I played it in DOSBox today. The text-based main menu already looks quite good, and having the option to choose between EGA and VGA is appreciated (I picked VGA).
The PC speaker sounds are well-balanced and not too annoying, and it's nice to "hear" the city slowly grow in the background.
Pixel artwork is really nice, I also like all the alliterations used throughout the building names, and having a proper description of the gameplay mechanics (F1 button) is really appreciated, good job!
Some constructive (sic) feedback:
- Clouds (at least I think those are clouds?) could be more cloud-like, maybe have more variety (multiple sprites or even sprites covering multiple grid tiles) and be placed a little more sparsely
- When pressing the stats/graph button (top left corner), the mouse suddenly cannot be used and one has to press "Escape" to return. Not so with the "news" page (bottom right button), there the mouse keeps working and one can click to get back to the city.
- The "palette" of buildings (residential and commercial) can be scrolled vertically, the column on the right houses just the labels "RES" and "COM" where it applies, maybe you can find a way to have a two-column layout and place the "RES" and "COM" grouping somewhere else, thereby avoiding the vertical scrolling in the palette completely?
- Scrollbars only react to clicks on the small arrow buttons, neither clicking in the empty dark spots of the scroll bar (to move the scrollbar there) or dragging the light gray part of the scrollbar works for scrolling -- implementing this might be a nice quality-of-life feature, as hitting the bigger areas of the scroll bar is easier
- The "white/gold/brown" horizontal stripes in the text (bottom third of the screen) makes the text a bit hard to read, maybe making the colors brighter / less contrast-y for the VGA version - so that it contrasts better with the black outline - would make those easier to read
- Where are the mandatory-in-citybuilder-games disasters? ;) Earthquake that reduces building heights by 2? Fire that affects wooden buildings only, but can spread?
- If there was a goal ("X citizens by the year 1998" or something) that might be more fun to work towards, although for my first playthrough, I really enjoyed that it was super freeform and there was always enough budget to bulldoze and redevelop parts of my city
All in all, a really nice-looking and OK-sounding city builder game that fits the DOS theme really, really well. The name (a 9-letter [8-letter executable name] pun on "demographics" I presume?) also works.
As always, if there's no Adlib music, I'm going to ask that some fancy FM synth music is to be added to the game, but it's already great as-is :)