Hello!
Long time no log! Aside from holidays taking up time, I've been under the weather for much of the past two weeks, but it's finally getting better. Devlogs will now be back on a weekly basis.
The next version of the game, 0.18, will be going live next sunday (the 19th). This is a bit later than I had planned at first, and due to my recent bout of illness. Moving forward beyond that version, I'm hoping to get back to more regular updates and will be taking some time off of my day job to allow for more dev time.
In the upcoming version, a few completely new systems will be introduced. They will not be fully finished, but usable and active.
First off, local area effects will be added. The current effects are: Crime, education, fire safety, health, pollution and wealth. These effects will work in tandem with the building requirements, but overall, the number of required nearby buildings to grow a dense city will be fewer. For example. Buildings will no longer require nearby clinics, police departments and fire departments. Instead, a densely packed area will get less fire safety and thus over time require a fire department to improve the situation. All these effects are calculated in sum, and if a building is in a polluted area with high crime and no fire safety etc, then it incurrs a 20% effeciency penalty (might change over time).
Each building, when built, gets local area effect nodes around it. Each building adds or subtracts the local area effect, for example crime. If an area is dense, then a lot of crime is added. Each building then gets an average of each node's values. Below is an image of buildings negatively affected by nearby pollution.
I've also started adding citizen representatives. These are a sample of citizens from your city. Currently you can only see their stats and view their home and place of work. In future versions they will provide you with information about their neighborhoods so that you can tweak them and improve them. They will essentially advice you about local area effects and give advice on policies that affect them negatively.
Advisors will also be added in with version 0.18. Currently, their topics of advice are rather limited, but over time I will add more and more into it and they should be able to provide players with a lot of information about issues in the city. Unlike the citizen representatives, their main focus is city wide rather than local, and they will be geared more towards optimizing the entirety of the city and maximizing ouput.
Currently there's only a placeholder image for the avatars, but there will be actual images of advisors and citizen reps once I have a good idea of what kind of style I'm going for. Any ideas? Shoot!
The winter theme will also be shifted out, so now we're going back to the usual spring/summer theme. In future version, the seasonal themes will be toggleable in game.
That's it for this week!