Here’s a rundown of what happened between today’s Metro Monday and the last one, which was also the first one.
Firstly, this past Friday we launched the game! The Free Edition, which has been available on itch.io for years as a rolling developer preview of sorts, is now also on Steam serving as a demo. The Gold Edition is now also available on both itch.io and Steam for purchase. We want to thank everyone who has tried either edition of IsoMetro so far, and beyond that we’re especially appreciative of those who have decided to fork over their hard-earned cash for the Gold Edition.
As far as the state of the game itself, we’ve rolled out a few updates since launch.
There’s now a Main Menu, so instead of jumping straight into an empty world with a clunky message box asking you whether to spawn the “starter level,” there are instead buttons on the main menu to start a new city in a few different ways. Since the visuals of the Main Menu only require loading a small subset of assets such as trees, the overall game is able to launch a bit more quickly. The existing Pause Menu has also been visually improved.
A bug with the tutorial wherein the first tutorial stage wouldn’t highlight the UI buttons associated with it is resolved. A bug wherein the volume setting would be ignored initially after resetting the game loop (for example starting a new city) is also resolved.
The assets for the “Frank’s Furniture” industrial building in the Gold Edition have been overhauled to be much more visually interesting. Two new tenement highrise buildings have been added (there are now three tenement highrises in total).
Finally, we are gradually figuring out the ideal ways to use social media to not just broadcast the existence of IsoMetro but also to welcome bug reports, usability concerns, and feature requests. Even if you’re reaching out about the Free Edition, we intend to take your feedback seriously. After all, both editions have plenty of code in common, so bugs in one are probably in the other. Bugs aside, suggestions for improving the IsoMetro experience are valuable to us – even if we’re already aware of a potential improvement, duplicate suggestions still help us prioritize what we should work on next. For a full list of our socials, such as our Community Discord, check the IsoMetro site: https://isometro.live