In a few hours, gamescom 2022 will begin. And Highrise City is playable at the Indie Arena Booth. So feel free to come by and say hello, we're there, waiting for people to chat with. If you can't make it to Cologne this year (or attend the show), no worries. The demo is available on Steam as well. Right now. We've just unlocked it.
It already contains a bunch of features which will soon be introduced to the game itself as well. Which brings us an important question: When will the next big patch be released for Highrise City? The answer is rather simple: Very soon. We're currently targeting the 7th September. And we'd like to discuss a few changes. Especially since this will be the biggest update we've been working on so far.
Street lights will start shining soon. When you change the time of the day and go into the night, street lights will have a light source soon. This is, obviously, a cosmetic feature, but one we wanted to include right from the very beginning. And we finally were able to do so without killing the performance. And it looks gorgeous.
Filters. Quite a bunch of them. And you will need them, as we have reworked a few systems underneath. And these systems will also influence the way you will build your cities. As you know, people will only move to your cities if you can offer them jobs. However your citizens won't take any job - there is now a maximum distance they are willing to take. And the filters will enable you to see which industries are too far away from your citizens. They will also allow you to scan for other issues, such as overall happiness or if water supply is running low.
Soon, every way to work will be calculated correctly. That means, traffic management will become more and more important. If a city for example gets more than one million citizens, everyone of them will be correctly simulated - the code underneath allows to do that now.
Other changes which will soon be introduced:
In the main menu, you will see the latest news regarding the game. When building a farm, you will be able to see how much the farm will produce. Countless performance optimizations have been made. Saving the game has been optimized A LOT. Also for savegames. Saving the game won't freeze your computer anymore for a long time. A lot of new buildings (visual variations) have been added. The landscape ground level textures have been reworked. Buff buildings will require access to roads now. Balancing adjustments, UI improvements and pathfinding have been improved and many, many more. Full patch notes will release with the patch.