Back in 2017, when my gamedev journey started, the game didn't really have a name. The project was simply called City, and for more than two and a half years, that was all it was called. No clever working title, no grand plan for the final name, just City. In fact, the original project folder is still called City to this day.
The name Citycon came much later, almost by accident. At some point during development, I was building what is now called the Citycon Building, the city's construction yard. I wanted it to look like it belonged to an actual company inside the game world, so I decided to put the company name directly onto the facade in voxel lettering. The original idea was something along the lines of City Constructions Inc.There was just one problem: it didn't fit. The game used a much lower voxel resolution back then, and there simply wasn't enough space on the building to write City Constructions in a way that was still readable. So I shortened it. City Constructions became Citycon, and suddenly there was a fictional construction company in the game called Citycon. At that point, it still had nothing to do with the title of the game. It was simply the result of a very practical problem: I didn't have enough voxels.But the name stuck with me. Much later, when release started to feel less like some distant idea and more like something I actually had to prepare for, the inevitable question came up: what is this game actually called? Was I really going to release a game called City? Should it be Citycon? Something completely different? I kept coming back to Citycon because by then it had grown out of the game itself and already felt like part of its world.The Super came from somewhere else. I grew up with the 16-bit era, especially the Super Nintendo. As a kid, the word Super in front of a game had a very particular feeling to it. Games like Super Mario World and Super Metroid made the word almost synonymous in my mind with that era of games. It still carries a sense of ambition for me, the idea that this isn't just the thing, it's the Super version of the thing. And in a very literal sense, that fits what I want to do with this game. I want to make it great.There is also a much more personal reason. One of the games that shaped me most was SimCity on the Super Nintendo. It was the game that really pulled me into the city-building genre. I still have a very specific memory from when I was about eleven or twelve years old and had a severe flu with a high fever. For seven or eight days, I basically had SimCity running all day. Parts of the game almost felt like an idle game to me back then. You built your city, tried to get everything working, and sometimes you simply had to let time pass so the city could generate enough money for whatever you wanted to build next.That image has stayed with me ever since. I was lying there sick, watching this little city slowly grow on the Super Nintendo, with that slightly strange, almost psychedelic MIDI soundtrack playing in the background for hours. It's one of those childhood memories that somehow becomes permanently connected to a certain kind of game. Decades later, I found myself making a city builder of my own.So what does SuperCitycon actually mean? Strictly speaking, it doesn't really mean anything. Citycon was never a word I invented with some deeper definition in mind. It was simply an abbreviation born from the fact that City Constructions wouldn't fit onto a voxel building. But if you trace the name back to its origin, I suppose you could say it means Super City Constructions.And somehow, for a game about building a city, that feels surprisingly appropriate. Citycon came from a construction company that only got its name because I didn't have enough voxels, while Super is both a tribute to the era of games that shaped me and, in particular, to the version of SimCity that first made me fall in love with building cities.It wasn't a name I planned. In a way, the game named itself.