Hello fellow tycoons,
The next major update for Good Company is just around the corner, so we wanted to give you a quick peek into what we’ve been working on during the past few months.
New Tutorial
Before starting to work on new gameplay mechanics we wanted to look back and investigate the problems brought to our attention. We realised that there was a large group of issues, reported by new players in particular, that were not actual bugs but rather misinterpretations of how certain parts of the game work. Additionally, a lot of feedback suggested that the game didn’t contain sufficient explanations and that most players had to overcome certain comprehension hurdles before being able to fully enjoy the game.
It was obvious that these problems had to be addressed before moving on to new features. Hence, we dedicated most of our work on the next major update to a new and more comprehensive tutorial system. This includes things such as detailed and context sensitive UI highlights guiding new players through the game’s structure, step by step to-do lists outlining the next course of action, and fullscreen instruction panels pointing out core concepts and illustrating them with videos and images.
We wanted the tutorial to be an organic part of the game, so we decided to integrate it into the campaign. New players should be able to enjoy themselves while learning the ropes instead of viewing these parts of Good Company as something they had to get over with. The tutorial is covered in the first four levels and then gradually transitions into the more challenging parts of the campaign. More advanced mechanics, especially those appearing in the late game, may still be introduced in later levels.
As you might’ve guessed, this required us to redo large parts of the first campaign levels. We took this as an opportunity to put more work into the campaign’s narrative and connect it with the tutorial parts. You can expect new characters making an appearance and a nice new coat of storytelling 'paint' to make it more interesting.
We hope this will significantly improve Good Company’s accessibility for new players, and maybe even clear up some misconceptions for those already familiar with the game.
More Control over Couriers
With the new tutorial, we mostly addressed issues new players would be facing. But since this is going to be a major update, we didn’t want to leave seasoned players empty handed. The courier route system in the 0.8.x versions has been repeatedly criticised for being very restrictive and a source of frustration for players who wanted to get out more of their logistics setups. On our end, the courier system was a minimal implementation that allowed us to play the game but still had some important functionality missing. And since it plays such a central role in the game’s logistics, it was a natural choice for an overhaul.
In the upcoming 0.9 update, courier routes will give you much more control over their settings. Each route will be able to handle up to six item types. For each item type, you’ll be able to define a courier action at each pallet on the route: pick up or unload. For each action, you can also define an item amount and for the ‘pick up’ action there is an additional ‘minimum storage’ value that determines the minimum amount of items that have to remain on the pallet after picking up. You can assign multiple employees to a route. Since all actions on a route are identical for each courier, increasing the number of couriers directly increases the throughput of the route.
This setup results in a structure which might seem familiar to those of you who played games of the Anno series. We are big fans of the series ourselves and for us, the trading routes in Anno fit the way we wanted to connect work zones with each other very well.
We hope these changes will improve your experience with Good Company. As always, let us know what you think!
All the best,
your Chasing Carrots