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 ]