Sorry for the late-ish reply . . . that time and year and I get lazy with signing up to forums far too often. As it's my first post, yes, I'm Swixel from the Kalypso forums
I'm trying to make my own city builder game. Any ideas where to start? (I'm want to make it from scratch and I'm most familiar with programming in java.
If you want to stick with Java, try lwjgl. I don't touch Java myself, but it's the one people often seem to point me toward.
If you're looking at C/C++, you'll need to work out if you want DirectX or OpenGL as your renderer (even soft-rendering in Windows pipes through one or the other for the final texture). Past that, you need to pick a framework or toolkit or engine if you want to go cross platform without going around the bend. GLFW is minimal; SDL is one that many people recommend; and SFML is a great deal of fun. Then comes the harder elements like GUI. If you think you can handle a lot of the lifting, go that way, otherwise something like Qt could accelerate production (albeit using LGPL, potentially restricting release onto console(s)).
If it's 2D, you can use a simple grid-based-guessing scenario, if it's 3D, you'll need to learn about picking.
As always, consider scripting languages to help speed it up. Qt has QML for rapid UI production ("Qt Quick"), and you can use Javascript in that, but by default you'll be lifting everything with C++. You could replace this with Lua (LuaJIT2 being the best way to go) or Python (if you want), or even Java (though that'll add serious bulk).
As a starting point I'd look at modding some of the existing games that allow modding. Not sure what city builders you've played before but many of them allow players to mod them. Modding can be as simple as changing the stats of a building in the XML files to setting up entire campaigns with all your own art.
This is probably where I'd recommend starting. If you haven't already, find a game you like, break it as many ways as you can until you work out what you were meant to do (trial and error), then start adding your own functionality.
While you obviously can't lift the ideas of others (intellectual property and all that), looking at how different groups handle things is always useful. Tropico 3 and Tropico 4 are fairly easy if you can reverse Lua bytecode (and Haemimont work things out in a similar way to how I generally do). Civ 5 is another fun one to pull to pieces (not a true city builder, but it uses a grid for city placement and has 'upgrades' within the cities). On a personal note, Civ 5 functions very differently to how I ordinarily handle data.
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