Thanks for the thread, Nebula!
This is the game I've been working on recently.
I must note that the feature list is taken from the PC version; two things were cut on the Xbox, the Challenge editor (aka Timeline Editor, aka mission editor), and the "visiting islands belonging to other players". The Challenge editor is essentially the same tool we used for the campaigns, where you set up a sequence of events that modify the game, e.g. raise export prices in 1952, than turn 20% of the population against you in 1954 etc; it was deemed too unwieldy with a gamepad. You can create such "challenges" on the PC version, and share them online - and we'll regularly make the best challenges created by PC players available to the Xbox version (downloadable in-game, for free).
This was our first console game. While the entire schedule we had for the game was quite short, the Xbox 360 version was done in a crazy short time; even if I told you how long we took to make it, you wouldn't believe me
The renderer is a bit short on buzzwords - it's a fairly traditional forward renderer with a single light source, a (non-cascaded) perspective shadowmap, instanced + billboarded trees, a splatted terrain, and a postprocessing pass featuring SSAO and the ubiquitous blur+bloom+sunrays combination. It's VERY heavy on geometry due to lack of sufficient LOD for the models; the few outside people who had a look at it were scratching their heads in disbelief, never having seen before a geometry-limited game.
I am not aware of other games on current consoles with such a combination of free camera and long view distance; the islands are 1.5 x 1.5 km in size, and you can move your camera from "follow camera" mode (essentially, a third person camera following one of your citizens) to a full overview of the island, without any fog to hide the distant parts of the scene, and the zoom back in to another part of the island. I think I understand now why there are no such games on consoles
What's also interesting about the game is the extent to which it is written in a very high-level language, Lua. I won't say "scripting", because this is far from "scripting" in our case, it's full blown "programming". The entire game simulation runs in Lua, and we devote an entire Xenon core to it. It _is_ CPU-intensive, and the Xenon cores aren't particularly well suited to running such code, but it wouldn't have been possible to implement the fairly complex Tropico simulation in a lower-level language like C++ in such a short time.
The control scheme is the already established from other dualstick strategies - the cursor is fixed at the center of the screen. People seem to like it so far; if you've played at least a little Halo Wars or C&C, you'll have no problem with Tropico 3, which is a much slower-paced game.
The game runs at 1280x720 without antialiasing, and the framerate isn't very good - you'll typically be at or above 30 fps with the camera position which is most convenient for playing, but you can get it to dip well below that if you find just the right (wrong?) spot on top of a mountain overlooking the entire island, staring at the sunset (to make the shadow frustum catch more objects). If the camera was limited to what other RTS games usually do - 60-70 degrees down, limited zoom - I think we wouldn't have a problem to maintain 30 fps, but the vistas with the entire island, looking at the horizon, are a worthy tradeoff IMHO.
The demo includes two missions, and a significant portion of the game mechanics (except for the entire tourism branch of the economics); you can't really cut this game to 10% of its gameplay features and have something meaningful. Consequently, it's very far from the recommended 15 minutes of gameplay.
Enjoy the demo, and (hopefully) the full game!
