Progress has been slower than planned this year because things got very busy in my personal life (in a good way!). My weekends have been booked with other stuff and I've been having to cram all my game development time into my weekday evenings after I eat my dinner.
So I decided to drop the first v17 preview tonight even though many of the features I'm cooking are kind of half-baked, because that way I can get some early feedback. I think that I am going in the right direction with this update, but I don't quite know for sure. And when my free time really opens up in March I can put my nose to the grindstone and start polishing the new systems I've added and really bring everything together.
I'd like to take a second to acknowledge everyone who has left reviews of my game on Steam as well as suggestions in the Steam forum and the Discord. I may not reply to everything (because I've been so focused on my vision for the new update), but I read most of it. And now that I've gotten the main parts of the new Planes Update put together, I want to go through all the feedback again and see if any of it makes sense to include in this next update. With that being said, here are the patch notes:
v17-pre1
Features:
- Airplane Manufacturers. They produce planes on production lines.
- Production lines. New method of ordering planes.
- Place an order in the priority line, or bulk order in the waitlist.
- Sabotage or improve the efficiency of the production line.
- Upgrade production lines to produce more advanced blocks.
- Blocks. Airplane models have blocks, which determine their stats. You can help research more advanced blocks to improve your planes.
- Seating configurations. You can now specify standing, economy, premium and lie-flat classes.
- Seating presets. Choose from available presets or save your own.
- Passengers now spawn as either Budget, Comfort or Luxury. This determines what seating class(es) they are willing to fly.
Changes:
- New passenger spawning algorithm that should be a lot more consistent than the old one. Instead of only trying to spawn between active airports, it tries to spawn between all possible city pairs. This should eliminate issues with one player expanding too fast and hogging all of the passenger spawns.
Known issues:
- Airplane upgrades are kind of broken at the moment.
- There's no way to view your hangar a.k.a planes you own, and manage+sell them for spare cash.
- Various QoL features such as duplicating planes are currently broken.
