Hello Drivers!
We’re back with another edition of our developer blog! We hope you have been enjoying the things we have been talking about up until this point and we will have much more to share in the future. If you’re new here, don’t forget to join our Discord channel to stay up to date with the latest news from our team regarding Urban Venture as well as our other projects!
As a note, everything mentioned in this blog is subject to change as the game is still a work-in-progress. That means anything we share is not set in stone, and later down the line it could get iterated upon, removed, or changed completely!
With that in mind, let’s get into it.
Unique Assets
As you know, creating a city at a 1:1 scale can be challenging as everything must be as it would be in the real-world. This means buildings, streets and landmarks as you would find them in real-life Barcelona must also exist in the game. As some of you may have already spotted, you can already find the La Sagrada Familia on the horizon when cruising the streets. We have also added in some new stuff like the Parc De la Ciutadella and Hivernacle del Parc de la Ciutadella, check it out:
In addition, we’ve managed to set up a couple of POIs (Points of Interest) on the map, which directs our engine to adjust traffic, and then allows us to witness denser traffic in these areas at any given time. For example, there will be many more cars around the office districts during rush hour.
Bollards won’t be annoying anymore!
Environmental destruction is a thing now in Urban Venture. For example, your vehicle can now knock down the bollards on the streets. While before they were made of solid steel… Now, you can simply run them over. Sadly, we don't have a video to show of this, due to some bugs on-going with the car, but we will share some imagery of this soon!
Day And Night Cycle
This is something that a lot of people from the community have been asking about and we’re happy to say that we have implemented the first iteration of a Day/Night cycle in Urban Venture. There is not much more to say besides the fact that we will continue to make it better throughout the development process, like the time of day affecting traffic. In the meantime, see the outcome for yourself:
Gas Station Gameplay Mechanic
Since we started the development of Urban Venture we have been focused on creating the world of Barcelona on a 1:1 scale. This was a huge undertaking and now that we have generated most of the world, it’s time for us to start focusing on actual gameplay. One of the first gameplay mechanics we have added to Urban Venture is the gas station!
The player will be able to pull up to a pump, and fill gas up manually depending on the amount of money the player wants to spend, or you can automatically fill up the entire tank at once! At this moment, there are three gas stations you can find in Barcelona. In the future, we will be talking about charging your vehicles as we also want to add electric cars to the game as well!
The Car Cabin
We’re also super excited to share with you all some of the in-car features that we have been teasing since the announcement of Urban Venture. We’ve talked about how the player will have full control of the vehicle's cabin as you would in real life, and here, you can finally see the progress we made. You can even roll the window down now with the press of a button! The navigation system has also been added and improved in the cabin.
Of course there is still some more functionality to be added to the button cabins and we will for sure share more details on that in the future!
Thanks for reading!
We can’t thank the community enough for showing support for our games. We have been to SXSW (South By Southwest) and PAX East in the last few months and it was really great to see people's reactions when we showed what Urban Venture was about. The reaction online was also fantastic to experience.
We will keep you guys updated as time goes on and we will have another Dev Blog planned for you all soon! Make sure to follow us on all social media channels which you can find here, and make sure to join our Discord channel to chat with the developers!
Hasta La Próxima,
Aleksandra
Urban Venture Producer