Devblog: Airline Contracts & Managing Game Content
Hey there! My name is Tom and I'm the lead developer behind One More Airport . We just launched our Steam page a couple of weeks ago and now that the hectic period of preparing a store page is behind us, it's time to take you along on our development journey. If you ever want to
Hey there!
My name is Tom and I'm the lead developer behind One More Airport. We just launched our Steam page a couple of weeks ago and now that the hectic period of preparing a store page is behind us, it's time to take you along on our development journey.
If you ever want to chat about the game (or our previous game, One More Island), you are more than welcome to join the Discord server!
For today's post I want to tell you about two new cool features we're working on: Airline contracts, and on a more technical level, how we manage our game content.
Airline Contracts
While the various scenarios have different goals and mechanics, the core of the 'vanilla' game revolves around building your terminal and growing the number of flights and passengers you can handle on a daily basis. Just like in the real world though, you won't see large jumbojets at your friendly neighbourhood airport, and so it's your task to 'earn' those big airliners.
While the construction of certain infrastructure (like the XL Gate, or certain types of runways) is locked behind research, you'll also need to convince airlines to send larger flights in your direction. They'll happily offer you some small flights to schedule, but for larger flights you need to earn some reputation to be able to sign a contract with them.
Every interaction with a flight will impact your reputation with the respective airline. Did the aircraft depart on time? Did all passengers catch their flights? Was baggage correctly loaded? And later on, did you provide Refueling or Catering services? You'll be able to see the effects of all these interactions on your reputation.
When certain thresholds are achieved you can sign a new contract with them. While that allows you to schedule larger flights to start earning the big bucks, it may also come with stricter terms. And what if you don't meet those? Well, your reputation goes down the drain, and eventually they'll cancel your contract. Yikes!
We're still tuning the UI, but the screenshot above gives you an impression of the direction we're heading in. Your feedback is of course much appreciated, so make sure to drop a comment if there are must-have features we should really consider ;-)
Managing Game Content
When we started on the game some time ago we didn't have moddability as a clear goal for this game, and we basically started out with hardcoding game contents into the source code. For the programmers among us, that basically meant putting zones and furniture types in C#, with the necessity to recompile for every little change. It's safe to say that was not an ideal development-workflow, so we got around to changing that a couple of weeks ago.
The screenshot above shows the 'game data editor' in its current (rough) form. With the help of Claude we managed to quickly build a UI on top of the game data, which now resides in JSON files instead of in C#. Through the game data editor we can quickly tune game content in a visual way, and reload it into the game.
Can you imagine how cumbersome it was to tune the positions of guests sitting on a bench, in plain-text without a realtime preview? Once something gets painful enough it's a good motivation to simplify/automate or in general improve.
Now does that mean we'll also support moddability? And to what degree? Ehrr..... we're not sure yet! For some types of content (aircraft types, airlines, scenarios) we definitely have this in mind. For others (zones, furniture, types of goods, ...) it's still an ongoing discussion. Again, your feedback is welcome here. If there are things you think should really be moddable, please share that with us!
Thanks for taking the time to read to the end! You might as well wishlist the game if you haven't already, and as mentioned before: head over to our Discord to share your ideas with the team!
Cheers,
Tom