D shows you the whole tower at once, dozens of floors readable in a glance. In 3D you're always looking at one face. Rendering every floor wasn't possible on an older iPad at 120 floors, so it concentrates on the working floor and the rest drops most of its polygons, which reads a bit like a section cut. It helps, but it isn't the same thing. Depth also makes it harder to tell what you're touching, and honestly the controls feel worse than 2D SimTower right now. There aren't many 3D tower sims to compare against, so more broadly: which 3D building or management games got this right, and what did they do?
I'm sorry to everyone on Windows and Linux. I'll look at porting if there's interest. There are a bunch of preset towers in there to load and look at, which won't be in the release build. If it crashes, or you couldn't work out how to do something, that's on me and I'd like to hear about it.