Hello guys, thank you for waiting this much for an update regarding this project, before jumping straight into the subject I want to mention that I am 100% honest and if you are only interested in what this update brings, please scroll down below it will be a bullet point list with the update.
What happened with the project lately?
For context, I've played simulators since I was a kid, this is one of my favourite genres.
When I started working on this project I had a job al the way until I fully released it (1 year ago), I had around 2-3 hours per day to work on the project and it was tough to work 2-3h tired, even sometimes I fell asleep at my desk, but I didn't care because I like what I do. In all of that time I had to take care of everything related to my game and also to develop it. Long Story short one year later after my game was at a "playable" stage (I thought) and I decided why not to publish the demo on Steam. The demo was buggy, not engaging enough and it got negative but honest reviews. The whole problem started when I decided to trade some of testing time in exchange to have more time on development (If any dev's are reading this PLEASE DON"T DO THAT) I was hyped for my first Steam game and I thought that the playtesting done in the engine while developing each thing was enough.
After the demo being out for some time, I realized that the release date set on Steam was so close and the game didn’t evolve that much from the demo version because of how much time I had available for it. So I delayed the game release date 2 times so I can come with a better final product, but even like that I didn't and I could no longer delay the release date (Steam Support helped me one time to reschedule the release that even that was no longer possible so a huge thanks to them). Long story short, the game came out unfinished, it got the feedback that it deserved and I've tried to improve it as much as I could when I wasn’t at my job. Because I used a plugin to create the city in a 3d software that is meant for architecture and photo rendering not for a game ready asset, the map was pretty hard to work with and bring a good overall map from it, and the optimization.... as much optimization as I had done that time didn’t feel like much. A similar story was with the capsule art, I chose at that time to use AI art because of my nonexistent budget and time.
All of this combined killed my hope and I was mentally exhausted, but I knew that I have to do something, you guys supported me from the beginning even if the game was bad, not a good capsule art, not enough communication from me because I was thinking that this should be my problem and I need to solve it. Huge thank you and for all of you guys that did purchase the game regardless of all these downsides, was a huge support that I've felt and it means a lot to me, a simple passionate dev that wanted to make this full time.
Another thing that I am going to change is all of the News announcements cover art, as requested.
Today I've released this update that is a huge improvement for the game performance and some huge bugs that now are gone. I don't want to leave this project like this, so with your support I want to continue working on it and improve it as much as possible.
If you want to hear more about the back story of my journey and this project and of course future ones because there is much more to say but I wanted to keep this as short as possible, let me know.
About this update
What is in this update?
New supercar
Day and Night Cycle
Joystick compatibility
More vegetation on the map
Huge game performance optimization (Map)
Bugs that were fixed:
Highway was transparent from underneath
Traffic Cars didn't detect the player
Traffic Cars didn't have sound
Side door of the van could not be used
Pause menu didn't work from inside the vehicle
and some more small bugs that were fixed...
Some things that I want to mention here, I've removed the tutorial because I am going to plan and rework it because it was not good at all
Thank you again for all of the support, I want to hear your feedback if you want to share it here and also any suggestions are welcome because I want to build this game together with you!
Stay tuned for more news and future projects!