This reminds me of microcity which is a Simcity Clone for the Game Boy Colour.

The author has some great in-depth docs about the design, and how they managed to make a fairly lively-seeming simulation fit into a machine with an 8 MHz 8-bit processor.

https://github.com/AntonioND/ucity/blob/master/docs/index.rs...

Bear in mind that the GBC is almost between high end NES graphics and SNES.