On Friday this week, we’re going to launch IsoMetro because it’s finally in a state that we consider presentable. Our plan is to continue gradually improving the game after launch (refining the simulation engine, increasing the variety of buildings, adding new modes), so to take inspiration from a particular game that has its own facts released every Friday, we’ll be releasing update news on Metro Mondays when there is something interesting to report on. In this first edition, we’ll detail some recent improvements that you may not be aware of if the last time you’ve played the game was a few months ago (or never).
On the asset front, the Blender artists have been hard at work creating a slew of buildings that far exceed the detail level and variety of the Free Edition content. At time of writing, there are 16 residential buildings, 13 commercial buildings, 7 industrial buildings, 5 public service buildings, 8 utility buildings, and 5 vehicle models. These residential, commercial, and industrial buildings also economically interact across 12 distinct economic markets instead of just 3 (the Free Edition simply has the “workforce”, “production”, and “shopping” market types).
As far as code, along with plenty of small stability and usability improvements, we’ve rolled out vehicle visuals, so if you’ve got a road with some traffic, you’ll now see cars, trucks, and/or buses driving along it according to the traffic volume.
Speaking of trucks, markets are classified as either passenger or freight traffic now, and have different pathfinding rules, so you will no longer see industries shipping their goods to retail stores by bus.
Speaking of paths, the tools for visually inspecting tiles have been expanded so you can now take a look at exactly what paths your citizens are taking through a particular tile, with color-coded routes by the type of transportation they’re using.
Speaking of types of transportation, you can now construct underground subways, which unlike buses aren’t limited to the capacity of your roads, and can move citizens longer distances in the same amount of time.
Speaking of buses, the building placement tool now automatically orients buildings such as bus stops in a sensible direction, so if you want to build a bus stop next to a road, you don’t need to manually rotate it anymore.
Speaking of building things next to roads, the game engine can now pick between car-dependent and car-free versions of buildings, so you’ll see driveways connecting houses to roads, and meanwhile if you remove a cherished bus or subway stop from a walkable neighborhood, you’ll notice existing buildings in the area scramble to demolish their gardens and common areas to make way for parking lots if driving is now their only viable option.
Finally, speaking of the very act of speaking of things, there is a context-aware tutorial which will explain basic mechanics in stages to help you get started more easily.
Overall, we hope that with this launch the game is enjoyable. Showing IsoMetro at conventions has already taught us some lessons and helped shape the game as it is today, so we look forward to integrating what we learn from feedback by initial Steam players into what we already have planned for further updates.