Dear Townscapers,
It feels great to have this toy released into the wild. It is absolutely delightful to see all the wonderful towns you all are building. Townscaper blew up a bit more than I expected, and I am somewhat overwhelmed with all the feedback and support you are providing. I'm afraid that I will not able to answer all your forum posts, emails, and twitter comments, but I will adress some of the most common topics here.
But first, a summary of my personal circumstances to give you a sense of the pace of development in the near future: I'm writing this from a laptop far out on the Swedish countryside, where I'm taking at least two weeks vacation to introduce my grandparents to their first great grandchild. Back home, we just moved and are not even nearly done unpacking and setting up the new flat. Moreover, I'm gonna go on half-time parental leave in the fall, and full-time parental leave in the spring.
I should be able to get some work done though, and here is what that work might look like:
Architeture
Throughout updating the game, I will continously add small details and architectural patterns. These are fun to make and mostly easy to add. The way the rules for these patterns work is quite esoteric, so it is not easy to explain why some things are easy to add and others hard or impossible. Some of these I will let you know about, and some of these I will leave for you to find on your own.
MacOS
My first priority is to release a Mac version. I'm not promising any specific date, but I will work towards this while still on vacation. I'm actually writing this on a Macbook right now (the one we bought for Bad North). The game runs perfectly fine on a Mac, but Apple has a rather elaborate security process with notarization I need to go through before I can release it to the public. And working on a Mac is new to me, so it's all a bit slow.
Linux
I don't know much about Linux, but apparently people are running the game just fine on Linux through Proton, so I'm not gonna focus on a specific Linux release in the near future.
People?
Many of you are suggesting I add people to the game. I would like to add more life to the game. I'm probably gonna start with some more animals; some fish or maybe a whale would be easy. Perhaps a pattern to build piers, and boats that come visit them. Adding people is a not a small task though. They need all kinds of complex behaviour, animation, and navigation, and I don't want to add them unless I feel I can make them good enough and interesting enough.
Terrain?
Many of you are suggesting I add new types of building blocks, like terrain, beach, different architectural styles etc. This does make perfect sense from a design perspective. Unfortunately, this is actually much more technically difficult than it might seem. Townscaper is built around a complex algorithm that I feed with handcrafted puzzle pieces that handle all the different possible connections and configurations. The number of pieces I need grow exponentially with the number of features I add. Adding one new type of block would increase that number from half-a-thousand to several thousands, which is not realistic. It is not impossible that I come up with some clever way of circumventing this combinatorial explosion, but I cannot promise anything.
Bigger Grid!
People are building way bigger than I thought they would. This makes me happy. When I decided the size of the grid, I built the biggest thing I thought anyone would want to build, and then doubled that. Clearly, that was not big enough. I'm fairly certain I will make the grid bigger, but there are a few things I need to figure out before that: the game does get slow when you build too big, my lighting system bugs out, and the graphics looks a bit too repetitive. I want to investigate and resolve these issues before I increase the grid size.
(Also, technically, the grid is actually infinite, it is the size of your town that is limited. Before you start building, you can pan around until you find a piece of grid you like, and start building there)
My hand hurts from all the clicking!
People are building for way longer than I though they would. This makes me happy. It also makes some peoples hands hurt. Many of your are suggesting various ways, tools, and modes to be able to place multiple blocks faster to alleviate this. After much hard thinking, I have come up with a design I think will work that I will try to implement.
Bugs
It is a sad fact of this universe that all games have bugs on release, and Townscaper is no exception. If you are encountering bugs please tell me all about them in this sub forum, and I will do my best to fix them.
Save
The game saves automatically when you exit the game, or when you open the save menu (the button that says "Open")
Controls
The game does have a bunch of controls and keyboard shortcuts, but info on them (and the ability to edit them) are nowhere to be found. I will add a proper control screen in the future. In the meantime, here are the current hardcoded controls:
LMB click - Add block
RMB click - Remove block
LMB drag - Rotate camera
RMB drag - Pan camera
Scroll wheel - Zoom
ALT+LMB click - Select the color at the block the cursor is over
WASDQE or Arrow keys, Page up and Page down - Move camera
1234567890YUIOP - Select colors
"," and "." - Cycle colors
CTRL+Z - Undo
CTRL+X - Redo
Anyway, thanks a ton for enjoying Townscaper. I hope you are having as much fun playing with it as I have developing it.
Best wishes,
Oskar Stålberg