Hello,
First off, Correcture Games will attend the Indie Playground at Dreamhack Winter in Sweden at the end of the month. Atmocity will be showcased and you can have a go at some gravity defying city building!
I've spent most of the week working on systems in the game. The traffic system is now functional, but needs quite a bit of work so that it looks good, spawns and despawns vehicles and just overall adds to the atmosphere of the game.
There's quite a long ways to go, but at least cars don't freak out when going around corners (that was a headache to fix).
I've started reworking some of the building placement stuff. Before, all buildings would be assigned a random rotation when built. Now I've changed it so that building rotation is controlled by the player using the scroll wheel. Buildings can still be rotated when they've been placed too. Here are some farms freely placed.
Next up, I'll be changing block and road placement to allow players to assign areas with blocks and roads instead of having to place one after the other. This should allow for quicker construction of the foundation on which you build the city. Being able to click and drag where to place roads is also standard in most games of this type so it's a given to add.
I've added a building register that assigns a unique ID to each building in the city. This will be used along with the traffic system to assign a vehicle to each building. Goods are produced and consumed globally, but each building will need access to other key buildings and this will be "tested" using the vehicles. The building register also allows for quicker processing when using the different view modes (like building efficiency view or building owner view) among other things.
Policy is on ongoing project. I've changed how tax rates affect citizen happiness from a somewhat consistent curve to one that allows you to set fairly high tax rates before truly affecting happiness. This should allow for some more player freedom, but also allows players to set fairly high tax rates if they have other things that offset the unhappiness from higher taxes.
The tax rates are still divided into three, targeting low/mid/high skilled labour respectively. The effect of taxes on happiness will also depend on how large the proportion of the targeted class is compared to the overall population. If you have a small low skilled labour population you will be able to tax them higher without losing out too much on the overall happiness.
I've also finally managed to get the graphs looking more up to my own expectations.
Lastly, I've implemented toggles for day/night, always day and always night into the UI. When moving the mouse to the top center of the screen, a small options panels slides down. From there (and the keyboard of course) players will be able to set the game speed (paused, normal, 2, 4 and 8x).
Next week I'll continue work on cars, doing some modelling/texturing and trying to finetune movements and then adding some basic path finding and traffic rules. I'll be working on drag and drop for blocks and roads and also some initial work on decoration tiles that can be used to improve your city visually. More policy is also on the schedule!
/ Dispersing Minds
