Now with with the Demo released I can focus on adding the final things to the game and fixing the last couple things. I was a bit apprehensive about adding the Deliveries section, the part of the game where you drive a 6-ton steam lorry through the town to deliver the toys. Mainly due to it being mostly physics based and overall not very suited for a multiplayer scenario. After some experimenting I've come up with a new approach from scratch so that there's no "physics jank", whilst keeping the core of the gameplay intact. I've also expanded upon the original concept, much like with the Factory.
Players can walk around inside the lorry whilst it's driving without issue and can hop in and out of it easily. The boxes and coal are still fully physics based, but behave nicely with the new lorry system.
Steering and the overall controls are much more stable than in the original game. There's overall more interactivity too, such as opening/closing the tailgate. As you can see there's an (untextured still) compass now that shows the direction of the next target of delivery. Players will have to manually unload a box from the lorry and place it into a designated spot, with a bell sounding on successful delivery. Navigation is no longer provided by the Boss, players will instead have to figure out the quickest route themselves with the compass to aid them. Of course the monsters will also return in this section of the game, but I'm also going to redesign these concepts from scratch as the Boss is no longer present in the lorry itself. Instead I want to experiment further with the Clockwork Demons and Competitors. The Boss will surely make appearances too, especially when players fail to do the deliveries properly. The difficulty selection board is now updated with all the difficulty stages for Deliveries:
The release date of the game is still 23th of June 2025. Since the core gameplay mechanics for Deliveries are already implemented I'm not worried that this section will be too unfinished for an Early Access release as I can now mostly focus on designing the town map and get a complete gameplay loop. However there will likely still be some bugs and missing minor things in this section at the time of release. I will post more info about this during the release itself. Don't forget to try out the free demo and let me know what you think about the Factory <3