Big Ambitions News

Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

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Hi friends,

We had some amazing 2 weeks since the last devlog. Lots of progress! I’m starting to feel quite confident about the forthcoming alpha release.

Let’s take a closer look:



My first task after the last devlog was improving camera controls for the pedestrian view. It ended up being the biggest timewaster since we started working on BA.

The issue was mainly buildings blocking the vision to the player character. You had to constantly rotate the camera in order to see the sidewalk. My initial solution was to make the camera more intelligent and making sure the camera was always just behind the player’s back. Unfortunately, this turned out incredibly complex. The number of corner cases was through the roof. Because of the floating nature of such camera, you would sometimes feel dizzy while playing. It was a nightmare!

So I did what all gamedevs do when they get stuck: They start playing games and figure out how other devs solved it.

And so I did. The solution was simple. Stick with manual rotating the camera, but completely hide blocking buildings. The solution was super close to what we had already. The biggest issue was actually getting around corners. The old version would highlight buildings, even if you just wanted to talk past them.

To overcome this, I’m now disabling all objects, once the left mouse button is held down and navigation has started.

It took me 4 full days of trial and error to get this working. It can definitely still be improved (as anything), but I’m happy with what we got now.


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Daniel and Paul #1 are busy finishing up the new harbor area which is planned to be ready for the alpha release. The area is highly industrial, containing everything from car dealerships to the biggest wholesale stores. We’re also planning on a large furniture store, potentially in blue and yellow colors 😎

Below is a few renders to give you a feeling of the building style:


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As the alpha release is closing in, the bug hunt has really kicked in. Gerwanese, adameg2305, tomvbj, and the rest of the community has been killing it, reporting more than 200 bugs already! As of writing, the status is 112 open tickets and 97 closed. You can follow the progress on our Github Issues page.

I’ll like to say thank you to all of you pre-alpha testers, both on Discord and the community website, who helped playtest and find all of these bugs. I and the rest of the team really appreciate your help!

We all look forward till next month, when we can finally invite all gold supporters to join the hunt 🕷






Recently I’ve been more focused on making sure players feel in control and understanding all of the numbers presented. One pitfall was the EconoView app still being halfway done. This week I added “the second level”, which is what you saw when selecting a specific business.

As you might notice, the 2 last rows indicates question marks. I’m still not sure what time range is relevant. I’ll have that added once we got some more content added to the game.


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This week we got the female characters added to Unity, but not yet implemented into the game. However, Illie, our shader guru, has been putting some work into making clothing a bit more exciting, by allowing different colors and prints. Please be aware that the current T-shirt prints are work in progress 😁

At the same time, Paul #2 has been working on some new pieces: Hoodie & Cargo Pants. Below is a quick preview of how it looks. If things go well, we can show you this in-game in the next devlog too.


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Long overdue, I finally found some time to switch the Dialog System away from the placeholder UI to the cooler version made by Robin, our UI designer.

Dialogs now show as a timeline. They are interactive (as shown in the video), allowing you to respond when AI needs your input.

I’m really happy with the outcome.


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Last but not least, it’s finally possible to train employees. To train an employee, you first have to unassigned the employee from any businesses. Once training has been initiated, the employee will be unavailable the next day. Each training session increases the selected skill by 10%. The price is based on skill type and level.


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Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas

Hi friends,

First of all, welcome to all the new followers on Steam. Until now these devlogs were only released on the website, but moving forward they will also be available from the Steam Coming Soon page. My gut feeling tells me most readers will be accessing through Steam. If you can hit the like button below, to help me get an indication of how many readers each platform has, that would really be awesome!

Now, let’s focus on what’s been happening the last 2 weeks. It’s been great to get back focusing on the game and not so much on marketing etc. The team and I are now pushing hard to include as much content as possible for the upcoming alpha release. Our planned feature lock is July 16, allowing the alpha to be release at the end of July.

We might push it tho, there’s currently 81 outstanding bugs: https://github.com/hovgaardgames/bigambitions-public/issues

Enough talk, let’s see what’s new:




After being in contact with Steam, I got confirmation that I am indeed allowed to share these numbers. So for the first time, I can report how many wishlists Big Ambitions got in its first 2 weeks:

[h3]10,000 wishlists in 2 weeks! 😲[/h3]

In comparison, my first game Startup Company generated just above 400 wishlists in the same period.

I am extremely humbled and thankful for how many of you have shown your interest in our work and project. Thank you! ❤

We’re still clocking in around 150 wishlists per day, which is way more than we expected. If we can continue this growth, the dream of adding co-op multiplayer post-release is suddenly much more realistic. Fingers crossed! 🤞

For pre-orders we have sold 127 copies. 92% of those were the Gold version! Thanks to all of you, we’re super excited to start working together with all of you once the alpha testing begins.



I talked about this so many times. We’re even wondering if we have the most sophisticated fake building interior shader out there 😂

This time we added two new features:

• A night version of the interior with lights turned on.
  
• Simulating apartments switching off the light the later it gets.
  

As you can see below, it looks absolutely stunning. I’m convinced that the night scene of Big Ambitions will eventually be the most impressive. We got much more coming on that front.


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[h3]Businesses Competitors[/h3]
Until now the city would only contain what we called “reserved buildings”, which contains core businesses that the player needs in order to play the game.

In the next update, the city will also contain businesses that directly compete with the player. The mechanic automatically spawns these businesses in strategic locations.

With this in place, I can start working on the algorithms that will make new business spawn, existing to shut down or move to bigger locations, all based on demands and activity in the city.

[h3]Traffic Index[/h3]
With the above addition, I had to develop a way to determine if a location was popular or not. We now got a “traffic index” for every building which affects the number of customers, but also the market value and rent prices. The value is a traditional index, meaning 100 is the average. Below is less traffic and above means more popular. The index is based on the overall city level and not just the specific neighborhood.


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As more business types have been added to the game, we slowly started to have too many ways to purchase stuff (one for retail stores, one for order-based stores, one for vehicle purchases, etc).

I’ve put together a unified UI, that can handle all business types.

Together with this implementation, I also implemented customer queues for all business types. No more jumping the line! 👮‍♂️


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The team continues to add more variety to the different areas of the city. We’re now working on Flatiron-inspired buildings. Looks sick, right?


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One big bottleneck in our development “pipeline” was unfinished buildings, mainly because it’s quite hard to define street numbers when you don’t know how many buildings are coming.

As the alpha testing (may) start in July, we come up with the solution to add temporary placeholder buildings.


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As always, the team has some additional new and good-looking assets:


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That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas

Hi friends,

Wow, what week it has been. I'm guessing most of you already noticed the Big Ambitions Steam coming soon page came online yesterday. While I still don't have any exact wishlist numbers, I'm already feeling confident
based on the number of visitors. Thank you to all of you who smashed the wishlist button, it means a lot!

The last 2 weeks haven't been the most productive on paper at least. Preparing the Steam page and website update, working on the sneak peek trailer, and finally fixing a ton of bugs after the big mouse input rewrite, has been taking up most of our time.

Although, we still got some cool things to show. Let's look into it...




Yesterday’s event was mainly focused on the “Steam coming soon” announcement. However, another exciting thing also happened at the same time: Pre-order is now available!

I’m still awaiting the sales result after the first 24 hours, but so far it’s looking very promising. I’ve decided to wait another 30 days to see how the sales stabilize. If it continues like now, there’s money enough to hire another artist to work on Big Ambitions. Fingers crossed, I’ll keep you updated! 🤞






Whenever you wanted to exit a building until now you had to find the exit door and then specifically click on it. It was annoying and would often force the player to click twice.

I’ve changed that so you simply have to navigate through the door to exit any building. Also, we got a fancy open/close-animation 🥳


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It was initially planned for alpha 3 but was postponed until alpha 4. Now it’s here, including a new clothing rack. I’ve also added 8 types of clothing, each suitable for a specific type of customer/citizen:

• Classic Cheap Male Clothing
  
• Modern Cheap Male Clothing
  
• Classic Expensive Male Clothing
  
• Modern Expensive Male Clothing
  
• Classic Cheap Female Clothing
  
• Modern Cheap Female Clothing
  
• Classic Expensive Female Clothing
  
• Modern Expensive Female Clothing
  

The clothing store is quite special, as it’s the first store type with a complex and wide product selection. This means that you, as a player, have to make an educated decision about which products will sell well in the neighborhood, your business is located in.


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In Devlog #16 you saw the improved building hider that eliminated blind spots, especially relevant when parallel parking in the city.

At the time we simply hid the blocking buildings entirely. This is being changed now. Instead, we’re now only showing the ground floor of the building. Looks much better!


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One particularly annoying part of the latest build was finding your apartment, businesses, or vehicles. As you primarily move between your own buildings, I’ve come up with a “POI” approach.

You’ll now see a special icon for your home, your businesses, and your vehicles.


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Not the most exciting update, but I had to include it as its complexity was through the roof.

Earlier, dirt on the floors was only generated when the player was actively inside of a building. This has now been changed so no matter where the player is in the city, hotspots become dirty and require cleaning.


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As always, the team has some additional new and good-looking assets:


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That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas

[h3]ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 7 MAY 2021[/h3]

Hi friends,

Another (almost) 2 weeks went by. As always I felt like we got absolutely nothing done, and as always I got surprised once I started summarizing everything 😂

My main focus right now is to get the Steam Coming Soon page up and running and start accepting pre-orders on the website. For now, I’m awaiting the “work in progress” of the sneak peek trailer. Once it’s ready, there’s nothing holding us back 🥳




For quite some time the city map of the game has been left untouched, as I wanted to do a full redesign. After some playing around with cameras and post processing effects, I finally found something I like.

As you can see, the new map allows for filtering building by business type. I’ve also switched from full top-down view to a bit of an angled view. Looks better doesn’t it?






Anyone who have been playing the alpha versions of the game know how bad the input detection was. Honestly, I wrote the code without any knowledge about raycasting, layermasks or even how colliders work.

6 months later, I felt I’ve gained enough knowledge to defend rewriting the mechanics. And so I did…

1 week it took, but the difference is stunning. I won’t go too complicated, but the major change is that the old version had each individual object track the mouse and determine if you hovered or clicked it. The new version is globally tracking the mouse in one place and instead sends information to specific objects if they are hovered or pressed. This makes it much more precise (and performant) and we avoid scenarios where multiple objects can conflicts with each other.

As always, I couldn’t hold myself back, so I also ended up redesigning the overlays used for interaction with objects. Everything is now using an even more streamlined UI. Overlays automatically become visible when the player gets close - much better!






Kinda related to the previous topic. When I was going nuts redesigning the UI for the item overlays, I ended up not being happy with how players interacted with buildings. You had to click the small “Enter Building” button which was annoying.

Fast forward, we now got full building “hovering with outlining”. Want to enter a building? Just click somewhere on the whole thing. Easy 😎






Once again our shader guy has been busy connecting lines between small boxes (that’s what they do, seriously). The result is much more realistic roads with patches and cracks.

The area around the roads used for the upcoming trailer has also received a make-over. We’re getting somewhere now, aren’t we?






Talking about the trailer, I figured it was worth showing you some before and after footage. In addition to the changes mentioned in the last topic, we have also upped the quality (especially by improving reflections and enabled MSAA).






Parking cars in Big Ambitions used to be quite hard, mostly because the camera wouldn’t hide buildings blocking your vision, meaning you pretty much had to just send it.

I’ve spent a good 8 hours making this work. The solution was simple, but it took quite some time to find it 🧐






Oh yes, big one! I’ve finally started to put together the upcoming Coming Soon page. The reason why the “Coming Soon”-page is so important, is because the amount of wishlists the game receives also indicates how many sales I can expect on release date. The more expected sales allows me to invest more into the game. On other words: more wishlists equals more content in the game 🤗

Here’s a quick “work in progress” screenshot:






Recently we noticed lower FPS for the game. Eventually I found out it was caused by the new modular pedestrians being much expensive to animate. To overcome this, I’ve rewritten the pedestrian spawner to only spawn pedestrians around the player. Whenever a pedestrian get’s more than 75 meters away from the player the automatically despawn. Complex stuff, but at the end this is the kind of stuff that keeps the dream of 144 fps @ 1440p real.






As always, the team has some additional new and good-looking assets:



Now I’m gonna shut down the computer, grab a beer and call it a weekend 🍺

See you in 2 weeks and thanks for reading!

All the best,
Jonas


[h3]YOU CAN READ ALL PREVIOUS DEVLOGS AT THE WEBSITE[/h3]

[h3]ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 25 APRIL 2021[/h3]
Hi friends,

First of all sorry for the delayed devlog. I took the Friday off and forgot all about the devlog in the meantime 😳

Because of the video update released 2 weeks ago, it’s actually been a full month since the last devlog. As you can imagine, this means we have quite a lot of things to go through. I hope it’s not too overwhelming 😁




As more and more areas of the new map is being completed, we have now moved into one of the corporate areas which means introducing the first “skyscraper”.




[h3]THE DRIVE-IN STORE 🚙[/h3]

Introduced in the last devlog, but now finished! The drive-in store comes with the new pallets, which holds 6 regular cardboard boxes.

Pallets of goods can be loaded directly into your vehicle using the forklifts.






Traffic and pedestrians have been added to the new map. Because of a limitation in the traffic system I’m using, we have been having a lot of traffic jams. Good thing, a patch was applied this week, so hopefully I can fix all of that next week.






The game is now in state where I believe we should start accepting pre-orders and wishlists. This means we have to setup a Steam Coming Soon page. In order to that, we need a trailer. It won’t be a full announcement trailer, but rather a sneak peek, that quickly explains what the game is about.

I’ve setup dolly tracks using Cinemachine to record these captures. The team is now working on improving these specific parts of the city to really make it pop in the trailer 🤩






Because of the upcoming trailer, we have started working on the night time appearance of the city. It’s a lot of work, but so far we got shadows and a few street lamps up and running.






Throughout the city there’s a lot of parking spots/lanes. They used to be all empty, but now I’ve created a generator that will randomly spawn parked vehicles. It was important to me to make these vehicles look realistically parked, meaning distance between cars, angle and free spots has to be randomized.

I’m pretty happy with the result. Currently density is static, but I plan to make it affected by time of day and street popularity.






Until now you were only allowed to walk on sidewalks and crosswalks, as I wanted to keep some level of realism to the game. However it just became too annoying to the playtesters, so you’re now able to walk freely.

Later on I’ll probably add some automated fines for jaywalking 👿






The further we got into playtesting the game, it became clear that monitoring all of your businesses quickly became overwhelming. To help the player, I have now added a to-do list. Basically, whenever something happens that you should take care of, a task will automatically be created.

We definitely still need to improve it more, but it already helps a ton 👍






As you’ve seen in previous devlogs, we have been working on unique and modular characters of the game. This has now been implemented for the male characters. Each citizen will get now come in different outfits, body sizes and later on skin and clothing colors.

It’s been quite a lot of working getting this to work, but now we got the knowledge and adding the female gender and more clothing styles should be a no-brainer.






As the game’s required disk space continues to increase, I’ve decided to move the playtesting to Steam. It allows me to easily push updates, without the testers having to download a full 700 mb zip every time.

At the same time, we started using Github Issues to track bugs. I’m planning to also use Github for the roadmap/kanban board in the future.

Lastly, I added Unity Analytics, to get some early insight on how players are handling challenges in the game. More about that later.






As always, the team has some additional new and good-looking assets:




That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas

[h3]YOU CAN READ ALL PREVIOUS DEVLOGS AT THE WEBSITE[/h3]