Welcome back to another Spontaneous And Completely Unscheduled Developer Diary™. I'm back from my short vacation where I treated myself to some delicious sushi, watched like four different football games on TV, and also went to IKEA at some point. But I know y'all don't care about any of that, so I'll jump right in to this week's topic--the upcoming update's airport infrastructure overhaul.
I'll start off with Concourses, which will be a replacement for the current mechanic of buying hub upgrades. Each airport will come with a random number of concourses, with each concourse having a random throughput amount and daily rent. You will be able to upgrade concourses too, although I am still workign out the details and balancing on that. Why did I replace hubs with concourses? Well, it's so you can fight with other players and AI, of course.
Concourses are meant to more realistically model the limited amount of gate space at an airport. Take my home airport of Seattle for example--Delta Airlines mostly occupies concourses A and B, while Alaska Airlines occupies C, D and N. Together, their presence squeezes out any potential third party from establishing a major hub at SeaTac. My hope is that the pressure of fighting over concourses will create similar dynamics in Puffin Planes.
Secondly, I have completely overhauled the airport upgrade system by replacing the old upgrade tree with two new types of upgrades: Common Infrastructure and Buildings.
Any money spent to upgrade Common Infrastructure at an airport benefits all airlines. Airports may also spontaneously upgrade their own common infrastructure in certain cases. I'll just go over a few of the new common infrastructure items to give you a sense of the mechanic:
1. Runway length: most airports will start with short runways which don't allow for larger planes such as the PAX-125 to take off and land safely. You can upgrade these to long runways.
2. Runway lighting: most airports will start without runway lighting, which means that takeoff and landing movements will take longer and be more dangerous during the night. Planes of different airlines may accidentally crash into each other.
3. Baggage handling: upgrading this to an automated system will increase base throughput for all airlines at this airport.
Now that I've given you a taste of some of the Common Infrastructure upgrades, let's talk about Buildings. Buildings are the replacement for some of the old upgrade tree items, namely hangars, fuel depots and lounges. Here's a list of some buildings and their effects:
1. Hangars will increase fleet capacity. You will be able to upgrade from a small hangar, to a medium hangar, to a large hangar, to a giant hangar, to a huge hangar, to a mega hangar, to a city-wide hangar, to a planet-wide hangar, to a galactic hangar, to a universal hangar, and eventually to a multidimensional hangar. Just kidding.
2. Hotels will give a permanent boost to market share at an airport. What's market share? Oops, I haven't revealed that yet 🤭. Also, your passengers will wait longer in the preferred state before transitioning into the open state. Oh wait, I haven't talked about what that means yet either, haha. Maybe later this month.
3. Catering facilities will allow you to produce your own meals, lowering your in-flight expenditures.
Have any ideas for buildings or game mechanics that I could try and shove into this update before it drops late this year? Let me know in the replies, the Steam forum or in the Discord.
Hope your September is going well!