Thank you! And: What's next?
Greetings Builders!
So, two weeks in Early Access. And it has been quite a wild ride so far. While we cannot go into details, we can confirm that the game is doing pretty well so far and above our expectations. And oh god, all that feedback - that's pretty amazing. We were able to fix quite a few issues you reported. And also found quite a bunch of interesting ideas we'd like to implement in the game. Thank you all. Thank you all so much. Like, seriously, we can't thank you enough.
Having that said, let's take a look at what we are working on right now. Of course, we are tweaking a lot of balancing things and are fixing some bugs in the background. But we're also working on some new content for Highrise City. Also, keep an eye on the Roadmap to make sure to stay updated.
While we will rework the streets at some point, our artists have been working a bit on the textures recently. It will make them look a bit more realistic for now (You probably won't notice the change on the screenshot but in a big city it feels and looks much better now):
Old
New
Detail
We're also adding more animations for the citizens and buildings so that the miniature world feeling will improve a bit as this is definitely one of our cornerstones. We're not yet sure if these will be made available already in the update planned for April though. But we're working on that. What definitely will be in that update is the first iteration of the building editor.
We already had to make quite some adjustments for the game underneath. Every object in the game now has a unique ID and when you create new buildings with the editor, Steamworks will give it a unique ID as well. That basically means that you can add infinite additional buildings if you want to. The first version of the editor will be filled with the assets we already have in the game. So you will be able to use these to modify them or create new buildings out of them and adjust everything with parameters. From colors to lights to basically everything.
The next iteration will then allow to implement external assets. Although we will have to write a documentation about how the game exactly reads the files. But we'll get there.
We are still positive that the editor will be available by the end of April. But it might be early / mid May as well, depending on how fast we can make progress. We will most likely ask a few Discord users to test out an earlier build soon.
So, two weeks in Early Access. And it has been quite a wild ride so far. While we cannot go into details, we can confirm that the game is doing pretty well so far and above our expectations. And oh god, all that feedback - that's pretty amazing. We were able to fix quite a few issues you reported. And also found quite a bunch of interesting ideas we'd like to implement in the game. Thank you all. Thank you all so much. Like, seriously, we can't thank you enough.
Having that said, let's take a look at what we are working on right now. Of course, we are tweaking a lot of balancing things and are fixing some bugs in the background. But we're also working on some new content for Highrise City. Also, keep an eye on the Roadmap to make sure to stay updated.
While we will rework the streets at some point, our artists have been working a bit on the textures recently. It will make them look a bit more realistic for now (You probably won't notice the change on the screenshot but in a big city it feels and looks much better now):
Old
New
Detail
We're also adding more animations for the citizens and buildings so that the miniature world feeling will improve a bit as this is definitely one of our cornerstones. We're not yet sure if these will be made available already in the update planned for April though. But we're working on that. What definitely will be in that update is the first iteration of the building editor.
We already had to make quite some adjustments for the game underneath. Every object in the game now has a unique ID and when you create new buildings with the editor, Steamworks will give it a unique ID as well. That basically means that you can add infinite additional buildings if you want to. The first version of the editor will be filled with the assets we already have in the game. So you will be able to use these to modify them or create new buildings out of them and adjust everything with parameters. From colors to lights to basically everything.
The next iteration will then allow to implement external assets. Although we will have to write a documentation about how the game exactly reads the files. But we'll get there.
We are still positive that the editor will be available by the end of April. But it might be early / mid May as well, depending on how fast we can make progress. We will most likely ask a few Discord users to test out an earlier build soon.