Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! It has been a busy week! ... Wait, wrong show. Hello everyone, so much happened since last friday. I don't know where to start!

Spawn Festival

As stated in the previous devlog, we had a table at the Spawn Festival in Angoulme, France. Thank you if you joined us, we had a blast! With two computers on premises, people didn't have to wait much to play. From what we could gather, players greatly enjoyed the driving, the funny vehicles, caring for their patients. Overall, they were pretty impressed by the refreshing proposition that is Highway to Heal.

Demo Progress

When you think of making a video game, you think of game feel, level design, visual effects, great music... What you don't necessarily think of, while being very important, is... menus! Well, unless your making a management game of course. Which we don't, by the way.
Look at this ambulance. It can't wait to have you play it! So yes, one of the reasons people can already play the game at public events and you can't, is because we are there to guide them between the unfinished bits. We now have a working and not too ugly pause menu too. We are also putting the final touches to the progression system so that you can replay missions and try to score them better. We also spent quite some time fixing bugs here and there, improving the user experience in some parts of the game that still don't work exactly we would like them to. Especially, we noticed people having trouble using our mini-map so we are working on that too.

Key Art

Finally, our new key art , with the new name, as landed! And it's amazing, right? It will be up on Steam very soon.

Surprises

This wasn't laid out in the order of events of the week. There is one I skipped. A big one. But one I can't talk about yet. Soon! I can say that you can expect to see us in a very very cool setting. Guess in the comments! Also, we spent some time chatting with some new partners that will help us on our... crowdfunding campaign! Last october, as you might recall, we won the silver prize of La Game Cup. The prize was composed of several parts including a participation in a crowdfunding campaign. This will happen on a french and super cute platform called Ulule! Who doesn't love owls? [url=https://fr.ulule.com/city-ambulance--rescue-express/]
Sign up if you'd like to join in

Next Week

We still have a ton of work, very minor stuff but so many of them... We can't wait to have you playing the game! See you then and take good care!

[ 2025-04-11 13:10:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there! As you might have noticed, our weekly devlog skipped a beat! Indeed, last week, as announced on our social networks, there was no news because we were too tired from a very busy week. What happened? Well, mostly we got on TURBO mode to ship a playable build with everything we really wanted people to try at a "playtest" evening gathering at our coworking space. A beautiful space shared with our friends from Nova-box, Ctrl Freak and Zaka Services.
After having a couple of friends try the game the day before, we already had plenty of notes on our whiteboards. We fixed and tweaked the game to almost all of their feedback, before the evening. But we were sure people will bring up a lot of stuff to our attention. Playtesting is a very important part of game development as development is often a big tunnel that you enter with great ideas and get out with no idea if they actually work or not. The biggest problem being that you know way too much about how all of it works and you really can't be sure if people will "get it" right away.
The evening went great! People could play the first three missions of the game and they liked it a lot! Especially the multi-tasking situations, the drive feeling, the visuals, etc. Of course we can and will continue to improve things. We already addressed most of what tricked people a few times. We also have a couple features that are not implemented yet, like the City Town Hall, that will help people get around easier and faster. If you want to play the game and are in Angoulme, see you tomorrow at Spawn Festival!
Otherwise, just wait a couple of weeks - probably - for us to finish a few things and you'll be able to play at home the demo of Highway to Heal! See you next week!

[ 2025-04-04 14:32:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

How do you do? The demo is nearing completion! There's still a few things to do and a lot of polish before releasing it, but you can expect to play the game in the coming weeks!

Disinfection mini-game

The third mini-game of the demo has been implemented and is now just waiting for the final visual touches. The story of this one is a bit weird as we ended up mixing two games that were previously designed on paper.
This was supposed to be an evaluation game, to assess the situation of the patient. But we want our games to be more involved in the patient's health. And while taking the vitals of someone might be nice on their mood (or not!) it was not active enough in our taste. So we took the idea of a disinfection game and applied it over the existing gameplay and graphics and it works quite nicely! We will probably rethink the visuals though, by changing the tools to be more representative. But that will probably wait an update after the demo is released.

Visuals

Visuals have vastly improved in the last few weeks. As previously stated, particle effects from ApologueFX have been integrated, but the main interface got a bit of an overhaul too. We feel the design is much easier to read while maintaining its distinctive "holographic" characteristics and makes you feel a lot more about the importance of the patient you're in charge of.


The injection game is a lot less spiky too! Thanks to new technologies, injections don't use needles in our future, but high pressure injection systems which are a lot less scary.

Next Week

As I stated earlier, the demo is approaching. We need tu update the tutorial to highlight all the new gameplay and make sure you start off in the best of conditions. You wouldn't want to harm those delightful characters, would you? After that, is just quality of life features up to the release! Integration of the latest music tracks, debugging, a proper pause menu, more debugging, performance improvements, even more debugging, gameplay balancing - it's wayyyy too hard right now! - and then... you guessed it, debugging. We can't wait to have all of you playing our game and telling us how you feel about it. See you then!

[ 2025-03-21 15:43:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bom dia! Yes I speak portuguese too and this game does support a vast diversity of characters so why not. "This game" and not "City Ambulance: Rescue Express", weird right? Maybe because we finally settled on a new name for the game? OMG! YES! It will be called... *drumroll* Highway to Heal. The new logo and key art are being worked out, so the change will be visible here and everywhere in the coming weeks.

Ambulance Damage Management

Taking care of your patients is important, but let's not forget to take of our ambulance! Without it, our patients wouldn't get very far. In Highway to Heal (sounds nice, right?), your equipment is your health bar. You have to drive fast, but safe! Avoiding traffic, obstacles, dodging lamp posts, etc.
When you hit stuff, your ambulance starts to break appart. No worries though, a slight detour through the garage or the pharmacy will fix all that! The garage will fix all your vehicle related equipment while the pharmacy will handle all the paramedic equipment. Both have hardware to fix your most important piece of gear: the siren! Here's a quick video of what all that looks like. Don't mind the visuals of the interface, they are being done as [strike]we speak[/strike]I write! [previewyoutube=T1b9xyc8rLc;full][/previewyoutube] I had to drive so badly to show this. I'm deeply sorry to all the vehicles, trash cans, lamp posts, trees and walls I hit along the way. Good thing no-one got hurt, not even a bird!

Illustrason

Let's put some faces on who's behind this game. Illustrason is a team of two talented sound designers who did all the audio effects and mixing you've heard in that video. Camille and Julien are still hard at work to improve the sound's audio. It's already great and we didn't even integrate their ambiance system yet! We can't wait to get to it but there's so much to do!
Check out the games they've previously worked on, they are great. They even got Best Audio prize for their work on Seers Isle at the Indie Prize 2019 event in London!

Next Week

There was some rethinking into what patient treatment mini-game should be done as third for the demo. But that thinking is over and implementation might be done next week. Hopefully, we will get to show you all the gameplay with a much improved interface too. See you next week! Take care!

[ 2025-03-14 18:09:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey! It's time for another update of this game. Although we redesigned some key parts of the game, progress is going well on our public demo. Hopefully, it will be released by the end of the month. Fingers crossed!

New immobilisation mini-game

To care for your patient, we plan on having eight mini-games in the final game. All will be playable in full-screen, while your picking them up, so that they're easier to do the first time. But all will also be doable while you're driving so that you can raise back the health of your patient if you drove badly! This week, I'd like to focus on the immobilisation mini-game. When you're given care of a patient that received an injury to a limb, it's often important to prevent that limb from doing any movement. This eases the pain and ensures the situation doesn't deteriorate more.
To that end, this mini-game has you use a pump to inflate a vacuum splint. You must inflate it enough for the limb to be secured but not too much as to not cause too much discomfort.

Radio

There's been quite some progress on the audio front, with new engine sounds and more general mixing. That's hard to show on an image, obviously! But we can talk about one important aspect of the audio of game. Paramedics spending most of their days driving, not necessarily in urgence, they listen to a lot of music. Some even do work playlists! Our approach here will be to give you six radios to listen to. Using the holowatch, you'll be able to easily change which one you'd like to ear. All will feature varied styles, from punk rock to latin music, probably some electronic music too.
In between the tracks, radio jingles and news will pop up. These will be designed to immerse you even more in our beautiful city of Le Mascaret. By the way, do you know what Mascaret means? It's french for a tidal bore, a wave that goes backwards: from the sea, up the river! I must tell you something: listening to hours of music for work is a lot less fun than it sounds! (pun intended) It's about finding which tunes suit best, writing them down, grouping them together, trimming the list again and again... It's a lot of spreadsheets! DJ'ing isn't just about showing off on stage, it would seem. Let us know which styles you think would be best to drive to!

Next Week

By the end of next week, all three mini-games planned for the demo should be working. Maybe we will show you the other two. There will probably be many surprises for us by then. Maybe the new name of the game? We'll see! See you next time and remember to take good care of yourself!

[ 2025-03-07 13:28:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bonjour ! as we say over here. We're still looking for the new name of the game. We tried a few things on Steam. Sorry if you were wondering where did we go, ahah! The contenders are:

• Safe and Sound
• Highway to Heal
• Pulse Fiction
• Rushing Siren
• CARE!

Let us know what you think of those! We're open to suggestions too. Come chat on our discord server.

Visual Effects

Our partner Apologue FX is currently shipping their first batch of visual effects for the game. It's going to rock a lot more! Here's a few work in progress animations to give you a taste. Here's what happens if you brake your siren. Go to the nearest garage or pharmacy to fix it!
I bet only the garage can you help you on this one.

Game Design

As stated last week, we are putting the patient forward in the hope that you take good care of them. But that can't be at the expense of your dear ambulance! Not only you will be able to upgrade it, but the more upgrades you have, the more resilient it is! That's because your upgrades will always brake before your wheels or your siren. To that end, we are re-designing the interface of the game and it will look more or less like this:

Next Week

We can hope that we will finally have the new name of the game. This is one of the hardest things to do while making a game. It's the toughest of all the decisions we have to make because it's not something you can change easily when the game starts to be noticed all over. What we are more sure of is that progress will have been done in implementing the new game design so expect to see versions of what you just read here but more polished and all actually working in-game! Reach out if you'd like to play our demo before everyone. We'd happily take your feedback! You can also follow us on social networks to get early glimpses of our progress. See you next week!

[ 2025-02-28 16:02:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello! This week shook a bit the development team. We started rethinking a few things including... the name of the game! With "City Ambulance: Rescue Express", we noticed people often thought our game was a simulation or a cheap mobile game port. For the moment we just renamed it to "CARE!", its initials, but we will probably change it again. Stay tuned!

Hologram Effect

As eco-friendly as we want our game to be, we still want it to be set in the future and that must show somehow. So, in the world we are designing, engineers have figured out how to make small starwars-like holographic projectors that work quite well and don't consume a tremendous amount of energy to operate. This was not very visible in the game yet, only a few touches here and there. We finally gave the characters a bit of treatment so that they convey that concept too.

Patient's Care

Thinking about marketing and the title of the game made us change a few things in how the game plays too. We're going to have the player focus more on the patient by constantly showing its health bar. In CARE! the health your patient depends on their state when you pick them up. While you're driving, it's health can worsen unexpectedly due to their condition or... when you drive bad! Driving properly is key to help your patient the best, but you can do more. If you drive perfectly, an aura charges around your ambulance and stays as long as you don't hit anything. As long as your aura is maximized, your patient health increases, like they obviously would if they were in an insane level of coziness.
But this process is quite slow and hard to maintain, so the game offers you an alternative: from time to time, a health mini-game will pop-up above the ambulance. The better you handle it - remember, while driving! - the more your patient's health will increase in an instant.

Next week

You might have noticed that I lied last week, as I did not talk about those health care mini-games that we have. Indeed, development of indie game by a very small team makes for unexpected changes. Maybe next week I will get to show you those, maybe I will have more to tell about the new gameplay, maybe we'll talk music... Surprise! Let us know in the comments if you're interested in participating in a private play-test! The game is quite light to download (only 250MB right now, we're targeting a maximum of 1GB for the final game) and has about an hour of gameplay available.

[ 2025-02-21 15:09:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone! We have started a weekly development log. Every week, we will post on our progress on making City Ambulance: Rescue Express, focusing on specific subjects of the game that have noticeably progressed. The first post is on the game's hub, follow it to not miss any! Weekly DevLog #1 - Vehicle AI & Environment Graphics
Have a nice week-end!

[ 2025-02-14 17:55:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone! We are starting a weekly development log so you can all follow our progress on the game. Well, we'll try to this weekly. Let us know if you like it, if you want it more often, less often, we'll happily ear your feedback on this! This week, there has been quite some progression on the artificial intelligence of vehicles and the graphics of the residential area, so we'll focus on that.

A Ballet of Vehicles

Vehicle artificial intelligence is the work of having cars automatically moving around in the city nicely, kind of a ballet! It's actually a pretty hard job. It's the kind of thing that when done right, no-one notices it's in there. So far, ours cars where super dumb, they would cut across intersections, they would drive at their maximum speed all the time... It meant for quite funny interactions but it was also super frustrating at times.
Daniel spent the whole week on this and now they know how to stop before obstacles presenting in front of them and how to turn in a nice arc to go from one street to another, without cutting across. It's not perfect yet, sometimes they can block themselves together, but it's already a whole lot better. You'll be a lot less surprised by their silliness! This is something we're definitely going to spend more time on in the future.

Environment's visuals

Tom spent a good deal of his weak working on the level design of the residential area. This is an area of the game where streets are quite narrow and cars drive slowly in. Even more than the rest of the city, it's super green thanks to thousands of trees planted by their citizens.
Le Mascaret being inspired by french towns, it's not just straight streets crossing each other nicely. It's all messy and fun to drive in. It's also many streets which are just for people to walk in, no cars, not even ambulances in there!

Coming up next

Right now the game features only one caring mini-game, a spiky injection. We plan on adding two more and re-working the one we have to use a more futuristic pressure injection system. No more being afraid of needles in Le Mascaret! Stay tuned for more and remember to take care of people around you!

[ 2025-02-14 15:05:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Dear Steam Players, It's with great joy that I'm writing to you. Something we truly didn't expect actually happened! Last week, Thomas and I, Daniel, went to Angoulme to defend our game amongst great other indie games in La Game Cup, the French Indie Game Competition. You might have voted for us online back in July, but the competition didn't end there.
It was a tense but still fun afternoon of preparation, making videos for social networks, getting interviewed by major french streamers before the event, etc. A bit before 7pm, we went on stage to talk about our game for the only four minutes we were allowed to. That's not much to defend a project! The whole thing was streamed on Twitch and Facebook. People could then vote by text message. It's with great surprise that an hour later, we got a silver trophy in our hands!
First Places were awared to Lost In Cairo and Versus in the Dark. Check them out, they're very cool! And the other finalists of the newbie and boss categories too!

What does that mean for us now?

This prize awards us several things. First, courtesy of La Banque Postale, we will be able to start a crowdfunding campaign on KissKissBankBank with a 5000 start! If you'd like to support our project before its release, stay tuned as this campaign will probably start in a few months. Second, we will have a 30 day access to labs at CNAM-ENJMIN. We will make sure to use the QA room to give you a nice bug free and completely enjoyable experience!
Lastly, and I think the most important : we will have an ad campaign in french paper magazine "Jeux Vido Magazine". Communication around a video game is hard, very hard. It totally makes the difference between a video game studio working hard for years and getting nothing upon release versus one surviving to make another contribution to the indie game monument. You can understand that free advertising is always nice to have! Not only that, but we also made nice contacts with the streamers there and, hopefully, you'll see more of our game with them in the coming months!
To conclude: Thanks for your support! And stay tuned to discover more about City Ambulance: Rescue Express!

[ 2024-10-08 13:57:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone, We are so happy to announce that City Ambulance: Rescue Express has been selected by the jury of french contest "La Game Cup" to be amongst the 3 finalists in the BOSS category.
This contest is held by KissKissBankBank, a french crowdfunding platform, and La Banque Postale, the banking service of the french postal service. The winner will get a headstart of 20 000 (21,699$US) in its KissKissBankBank crowdfunding campaign, an assured win! >>> VOTE FOR US <<< Winning this contest would tremendously help Manufacture 43 in making City Ambulance: Rescue Express a reality. The economic situation has been difficult for everyone and that includes us too.
Winning the contest is done by public vote on the website of La Game Cup. It is done by a simple click of "Je vote pour ce jeu" (french for "I vote for this game") under the name of the game, on the website. Voting will happen in three phases. The first phase is happening right now! The second phase will be in September, we will notice you again. The last step will happen in public in Angoulme, France, where the team will be. Drop by if you want to meet us :) You can also help us by sharing the link to your friends and family and ask them to vote for us too. Thanks for reading us! Daniel & Thomas

[ 2024-07-11 11:17:36 CET ] [ Original post ]