Hypothetical City, to begin with…
Before adding data for a real city, I decided to build the tool for a hypothetical one as a proof of concept.
Here you’ll see when I drew the first grid with Pygame; when I made each cell within the grid selectable; when I was still trying to make the game about a real city, so I drew a grid over a map; and when I confronted issues about the scale of a map vs. the grid size and decided to take every problem one step at a time.
Read on to see how I designed a way to add data about the city!
I used OpenStreetMap to capture an image of the map of NYC to test placing over the map, a grid with an array of selectable cells. Notice the first cell is tinted green. This is the color of a selected cell, indicating that the cell has been selected. Now I wanted to put data into cells! But before that, I had to revisit the problem of scale. The map was too big and each cell had many buildings. How could I add data at such a scale and make it meaningful? Was I going to zoom in and out? Did I have time to execute this level of complexity for a proof of concept in a short time?