Greetings, Newsbearers!
Happy New Year from the entire News Tower team! 🎉
We hope 2025 brings you exciting adventures, both in real life and within the bustling halls of your growing newspaper empire. As the world turns the page to a new chapter, we’re ready to share some of the exciting new content of our next update: "Going International".
Today, we'll give you a preview of the major features and changes that will take your publication beyond New York and onto the global stage. We hope you're ready to face the challenges of reporting across borders! Additionally, we’ll touch on a more serious topic and discuss how we’ve integrated it into the game.
Without further ado, let’s explore how your newsroom will soon capture the pulse of the world!
The next update is called “Going International”. Where is it taking us?
Europe! This is the first time we will open up a new continent. With more continents to come later on. But this update is not only about that. The new Pneumatic tube and dumwaiter transporting systems are a big part of it too. And so is the reworked Employee list, for managing all your employees.
The 1930’s in Europe were marked by significant historical events, including the rise of facism and Nazism. How does News Tower approach these themes, and what can the players expect to see (or not see) in the game?
There were big conflicts of ideologies on the continent. The Spanish civil war, Italian fascism, Nazi Germany, all fueled by political unrest set aflame by the great depression. Narration wise, the rise of Nazi Germany is something we really wanted to tell through news articles. Show what political turmoil can lead to and that the press and censorship play a big role in that. That governments can slowly slide away through disinformation and propaganda. But it’s not only going to be dark sad news you can find, some humor and cool facts can be found throughout too.
We don’t want it to be too complicated gameplay wise since you still are an American newspaper, but expect some new Reporter traits like Diplomat, Polyglot and others that are specifically tailored for European news items.
Also, new news item layouts and all come with travel tickets, so travel times really start to matter in this update.
How did you decide where to draw the line between historical accuracy and maintaining News Tower’s lighthearted and creative tone?
News Tower is a game about newspaper headlines. In a sense, we are already curating it a bit, we can’t go in depth that much. So that flattens the truth, but if the player learns just a little through the game, that is a win in our mind. To us, History is one of the key elements of the game, and a fun part of it is we can entertain and educate at the same time. So almost all the news are accurate, and really took place in the actual month. We cover a rough period, but we sort of look at it from a bird's point of view, while acknowledging the seriousness and pain it caused. We mixed that with some fictional humorous news from time to time to keep it breathable and lighthearted.
Generally speaking, how do you approach integrating real-world history into a game like News Tower?
First we start researching all of the big news items from that period. We want to at least cover all the main events, so lots of browsing on historic newspapers and event overviews. Very fun, but time consuming!
Once they are all in a spreadsheet (Event, Location and link to source), we select them to be roughly even in terms of categories and start converting them into one big headline and subheadlines, locations per story-file and a Reporter comment on the event. We mostly do this to bring extra context or lightness to the News.
After that, we can start implementing it. Internally, it looks like this:
You can see how we label each news item. Labeling is very important for the game system to be able to spawn a news event in the right place and at the right time.
We're slipping you some 'insider information' with these behind-the-scenes screenshots, so don't tell anybody. ;)
The new continent is obviously the main feature of this update, but there is a lot more going on. For instance, were pneumatic tubes a common form of office travel in the 1930’s? And why aren’t we using them today, they sound fun!
They are fun and there are a few still in use today. Some hospitals in big cities where traffic is a big problem use it to shoot medicines through. But most of them have been removed. In the 1930's though, they were a perfect way of transporting documents all around.
As the players will notice, in the game it is the fastest way to get something to the top of your tower... And it just looks and sounds awesome.
What else should the players look forward to?
The pneumatic tube and dumbwaiter transport systems bring a whole new dynamic to your tower. Once unlocked, they will bring many new ways to layout your tower.
Want to put the typesetting desk at the top of your building? No problem! With a super fast pneumatic tube system, those reports are there in no time.
With the dumbwaiter, resources like coal, paper and food can now easily be transferred to places without needing to be slowly carried up the stairs.
For this to work, we really had to bring big changes to our employee AI. The cooperation between employees is what the new transportation AI tries to solve. In previous versions, every employee would decide for itself what to pick up. There was an overarching system that made some suggestions about what item would be best to go to a certain destination, but in the end, the employees thought only for themselves.
With this update, the employees have a sort of “hive” mind in which everybody that is available is taken into consideration. Based on scientific research done in real world transportation cost optimization, the tasks are assigned so that the total cost of all tasks combined is minimized. Crucially, the system is able to look ahead in deciding what task to assign to whom. This allows cooperation in situations like: “I can start walking now to that dumbwaiter because I know somebody will send an item there in 15 seconds”.
This brings a whole new dynamic to your tower that the players can use to their advantage.
How can the community help shape or give feedback on this update?
Before the update goes live, we'll be inviting community testers to join us, with full details coming in about two weeks.
For the European continent we are curious what players think about the new news layouts and employee traits interplay. Is that too hard to manage? Should we tune it differently?
We do like the feel of specialising reporters, we think it is one way to do that.
Since our new employee AI system is totally reworked, lots of players testing/playing will give us great insights. We might find rare bugs, or gameplay that we could tweak better. In general, we are very curious on how players will work with the new pneumatic tube and dumbwaiter system.
We're also eager to see what fun and optimised tower layouts they can find and what suggestions and feedback they bring around using them in general. Is it making comfort too easy to manage? Is is too complicated to install in crowded towers? That is one example of feedback we received when we implemented the first Elevators, and we were still debating and testing to improve them.
As for the the employee list rework, we are just curious if every function a player needs is in. We're open for suggestions on that too.
As we wrap up this deep dive, we hope you're as excited as we are about the new content! We've covered a lot today... So let us know if you found it interesting, or if you'd prefer shorter dev diaries!
We've said it time and again, but your feedback is invaluable in shaping the future of News Tower. So thank you for being part of this journey with us!
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