There’s one good thing that comes from bad games: they often inspire other developers to do a better job with their own games.

This time last year, gamers were struggling with SimCity‘s need to always be online, the tiny tracts of land it gave people to build their cities on, and its fundamentally broken traffic system. Instead of just moaning about it, a young German developer decided he’d make his own city-builder that specifically avoids those pitfalls.

Anselm Eickhoff’s game is called Citybound, and it uses JavaScript to handle the simulation aspects of his game, and procedural generation for much of its visuals.

Procedural generation is the art of making the computer do all the work when it comes to producing graphics. Basically, the programmer sets the rules for what he’d ultimately like to see, and the computer does the rest. It’s a surprisingly efficient way of creating things that would otherwise take up a huge chunk of time, and it’s worked well for the likes of Indie developer Introversion Software for their games Darwinia, DEFCON and Subversion.

When news of his intentions to make a proper city simulator broke on Reddit, the thread exploded with enthusiasm for the project.

“The next two days now seem like a single, rushed, very intense experience to me,” Eickhoff told Gamasuitra. “I spent almost all of my waking time just answering the comments, questions and concerns of hundreds of redditors.”

In the wake of SimCity’s disastrous launch and his own disappointment at the game, Eickhoff made it a point to study up on traffic simulation before embarking on the creation of his own city sim, adding to his existing knowledge of game design from having read books like Jesse Schell’s “The Art of Game Design” and “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals” by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen.

He’s a self-taught programmer with experience in modding, and he works at a Bavarian broadcaster on their web back-end. He has extensive knowledge of JavaScript and an interest in procedural generation, which is why Citybound is going to be a web-based game that leverages those technologies.

Instead of crowd-funding the game on Kickstarter or similar platforms, Eickhoff told Gamasutra that he’s going to fund it through paid Alpha and Beta tests, a route he says he has seen work for other Indie developers.

The best news out of all of this? Eickhoff says Citybound will be ready for Alpha testing in the next “1 – 3 months”. For regular progress updates, check out Eickhoff’s Citybound blog.