July 2019 – Correcture Games

Devlog entry 43

July 28, 2019 Dispersing Minds

Hello!
Well, release into EA is just around the corner and the builds are now up, waiting to be launched on tuesday.

This week I’ve done some additional polish to the campaign, and added one of the retro modes. This retro mode is a “flooded Earth” type scenario, where resources are mined from small islands (mountain peaks).

Instead of the particle filtration plant, in this mode there is instead a mine/excavator and a sand extractor:

Initially, this mode doesn’t play much differently from the rest of the game except builds are flat. What will be worked into the mode though is a greater emphasis on environmetal care and citizens will demand you treat the remainder of the environment with care.

I’ve started working on the future feature list for the game. There will some additional res/com/ind buildings of different sizes. These are being worked on currently. I’m also adding citizen representatives that will be assigned to buildings across the city and will advise you on things they need.

Moving forward, updates will mainly be biweekly so that I can focus more time on adding features and fixing issues.

Devlog entry 42

July 21, 2019 Dispersing Minds

Hello,
A bit more than a week to go before the game releases into Early Access!

It’s been a pretty rough week due to a bunch of Unity related issues. Among them scenes corrupting requiring a lot of time to find the source of the issue and issues with colliders.
As such, some images this week will be a bit random.

One of the issues with colliders caused roads to suddenly stop working requiring a bit of rewriting of the code that checks if the road is connected to another road tile as well as the code that checks if buildings are connected to a road and what road network it is connected to. Not the kind of stuff that I like doing when I still have a few more things left to do before the game releases, but on the upside, it meant that I could also remove some ugly code and also improve load speeds a bit.

I’ve started doing some last minute fine tuning to tax yields, upping yields from industry and commerce and lowering it a bit for residence. I’m hoping this evens out the yields a bit and incentivizes more planning.

The campaign is now finished and tested. There are a few things that might need to be added into it post EA-release, but mostly regarding instructions etc. There are a few things that can perhaps be explained a bit better. Should there be time in the upcoming week, there will be some more polish added to it as well.

Atmo fleets are now implemented. There’s some minor work still needed for path finding, so that they don’t fly through things. But they function as expected now. I will be adding some more bling to them to make them a bit more interesting.

https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1150840295933861888

The land mode is coming along nicely. I’ve made the necessary changes to the UI and started adding items to the mode. The buildings will be made this upcoming week. There will be a set of excavators to replace the atmospheric particle filtration plant, a sand collector and I’m also adding a wave power plant. The mode itself will be more fleshed out over time and it will eventually diverge a bit from the main modes of the game.

There’s been a tonne of work put into optimizing things and speeding things up in game as well as fixing music and texture imports. I’m hoping that the game will run well enough on target machines.

Next week will be the last pre EA devlog, so stay tuned for that. Here’s a shot from an early campaign level:

Devlog entry 41

July 14, 2019 Dispersing Minds

Hello!

This week I’ve finally gotten around to fixing up the traffic system. Before I had set the amount to 2 times the amount of buildings in the city with a max limit of 100. This usually looks ok when a city is small, but once the amount of roads increases, the streets would start looking quite empty. I’ve now changed this to assign 1-3 cars per building depending on the type of building. Running this amount of cars is quite taxing on the city though. So I went the Truman show route halting cars and returning them to their home position as soon as they are out of view. Once they can be seen again, they start moving. This gives an impression of city streets with plenty of traffic.

I’ve continued work on the campaign mode. All UI elements have now been implemented. There will be some further polish in the upcoming week and another round of overall UI polish later on.

I’ve done more work on trains, ensuring that they can only travel between stations, and making sure they update their position sets once a change is made in to the vactrain system.

Atmo fleets are still not quite finished, but they are getting there. The movement is currently a bit strict looking, but I should get this to look better in the upcoming week. I hope to have a well fuctioning system up and running next week so that I can have some images and gifs.

I’ve now also implemented bridges. Currently only a plain bridge has been implemented, I intend to add more later on (after EA-release).

Bridges allow players to tuck vactrain system away a bit. My intention is to add more functions like this as I keep developing the game.

The last remaining feature, the retro/”land” mode is currently also underway. Once the campaign is completely finished, I will round it up too. This mode will require a few extra buildings, so I will need to put in a lot of effort this upcoming week to finish the remaining items on my todo list. But the game will release fairly soon, which is exciting.

Devlog entry 40

July 7, 2019 Dispersing Minds

Hello,

This week’s update will be a brief one, as there’s been another one of those “under the hood” kind of dev weeks. (as such some images are more random than usual this week)

First of all, the work on the atmo fleets that are to land at the atmo port has taken a bit longer than expected, so no update on that this week.

I’ve overhauled part of the template loader to allow for the campaign, retro mode and free roam mode to all use the same foundation. The template loader checks if there are objectives for the “level” loaded, and where to place preplaced objects such as blocks in the free roam templates etc.

Work on the campaign has progressed well. Essentially, the campaign stuff being finished marks the last bit of code that goes into the main menu (retro mode has been finished too).

When loading a campaign level, a small additional UI is loaded into the scene. This can be hidden using the arrow button. Things are still WIP, especially there’s a level tutorial and objectives description window missing. This will be made in the upcoming week.

I’ve also overhauled the message system. So instead of messages appearing in lower middle of the screen, messages now appear in the shape of icons to the right of the screen. When hovering over them, the actual message can be seen. Clicking icons will open up a relevant window (like the budget window if your economy is poor) or transfer the camera to a building.

Overall, things are progressing fairly well. I’ve had a few ideas for additional buildings that will be available only in the retro mode. These will be made in the upcoming week along with finishing up the campaign, retro mode and fleets. If I can manage those things, the game is essentially the Early Access version I had intended with the addition of a few extra buildings.

Until next time!