Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
This project features a little something from everyone, and was an idea hatched when I was poking around Jake Strait ‘s Wolfenstein demo. In fact, you’ll see similar looking characters running around the town. But before I go into all the references, what is this?
Independence Town is an entry into week2 for Summer Into AI-the theme this week is centered around simulations, practical entries, workflows, or other engines that make something. Myles, for example, submitted a boid simulator and an AI model training sim. I, on the other, pushed up a ceiling fan.
Independence town is an isometric game that’s also inspired by what Kyle Sebeysten did for week1 around USA-OS. I really enjoyed the click and grow of that type of interaction, and thought, “what if I build a simcity clone that’s sole reason for the town’s existence was to launch fireworks?”
It features an opening cinematic, which I’ve provided here.
Secrets
I always like games or projects that have secrets. It’s fun to find them; however, in these short projects I feel disclosure is the smart move. So what all secrets exist?
If you build an aquarium, you’ll get a beach and water that get added to the scene. If you build a pier, you’ll get a boat that’ll take you to an island. You have to walk to the pier to get on the boat.
If you unlock the sand, you can play a fishing mini-game.
If you place a mechanic shop, a car will spawn on the map (lower expectations, this was a two day build) and you can drive around in it.
If you place a train station, you can ride around your city on a train and watch the fireworks as you do so.
There’s a secret island that’s only reachable by walk mode and a boat.
You can pickup candy during the parade.
There may be some other smaller surprises, but those are the big ones.
Fishing
The finishing mini-game has rare catches on each side of the landscape. If you catch a fish, you’ll get a little preview of what fish you caught.
Riding the train
There’s so much more, it’s crazy.
Audio and Music
The radio system implements the same audio idea that Myles built, almost literally the same code, and discussed in his article here. What I did was to take that and place it inside a radio that you can dial, save radio stations (similar to Kyle’s Artifact from Spring into AI, only far less cool) and listen in on the different options. The game will try to find “suitable songs” based on what’s going on in the game from time to time.
And something that I didn’t even know what possible is what Jake pulled off here-that idea being procedural audio generation for atmospheric sounds of the ocean. So if you’re near the water, you’ll hear the water.
Walk Mode
If I had to pick a favorite feature, it’s the magic of walk mode. It’s not just walkmode-the entire small settlement-whatever settlement you create-is walkable. It’s the one thing I wanted from SimCity all those years ago, and now it’s just as fun and ridiculous as I imagined. In fact, the car you drive around is loosely based on Mario Kart-sadly, I did not have enough time to get the quality right to where I wanted it. You will see familiar spins and ideas that look like a shell toss.
Point maxing my way to the top
And there’s even more in this game inspired by others, for example every day before the fireworks display at the end of the week there’s a lovely parade. You can watch it from the orbit camera, or you can watch it from walk mode, and one more-you can see it in the credits, too.
The parade idea I borrowed from Kady's Substack entry on Parade Candy Chaos.
And, oh that’s right! One more secret for this post. If you build enough trees close together, you might even trigger eagles or other birds.
Where to play
I have the build-up on my site. If you’re technically interested then one more thing-you should poke at the code, just open up devtools in the browser. There’s no server backend for this. It all lives in your browser.
https://www.ericrhea.com/gamelab/projects/independencetown/index.html
You can read a bit more about it on the description page I’ve stood up on the site as well, which is here. And if you’re new to my posts, subscribe for more wild experiments.
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://advisoryhour.substack.com/p/summer-into-ai-week2-independence.