Plotline: build a whole town in your browser

A town, not a model of one

Plotline is a city builder that runs inside zdraw. You draw the roads, mark out what goes where, and the town builds itself: houses go up on their plots, families move in, cars find their way to work, and the lights come on at dusk.

Click PLOTLINE in the site header, or go straight to zdraw.app/play. There is nothing to install, and the game is free.

Pick your land

A new town starts on one of fourteen kinds of land: river, meadow, lake, coast, desert, hills, desert hills, a meandering river, an island, a railway, river and railway together, a marina, a paved river and a valley river. The land decides what you build round. You cannot run a road across the lake. The railway land comes with a four-track station, and its level crossings lower their barriers for the trains. In the valley, roads cross on bridges.

Roads first

Everything in Plotline hangs off the road network. Draw streets, avenues and roundabouts, or start from one of the road network templates. Drag the end of a road to move it, and drawing carries on from where you dropped it. Junctions get traffic lights where lanes join a street, and roads over water become bridges.

Every road cuts its own plots along both sides. Those plots are what you zone.

Zone it, and let demand decide

Zone plots as:

• Homes, at three densities: houses, townhouse rows and tenements
• Shops and Offices
• Towers, for a commercial centre
• Civic, for the town hall and public buildings
• Leisure, for cafés, restaurants, bars, theatres and corner shops

A zoned plot does not build the moment you zone it. The town has to want it: a demand meter shows how much call there is for homes, shops and work, and a plot builds when there is call for what it is zoned for. A plot that is waiting carries a badge with a word on it, and hovering it tells you why. A plot nobody wants yet and a plot nothing fits are different problems, and the badge tells you which one you have.

Every house is a real house

The homes are not boxes with a texture. Each one is a house from House Builder, the same generator you can use in the editor. They come in eight styles: classic, minimalist, barn, log cabin, farmhouse, chalet, Mediterranean and A-frame. Mansions go on the biggest avenue plots. Up close you see the full house, with its porch, gutters and window bars. Further out a lighter copy takes over, so a town of thousands of buildings still runs smoothly.

Pick a style district and that style grows there. You can also click Rebuild on a built plot and choose its replacement from pictures. The old house is knocked down by a bulldozer before the new one goes up.

The rest of the town

The build bar has six groups: Look, Roads, Homes and work, Public, Nature and Change. Each thing you can build is a tile with a picture, and a line under the bar says what to do next. Among them:

• Trees: plant them, or fell a wood.
• Paint: water, flowers, rocks, grass and block paving.
• Fences: eleven kinds, from picket to iron railings.
• Parks: playgrounds, benches, courts, and football and baseball pitches.
• Pools: dug, tiled and filled while you watch.

The town runs its own services. Refuse trucks stop at houses to empty the bins, and ambulances, fire engines and police cars go through red lights. At night about half the windows in each house are lit.

Your own buildings in the town

Design a building in the editor, then open Generators → Plotline and click Send to Plotline. It shows up in the game under Your buildings. Place it anywhere, or use Rebuild to put it on a plot. In walk mode you can go inside, and its doors swing open as you walk up to them.

Free, and what Pro adds

Plotline is free to play, on maps up to 300 m across and up to the size of a town. Pro adds a sandbox with everything unlocked, bigger 400 m and 500 m maps, room to grow into a Large town and a City, and Export to download the town as a 3D model.

The game also runs on phones and tablets. The 3D is lighter there, and the town bar folds down to the essentials.

When your town is ready, Publish puts it in the library, marked Play, so other people can walk round it and fly over it.