Hello everyone!
Well, here we are! Exactly, the biggest update of City Game Studio. What to say about this update? Honestly I thought about upgrading to version 2.0, that's how big this version is!
Behind this update there is a lot of sweat, tears and even BLOOD. There are so MANY changes that it's going to be hard to detail everything here, but I'm going to do it anyway!
Let's go for the presentation of the v1.11.0
Events
You know that little icon at the bottom of the screen that looks like a letter? Yep, that's what we're going to talk about. Events have been added in 2019, and barely changed since then. So I had to roll up my sleeves and add some icons here, some formatting there. Consoles' announcements have been grouped together, so your mailbox is going to be lighter. In addition, there are new recurring events.
From now on, your fans are going to write to you. Sometimes they are happy to hear from you, and they tell you so, sometimes they are not so happy. So when they ask you for something, I advise you to listen to them, your wallet will be grateful. Fans are going to contact you mostly to talk about your games, to ask you for updates, sequels...
When you release a game, there is a slight chance that it impacts the popularity of the themes. When it happens, as my great-grandfather would say, cool beans!
Your consoles
There have been some changes. The console sales algorithm has been revised, it's a bit more balanced than before, especially when you release several consoles. But the biggest change is the ability to make your consoles backwards compatible. That's a great feature.
By making your console backwards compatible, you ensure that you can port your entire game catalog with 100% compatibility. This means that porting a game will cost you less and make you more money. However, making a console backwards compatible is not cheap either.
The interface
The pièce de résistance! Almost the whole interface has changed. Gonzi, a player of City Game Studio, helped me a lot to improve the aesthetics of the menus of City Game Studio. Icons, buttons, panels, so many things have been changed, and for the better, I hope!
The dark theme has been improved, making it easier to read all the text and images. The comfort of the dark theme is as good as the default one.
Selling a studio, what an ordeal. Where is this button? In which menu? Well, from now on you can sell a studio directly from the bottom menu, right next to its name. Very convenient! Renaming a studio works on the first try, and every time!
The staff management panel has been redesigned as well, replacing some hidden icons with visible tabs. All this for a more instinctive result, and therefore more pleasant.
Optimizations & fixes
Playing with a modded version of City Game Studio could be a bit of a pain. Game slows down during some periods of the year, and freezes most of the time. Sometimes it even hangs completely. Well, I did my best, and I think City Game Studio is much better optimized. It now uses a unique resource loader system, so there's no need to load the same resources several times in a row. Shaders have been standardized, stored in a nice folder, and their invocation is done through an interface that saves me from duplicating shaders to replace existing ones. Some shaders could not be deactivated properly, so the game slowed down on old machines
As for the fixes, there are many. The Game of the Year stopped working when there were not enough contestants to elect a game. City Game Studio had to be restarted to make it work again. It was also impossible to develop a game of the year, well, that's fixed too.
Currency adjustment
Don't worry, the game's price will remain unchanged in Euros and USD. However, other currencies are going to be adjusted thanks to the new tool that Steam provides. Indeed City Game Studio's price has barely varied in other currencies for the last 4 years, so I think an adjustment is in order.
To conclude
I have not listed all the changes, there are really many, some are less visible than others, I have listed the most important. But City Game Studio is more and more complete and stable.
I still have some changes to make in the game. I would like to add the possibility to make games with 2 genres, add achievements, and maybe review some other things. In the meantime, this new version of City Game Studio should delight the most ardent of you.
That's all for today.
I wish you a good game.
See you soon for the rest.
Xavier AKA Binogure
Changelog
Feature
- Add events when a player releases a game gets a chance to:
- Theme trends event: A theme can gets trending via an event
- Community's excited, so they should publish an update ASAP
- After 3 years, if a game has more than 90% score, fans can ask for a sequel
- Add backward compatibility for consoles
- Add the backward compatibility to the existing platforms (Grantendo, Saga, Gamestation...)
- Add tooltip on platforms (add name of the backward-compatible platform)
- Rework the custom-platform algorithm to take into account the backward-compatibility feature
- Rework the gameport-algorithm, to take into account the backward-compatibility
- Digital store: Can port a game to the digital store via a game update
Misc
- Update the console market share (Gamestation 5, VBox Series V, Grantendo Swap, Teamdock)
- Number of competitors (use the game creation to define how many of them)
- Group platforms announcements
- Add following items to the yearly financial report:
- Furnishing studios
- Buying servers
- Building studios/universities/convention
- Acquiring a competitor
- Buying competitors stocks
Bugfix
- GOTY: Stopped even with competitors spawned
- GOTY: Cannot dev a GOTY
- Game crash when upgrading computers
- Custom-platforms: When releasing the next-gen platform, sales of the old-gen doesn't fall.
- Custom-platforms: Cancelling a platform might lead to random behavior
- Custom-platforms: Do not send platform bought event for custom platforms
- Map shader: Cannot deactivate the season shader
Optimization
- Switching between studio takes less CPU/memory
- Optimizing navigating through menus ("creating a new game" panel should load faster)
- Use a ResourcePreloader instead of preloading all resources at launch
- Add paginations for staff instead of yielding
- Refactor models and controllers to use node system instead of dictionaries
- Trade panel: Tooltips optimizations
- Improve studio/map background rendering
- Add C++ function to sort IntArrays
UI
- Replace "filter by" by "sort by" on the right panel
- Improve dark theme
- Rework the main interface of the game
- Improve in-game notifications, better description, better tooltip
- Trending themes: put the top 3 themes
- Shop: Replace button by switch (auto-furnish) and add a tooltip
- Game engine: Add a tooltip when creating a new engine while there's no studio available
- Improve feedback on game creation
- Can sell a studio from the studio list
- In dev items: Revamp all the panels
- Replace staff panels icons by tabs with text (more readable)
Mods
- Difficulty: Add moddable parameters for fan based events
- Famous employees: Cannot rename famous employees