Hey,
How's the development going?
We are working intensively on Indoorlands. We want to give you the opportunity to play Indoorlands in the first Early Access version as soon as possible. Originally, we wanted to have already released in Early Access, however, some topics turned out to be even more important than initially thought (and the pandemy doesn't make things easier ːsteamsadː).
The version of Indoorlands that we will release - like every Early Access title - won't be completely finalized. However, we have certain minimum requirements: The game should run stable, the balancing should be fun and important core features are supposed to work.
To keep you up to date with what this means in detail, we want to give you a few insights into the development:
What we have been working on lately:
The Blueprint System
We want to give our players the possibility to save their hall designs in order to re-use them in different parks or quickly setup new halls which are already decorated a bit. In addition, we want to allow our community to share their blueprints with each other. Right now this is possible via sharing .blueprint files e.g. on our Discord server. We also consider adding STEAM workshop support in the Early Access phase, but only if it is of high value to the community.
Park Cleaning System
Keeping your park clean should be an important task in Indoorlands. We are now in the third iteration of such a system. In the last iteration it was more a number game so each hall had a dirt value and you could build surrounding cleaning halls which lowered the dirt value a bit. It worked but in the end it was not fun. We scrapped all that and went for a more realistic and visually understandable system.
Now visitors have a dirt emission probability (which increases after visiting shops or restaurants) and sometimes they throw their waste on the ground based on that probability. Every visitor walking past this mess now has the opportunity to be disgusted by it.
If this happens too often, then your visitors will become unhappy and this can lead to the general interest in your park decreasing and you getting fewer visitors.
To get rid of the dirt, you can - especially at the beginning of the game - use the cleaning tool. However, you'll quickly want to automate this activity. That's why we've now included cleaning rooms. In them, there are cleaners who regularly swarm out to get rid of the dirt around the building.
This feature is almost done but still needs a bit balancing.
Making rides safer
We have several different rides which can be placed in the halls. Some parts of the rides even move across the hall (especially swinging rides). This has led to the gondolas sometimes colliding with placed decorations. So we built a small system that prohibits placement in the relevant area and gives visual feedback to the player.
More rides
We want to expand with content during Early Access but we also want to have a good basis at the release. So here is a screenshot of one of the rides we lately worked on:
What we want to accomplish prior Early Access release:
Cutting decorations
Previously, decorative parts could not be partially pushed outside the hall, otherwise they would have stood out from the walls. Thus, the objects always had to maintain a small distance from the wall and this very much limited the creative freedom. To turn your halls into really beautiful ones, it should be possible to place objects at / in the edge of the hall. To do that, they have to be "cut". We investigated a lot of possibilities here and finally have a properly working solution
Re-iteration of the demand system
Currently, the core loop of the game is to have as happy park visitors as possible, thereby generating more revenue, using the funds to expand the park, and so on. This works well, but we would like to revise the system, which determines the wishes and needs of the visitors. The new iteration should have more game depth and be more comprehensible for the players. We will go into more detail on this topic in another post when the time comes.
Expand the park
To increase the size of your indoor park, you need to unlock more land. We have already finished the functionality, but it still needs to be balanced cost-wise.
Is that all?
Obviously, the examples shown do not cover all open tasks, but should give you a representative insight into the development. One thing you can be sure of: We want to share the game with you as soon as possible and are looking forward to your feedback.
If you liked this post please make sure to wishlist the game and follow it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1378890/Indoorlands
Let us know any feedback or questions you might have in the discussion section or on our Discord server! Also let us know if you are interested in more such update posts.
- Your Pixelsplit team