Hello everyone!
Today we’d like to tell you about an interesting feature which will become available for everyone in the end of this summer, and it’s called Challenge Editor.
We have information about several tens of thousands of cities around the world in our game, and we can use any of them while creating challenges. Each one is unique in a way that affects gameplay – distance to other cities and population (passenger flow depends on it). Some cities have their own random events: for example, a game exhibition can take place in Cologne and Los Angeles, and Octoberfest may begin in München. These events temporarily increase passenger flow to these cities.
Let us show how the editor works.
Let’s try to create a simple challenge about flights in USA to far cities. It would be quite expensive to build far routes – this is going to be the main challenge for player.
Interface of this editor is about to change as this is a very early look.
The first tab: we need to enter the name and description of our challenge. What is interesting – you can enter these on English and other languages supported by the game. The language selected in Settings will be chosen by default.
The second screen is a lot more complex and contains many parameters which will determine, what will happen in the challenge. First of all, let’s add victory condition. Let it be: “Gather 30000 credits in 20 minutes”. On the same screen, let’s make Initial balance to 1000. It would be enough to connect the first few cities, upgrade a plane or launch a couple of new ones.
From time to time, random events can occur in the game, affecting the gameplay. Here you can choose how often they will occur or disable them fully. Also, here you can set the minimum population of an unlocked city. If population of the city is lower than this number, it won’t unlock in the challenge.
The percentage of domestic routes determines how many passengers will fly only inside the country. In our scenario, there is only one country – USA, so let’s not touch it now – it won’t affect anything. Let’s assign interval between unlocking cities (they will be chosen randomly), and how quick new passengers will appear in airports.
The initial country is, of course, the USA. Let’s add the rule which won’t allow players to unlock other countries (other possible options: unlock any countries; unlock countries which have a common border with currently unlocked ones).
Let’s leave speed of the basic 1st level plane as is (but we can dramatically change game speed just my adjusting it).
Here’s a game mechanic hidden from player: passenger flow generated by a city grows over time. After the determined time, passenger flow is increased twice. But the cities are unlocked gradually, so passenger flow grows very fluently in the game.
Now let’s pay our attention to the third tab. It’s Timeline, and it determines what will happen in the game during the challenge. Let’s click on it and add two cities to be unlocked at the start – we’ll connect them to the capital.
Let’s create one more event: unlock Seattle City on the seventh minute of gameplay. Pay attention to the number in brackets – it’s population of this city, and as you remember, it influences the passenger flow into and from it.
Now let’s add a couple of cities distant from the central part of the country:
Let’s make our own event! According to our evil plan, player would have to pay taxes on the eighth minute. To do that, we add events “Subtract money” and “Show message” (so that the player knows the reason why his balance decreased).
You can also add pre-set events like volcano eruption, pandemics, global crisis and others. All of them will affect gameplay in this or that way.
Finally, let’s give name to the challenge file and test it.
By default, we only have capital and two cities we chose on the timeline. After 1,5 minutes, just like we entered, a random city was unlocked – New York, After 1,5 more minutes – Chicago. Now we can connect them and begin building our network.
The cities are unlocked constantly. Here’s the Seattle! Let’s build a route by connecting it with Albuquerque.
The time passes, new routes are being built, new planes are bought. Despite these costs, we still earn money. We need to save as much as we can to connect Alaska and Hawaii to our network, just like we stated on the Timeline.
We believe that challenge editor will drastically change the game and make it more replayable. After that, we’d like to implement the database of user-created challenges with search, ratings etc.
As for right now – the game has quite many pre-created challenges – all of them are created in this editor and you can try them right now.
Thank you for attention, have a nice flight!