Hello everyone!
I've been working on this new version of City Game Studio for months, and I hope you're as excited as I am about this new update. There's a ton of things to talk about, so without further ado, let's dive right in.
Copy Studios
This is one of the oldest feature requests for City Game Studio: the ability to duplicate the furniture of one studio to another! And I understand why. Because even though automatic furnishing is stylish, it will never be as cool as when you furnish your studios yourself! So this feature is now available in City Game Studio. From now on, you can duplicate the content of a studio to another studio of the same size or larger.
For the moment, it's not possible to duplicate the content of a studio from another save file. There are many things to take into account, such as the year, since not all furniture is necessarily available. So it's possible that this improvement will come in a future update, stay tuned.
Your Consoles
Manufacturing costs for consoles now adjust based on the number of units sold. The more a console sells, the less it will cost to produce. Of course, you'll receive a notification to inform you of the change in production costs, but there's another thing that has changed!
When you set a price for a console, you specify the profit you want to make per console, and the game will set the console price based on the profits you want to make. This makes it much harder to go bankrupt due to a pricing issue. The advantage of this method is that the console price will automatically adjust with the reduction in production costs, and consequently, you don't have to do anything to manage console prices once the console is released.
Other Consoles
A new console makes its appearance, the Grantendo Swap 2! Yeah, I've made some educated guesses for the sales figures, since we only have estimates, but I'll adjust over time to make it match reality as closely as possible.
I've also updated the data for the Grantendo Swap, the Gamestation 4 & 5, as well as the VBox series V. I've added end-of-life dates for the VBox Zero, the Vega Vita, and the Grantendo 3DS, so the game matches reality even more. I hope you like it!
Studio Director
Many of you use the studio director and have sent me suggestions! Among them, two caught my attention. The first is the ability for the studio director to only publish games with a certain minimum rating. This helps you avoid producing flops and doesn't tarnish your company's image.
The second option is being able to hide review magazines when they publish a review. This makes the game experience more streamlined, and it really does feel good!
Interface
There are quite a few changes here. First, competitors. Now you can list their games very easily as soon as you open the competitors panel.
For the bottom menu bar, the Map View / Studio View buttons weren't visible enough, so I added a bit of juice to make them stand out more.
The panel containing game creation, history, ports, or remakes has been revised to add more filters. You can search by name or by genre. In short, there are many more filters than before, making the interface more pleasant and intuitive.
And since we're on this panel, I want to tell you about the other big change. It concerns the studio selection. It has been completely redesigned to make it more intuitive. City Game Studio now displays more useful and condensed information than before. I know this change has been well received by beta testers.
Among other changes, there are notably some icons that have been redone to better integrate with the game interface. The digital store has also been slightly revised to make bestsellers look better visually.
And the last visual change concerns the game end-of-life panel. In fact, when you publish an online game, City Game Studio displays the combination of sales with subscriptions. You might think a game was selling billions of copies even though the console didn't sell more than a million units. This is now fixed as the game now displays an additional line to distinguish subscriptions from sold copies. Thanks to those who reported the problem.
Updates
This is an anticipated change, I think, regarding game updates. The number of in-game purchases will increase with each update, allowing you to add new items to buy.
I've also revised the update algorithm, because for older games, making an update was hurting their popularity. And that wasn't at all what I wanted. From now on, even older games will benefit from a sales boost during an update!
Optimization
This is a frequently mentioned topic, so I work on it often. City Game Studio uses Godot Engine 2.1 with a programming language integrated into the engine, which means it's not the most optimized. So, I wrote a benchmark for this specific language. This benchmark allowed me to know which function executes most efficiently. Thanks to this benchmark, I was able to improve the overall performance of the game. The display of certain texts is 40% faster on average than before. Meanwhile, the generation of GotYs, or the purchase of competitors, is much faster than before. We've gone from 5 seconds to less than 100 milliseconds.
I know that overall there's still work to be done, but it's moving in the right direction, and I'll continue to work on it so you have the best possible gaming experience.
Fixes
There are many, so I'll just list the most important ones.
- You could buy the same studio multiple times
- When you updated a game, you couldn't use templates
- Impossible to cancel an update
- Pagination issue that could crash the game
- The log system was crashing the game
- Improved console for cheat codes
Other Changes
Added to this is the integration of a mod into the game. It's a mod that translates the game into Mandarin. Given that the feedback from users of this mod was excellent, and that the mod was well maintained, I took a week to integrate it directly into City Game Studio. This makes the simplified Chinese version more natural. There have been other fixes for translations, but they're not as significant.
Also added are new cheat codes. No, you still don't need to pull out your credit card; cheat codes are free in City Game Studio!
The Next Update
I've had quite a bit of feedback that I would have liked to include in this update, but couldn't fit in due to time constraints.
The v1.23 will be devoted to mods, but not only that. The idea is that you can load mods and know which ones will modify your gaming experience, unbalance it, or slow it down. But I also plan to add other elements based on your suggestions.
I'm thinking about making it so that when you automatically assign employees, they are distributed as efficiently as possible across studios. Or having a summary panel for your company. Or even a summary of all the previous Games of the Year. And for the history panel, adding more information about game ports.
That's what I plan to do, and I have 3 months to do it. Since I publish an update quarterly on average. I know I've already talked to you about the sequel to City Game Studio, but it's not for right away. In less than 2 weeks, I'm releasing my next game, which is a chaotic multiplayer Monopoly game. The idea was to make an original Monopoly game. So you vote for new rules, you draw cards, and most importantly, you roll the dice. You can play in teams, it all uses the Valve Anti Cheat system, and will cost less than $5 with a 40% discount to celebrate the Early Access release.
So if you like the project, or if you want to support me, please wishlist Fortune Avenue because it will clearly help me make it a successful release. And a 40% discount at launch is not to be missed either.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1810050/Fortune_Avenue/?utm_source=CGSV122
That's it, it's already over, thank you for reading.
I wish you a great time playing City Game Studio!
I'm already looking forward to working on the next update
See you soon
Xavier aka Binogure