Our First Video Game Release

THANK YOU to everyone who played, reviewed, tested, and worked on Silicon City. This marks the beginning of our studio, and we take pride in being a small team of gamers making games. Silicon City was created with sweat, blood, and tears, fueled by our passion and lots of coffee. We are thrilled to be part of the gaming industry's future, even with humble expectations.

Player Feedback

The Good

We are immensely grateful for the mostly positive reviews and support we received. Many reviewers recognized the essence of Silicon City, which is a retro city builder with intriguing new mechanics. The focus on citizen happiness resonated with some players, and we are grateful for that. Additionally, thanks to our rigorous testing and production efforts (despite not having a dedicated QA team), the game had a smooth release without major bugs.

The Bad

We also acknowledge that there were some negative reviews of our game. We have read all of them and found valuable insights. Our game is not perfect, and some criticisms accurately described its shortcomings. Players noted the absence of a narrative in the classic mode, mentioned that the game was too easy, and pointed out imbalances in mechanics such as budgets, park costs, and energy management. Furthermore, a few comments were made about the subjective topic of low-poly graphics.

The Ugly

While most of the aforementioned issues are relatively minor, a significant concern looms over the game. At around 1,000 citizens and after several hours of gameplay, performance drops significantly, causing the game to become slow. We recognize the seriousness of this matter, which exposes our studio's inexperience. However, we are committed to addressing this issue.

Upcoming Patches

Performance

As mentioned earlier, our primary focus now is to optimize Silicon City's performance and enhance its speed. Here's our plan regarding the game's performance: As this is our first game, many members of the Polycorne Team are talented developers who do not come from a video game background. We have learned a great deal, particularly about the differences between creating software and games. Unfortunately, we realized the importance of multi-threading when it was too late. Most of the game's code runs on Unity's main thread, utilizing only a single core. However, we have already been working on a substantial code refactoring for the past few months to implement multi-threading. This process will take a few more months for testing and release, but it will result in a significant improvement in the game's performance by the end of the summer. Additionally, before that major update, several optimizations will be implemented to enhance CPU and GPU processing. For instance, the upcoming 1.0.1 patch has already achieved a solid 20-25% framerate improvement, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Balancing

We have also taken note of player feedback regarding city mechanics and budgets. We will be making slight adjustments to building prices and upcosts to prevent players from relying solely on specific parks and gifts to maximize their stats. Real-life situations involve a combination of positives and negatives, so in future patches, we will inform you about the affected buildings. The power plant is likely to undergo changes in cost and capacity.

In-Game Content

During this summer, we will release a free update that includes new super-customizable parks and additional landmarks. Stay tuned for more information!

The Long Run

DLCs for the Future

Once we have addressed the aforementioned issues, we will begin developing extra content for Silicon City. Our objective is to create DLCs that offer everything we didn't have time to include in the base game. The first DLC will focus on transportation, introducing railroads, buses, parking lots, and other features related to traffic management in Silicon City.

Community Content

In the near future, we will dedicate time to crafting custom scenarios for Silicon City, which can be shared and modified. We will also expand the capabilities of our API (available on the wiki). Additionally, we are working on a standalone app that will enable users to create their own procedural buildings. Imagine an editor where you can maximize customization by exploiting procedural rules and then share the building seeds on the Steam Workshop.

Conclusion

Developing Silicon City was an ambitious undertaking, filled with a rollercoaster of emotions and a tremendous amount of work for a new indie game development studio. We are delighted to have made it this far and are proud of the game's quality. We understand that game development doesn't end with the initial release, and we look forward to updating and improving Silicon City. Cheers, Polycorne.