Hello everyone!
Today I'm showing you the new face of City Game Studio. I've made some changes that greatly alter the look and feel of the game. Let me start by saying that there are no new features in this release candidate. However, there are changes that will impact the way you play. Let me tell you all about it right now!
This Week's Recap
First off, the sales graph. It hadn't changed since 2019, and it's only recently that I wanted to make an update. Thanks to you, who came to tell me that the curves aren't clear enough to properly visualize a game or console's sales. So, I took inspiration from other games in the genre, and now sales are displayed using histograms. While we lose some information, like marketing campaign costs, we gain visibility. The graph colors now adjust based on the game type. What I mean by that is, a regular game has a blue graph, but if you're working with a publisher then the graph will be yellow. And if you're a publisher hiring another studio, then the graph will be green.
Now for micro-management. There's a very important change here: when you publish a game, if a producer is assigned to it, they'll be automatically unassigned from the published game. And it's no longer possible to assign a producer to a game that's already been released. I've done the same thing with remakes. You're back in control, and most importantly your studio director will benefit from these changes since they'll be able to use producers more frequently.
I've also fixed quite a few bugs, particularly regarding competitors. You could crack the same game multiple times, and sometimes the mini-games were unplayable. In fact, if you launched a mini-game while an event was happening in the game at the same time, it would freeze City Game Studio entirely. This has been fixed and shouldn't happen anymore.
An important fix: it was possible to port a game multiple times to your own console. I won't detail how to do it, but it was possible. Obviously, this bug meant that your console would become a way to make infinite money. Well, it's fixed, and thanks for reporting this bug by the way!
There are other small additions but I've covered the changes overall.
What's Coming Next
We're already in early November, time flies and v1.25.0 is already packed! But I still have a bit of time left to add some small things. I'm thinking about improving studio directors so they can port games to other consoles. Now let me break down how I envision this so you understand.
I think we'll need to add a panel to the studio director dedicated to game ports. In this panel you'll be able to port only the games that a studio director makes, or all the company's games. Then the second setting concerns platforms. Studio directors can't negotiate licenses, so they'll simply take the available platforms and you'll be able to set the minimum compatibility rate for the platform to port the game. That means you'll be able to specify that a game is only ported to another platform if the compatibility is above 80% for example. This way you ensure that games are ported to all platforms that will get a good score. And that's it. The studio director won't check whether a console works well with a given genre, so there will be some risk involved.
As you can tell, making this last change will take me quite a bit of time, but I think it'll make your gaming experience so much better!
That's all from me, thank you for reading.
See you next week, take care in the meantime
Xavier aka Binogure