Hello friends!
[Aanya Bhatt, Mahaan Industries]
It’s so lovely to see you here! A big thank you to all of you. Just as our entire team, I’m very excited to see all the lovely feedback and reviews. It’s been a long journey during which a lot of creative ideas have been conceived and many wonderful stories have been shared. Together we’ve lived through ups and downs and made this incredible product a reality. We’re shortly before the release and I thought it would be the right time to look back at this exciting path we’ve traveled.
Today we’ll be hearing from the team working on our product. What are their thoughts and impressions? Here are some personal words from our staff:
________________________________________________
Patrick Wachowiak - Chasing Carrots - UI / Art
“What was the luckiest moment during the development?”
During the search for reference material, I stumbled upon an old print ad for a C64 home computer. Turned out that the colors and even the shapes used in the ad were a perfect fit and provided the basis for the whole UI design of Good Company. Thank you, commodore.
________________________________________________
Paul Lawitzki - Chasing Carrots - Game Design / Programming
“If you had given one more thing you could add to Good Company, no matter how big or small, what would it be?”
Pretty early in development we wanted the maps to be more dynamic. We wanted the player to be able to construct their own buildings and have to take care of their utilities. Another idea was to have multiple maps at once, so you could switch between your production sites and be able to ship materials between them. It turned out these features would have blown our scope way out of proportion. Looking at it now, it would’ve also added a lot of complexity to a game that is already very complex. In hindsight I’m very happy how it turned out. But still, I would’ve loved to see players have more influence on the environment they are building their companies in.
________________________________________________
Eric Goofers - Chasing Carrots - Programming
“Tell us about your favourite reaction of someone to Good Company.”
There is a guy on our Discord that goes by the name “pumpCurry”. He posted insane production line setups on a regular basis and really pushed the game (both design and technical wise) to its absolute limit. At one point, he even shared some save files with us which was immensely helpful in order to find some freak bugs that only happen with big setups, but also to optimise the game’s performance.
Creating something that people enjoy this much really is one of the best things about making games. Keep on pumping, pumpCurry!
________________________________________________
Dominik Schneider - Chasing Carrots - Programming / Game Design
“If you had been given one more thing you could add to Good Company, no matter how big or small, what would it be?”
The one thing that I would have loved to make it into release is mod support. Over time we developed many systems in the backend that can be combined in even more ways forming something completely different. And I would love to see what crazy concoctions the community can come up with using those systems!
We used our LUA binding to create the complete campaign, challenges and many of the freeplay mechanics. So the basics are already there (and you CAN dabble in it, breaking things :), but for proper mod support there needs to be infrastructure for the players and also UI scripting, maybe even external model loading. I can’t promise anything, but mod support is definitely high on my list!
