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Note: This development diary covers functionality present in the pre-alpha version of the game. All information provided is subject to change as development continues.
Welcome to development diary #5 for Metropolisim - The Deeply Complex City Building and Management game.
Today I want to talk about the education system. Providing access to quality educational opportunities is one of the fundamental aspects of taking care of the citizens of your city. As you will read below, educating the citizens of your city is critical to advancing your city from a small town to a large metropolis. Neglecting education is a certain way to doom your citizens to eternal misery. And maybe that's your thing?
Hello and welcome to Development Diary #3 for Metropolisim. I am really thrilled to be writing this and to be able to share new information about the game with you. I'd like to once again thank you for following and supporting the game. A special thank you to everyone who has Pre-Ordered the game. It is amazing to see the reception the game has already received even in it's early stages. I am eager to show you as much as possible in the coming months as we move towards Early Access release.
Today I am going to be covering a lot of in-depth information surrounding the traffic and pathfinding systems in Metropolisim. For those who have been following my development diaries you will know that initially I planned to have a narrated gameplay video uploaded to YouTube to coincide with this post. However, I just haven't had enough time to make that video. Since I have been seeing a lot of anxious fans awaiting more information on the game I decided to go ahead and post this diary today and continue to work on the video which will be released in the near-future.
The good news is, although I wasn't able to create the narrated video in time for this post, I still have several gameplay videos embedded throughout this diary, including first looks at city traffic in action. Hopefully this is as exciting for you to see as it is for me to share! Without further ado, let's go ahead and jump right into it.
https://youtu.be/1NpYmntkRtk
https://youtu.be/UY7ILHgwPRY
Fast and accurate pathfinding, in my opinion, is one of the core foundational elements of a city building game. Traffic impacts almost every other system in the game and is incredibly important to get right but also incredibly difficult to get right. In order to simulate millions of living citizens with real lives that include families, jobs, and leisure interests each of these citizens need to be able to move around your city from point A to point B in a believable manner and on a schedule that makes sense. Traffic systems are a constant source of feedback for the player as the cars zoom to and from their destinations so getting it right is incredibly important. If paths take too long to create, are not accurate, or traffic behaves in a nonsensical manner it can break immersion and result in poor gameplay.
I have spent a significant amount of time creating the traffic and pathfinding systems for Metropolisim and I am very happy with where these systems are. With that said, the game is still in a pre-alpha state so I am continuing to work on fixing bugs and adding features and functionality. I have lots more planned to add as the game moves into Early Access and beyond.
In this Development Diary I am going to cover some of the points I think the community will be most excited about but keep in mind there is lots more still to share in the future.
Hello all you Metropolisimers? Metropolisimites? Metropolisim-lovers? Hmm..need to work on that. Open to suggestions. :)
First of all - HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope you all had a fantastic night to ring in 2019. I will be honest, I was at home working hard on the game, but I did get up at midnight and give the family a kiss and take a moment to reflect and be thankful for a great year in 2018.
2018 will be a hard year to beat, but I'll be darned if 2019 isn't going to be amazing too.
2019 is the year Metropolisim will launch into Early Access and you will all get a chance to play it for yourselves. I am still working on an exact date when that will be happening, so more to come on that. But before we get to that point I still have lots more development diaries planned with information to share about the game.
The next development diary will be coming in the next two weeks (mid January or so) so please look forward to that. Dev Diary #3 will be focused on citizen pathfinding, movement, and public transport usage. It will most likely contain a video so you will get to see the game in action.
Right now I am trying to polish a few of the systems that serve up that functionality as well as the UI so I make sure that when I show you guys the game it is up to my standards and the standards you all expect and deserve.
In the meantime, here's a quick look at a work-in-progress version of one of the UI elements. This is the citizen detail panel. It still needs a lot of work but it should give you an idea of the type of things you'll be able to do with the citizens of your city. Things like see where they live, where they work, where they're going, and follow them (if you want to be a little creepy.)
Also, dig into their current mood. On some of the hidden tabs will be more really in-depth and exciting things like their income, details about their family, etc. So excited with how much detail and interaction I'm going to be serving up and putting at your fingertips when it comes to the residents of your cities.
I know a lot of you have been asking questions in the forums and I haven't been able to respond lately. WIth the holiday season and everything going on I haven't had time to do much, and what free time I have I spend working on developing the game. I promise I will be jumping into respond to as many of you as I can in the coming weeks.
Thanks again for following the development of Metropolisim and I look forward to sharing more with you soon.
Wishing you the best in the coming year.
-Roy
Hello and welcome to Metropolisim Development Diary #2. It's been over a month since I posted the first development diary for the game. A lot has happened in the past six weeks. I have been working at a feverish pace developing new functionality for the game, testing and fixing bugs, and interacting with the awesome community that has started to form around the game.
First and foremost I want to address that our Steam community has grown exponentially and I want to say "welcome" and "thank you" to everyone who wishlisted and is following the game in our community. It really is amazing to get to interact with you all and I've answered several really great questions so far. I'm happy to answer more so keep them coming.
Before I get into a recap of what I've been working on for the past month I want to talk a bit about some of the fundamentals of Metropolisim. I haven't been shy about discussing the fact that I am a huge fan of city building games. I want Metropolisim to be, in as many good ways as possible, a spiritual successor to all of the great city games that have come before, most notably Sim City 4. For those of you who have played and are fans of that game I'm sure this is great to hear, but I know there are a lot of people who haven't played it, so I want to be transparent about what you can expect from Metropolisim.
The number one thing you can expect is to go deeper than ever before in terms of city simulation and management. I would argue that Sim City 4 has taken us, the city building gamer community, about as deep as any game has. But even that wasn't nearly enough for me. What it did do was encourage me to make the game I and others desperately want to play. To put it in perspective, that game did about 30% of what I want to do and plan to do. I want to give the player so many "levers to pull" to manage their city and be an active decision-making participant that it is almost overwhelming. Almost. This game is going to take time to learn, it's going to be challenging, but most importantly it's going to be fun and rewarding.
I want to re-capture the feeling we all got when we played our first city builder and started to see our city make the transition from small town to metropolis. I want you to feel like what you're doing matters, and you're not just a bystander who painted a couple zone colors on a map and then watched buildings appear. That is my goal.
Before we can get to all that I need to expand on some of the basic concepts of the game. I need to outline some of the core gameplay elements in Metropolisim. I plan to do this over the course of the next several development diaries, and today I will focus on Road Placement and Zone Types. Please keep in mind, as Metropolisim is in pre-alpha stage, the below is subject to change and will most likely improve/grow in the coming months. But this is what I've got working or planned so far.
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