Highway to Heal News

How do you do?

The demo is nearing completion! There's still a few things to do and a lot of polish before releasing it, but you can expect to play the game in the coming weeks!

[h2]Disinfection mini-game[/h2]
The third mini-game of the demo has been implemented and is now just waiting for the final visual touches. The story of this one is a bit weird as we ended up mixing two games that were previously designed on paper.



This was supposed to be an evaluation game, to assess the situation of the patient. But we want our games to be more involved in the patient's health. And while taking the vitals of someone might be nice on their mood (or not!) it was not active enough in our taste. So we took the idea of a disinfection game and applied it over the existing gameplay and graphics and it works quite nicely! We will probably rethink the visuals though, by changing the tools to be more representative. But that will probably wait an update after the demo is released.

[h2]Visuals[/h2]
Visuals have vastly improved in the last few weeks. As previously stated, particle effects from ApologueFX have been integrated, but the main interface got a bit of an overhaul too. We feel the design is much easier to read while maintaining its distinctive "holographic" characteristics and makes you feel a lot more about the importance of the patient you're in charge of.


The injection game is a lot less spiky too! Thanks to new technologies, injections don't use needles in our future, but high pressure injection systems which are a lot less scary.



[h2]Next Week[/h2]
As I stated earlier, the demo is approaching. We need tu update the tutorial to highlight all the new gameplay and make sure you start off in the best of conditions. You wouldn't want to harm those delightful characters, would you?

After that, is just quality of life features up to the release! Integration of the latest music tracks, debugging, a proper pause menu, more debugging, performance improvements, even more debugging, gameplay balancing - it's wayyyy too hard right now! - and then... you guessed it, debugging.

We can't wait to have all of you playing our game and telling us how you feel about it.

See you then!

Bom dia! Yes I speak portuguese too and this game does support a vast diversity of characters so why not.

"This game" and not "City Ambulance: Rescue Express", weird right? Maybe because we finally settled on a new name for the game? OMG! YES! It will be called... *drumroll* Highway to Heal. The new logo and key art are being worked out, so the change will be visible here and everywhere in the coming weeks.

[h2]Ambulance Damage Management[/h2]
Taking care of your patients is important, but let's not forget to take of our ambulance! Without it, our patients wouldn't get very far. In Highway to Heal (sounds nice, right?), your equipment is your health bar. You have to drive fast, but safe! Avoiding traffic, obstacles, dodging lamp posts, etc.



When you hit stuff, your ambulance starts to break appart. No worries though, a slight detour through the garage or the pharmacy will fix all that! The garage will fix all your vehicle related equipment while the pharmacy will handle all the paramedic equipment. Both have hardware to fix your most important piece of gear: the siren!

Here's a quick video of what all that looks like. Don't mind the visuals of the interface, they are being done as we speakI write!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I had to drive so badly to show this. I'm deeply sorry to all the vehicles, trash cans, lamp posts, trees and walls I hit along the way. Good thing no-one got hurt, not even a bird!

[h2]Illustrason[/h2]
Let's put some faces on who's behind this game. Illustrason is a team of two talented sound designers who did all the audio effects and mixing you've heard in that video. Camille and Julien are still hard at work to improve the sound's audio. It's already great and we didn't even integrate their ambiance system yet! We can't wait to get to it but there's so much to do!



Check out the games they've previously worked on, they are great. They even got Best Audio prize for their work on Seers Isle at the Indie Prize 2019 event in London!

[h2]Next Week[/h2]
There was some rethinking into what patient treatment mini-game should be done as third for the demo. But that thinking is over and implementation might be done next week. Hopefully, we will get to show you all the gameplay with a much improved interface too.

See you next week! Take care!

Hey! It's time for another update of this game.

Although we redesigned some key parts of the game, progress is going well on our public demo. Hopefully, it will be released by the end of the month. Fingers crossed!

[h2]New immobilisation mini-game[/h2]
To care for your patient, we plan on having eight mini-games in the final game. All will be playable in full-screen, while your picking them up, so that they're easier to do the first time. But all will also be doable while you're driving so that you can raise back the health of your patient if you drove badly!

This week, I'd like to focus on the immobilisation mini-game. When you're given care of a patient that received an injury to a limb, it's often important to prevent that limb from doing any movement. This eases the pain and ensures the situation doesn't deteriorate more.



To that end, this mini-game has you use a pump to inflate a vacuum splint. You must inflate it enough for the limb to be secured but not too much as to not cause too much discomfort.

[h2]Radio[/h2]
There's been quite some progress on the audio front, with new engine sounds and more general mixing. That's hard to show on an image, obviously! But we can talk about one important aspect of the audio of game.

Paramedics spending most of their days driving, not necessarily in urgence, they listen to a lot of music. Some even do work playlists! Our approach here will be to give you six radios to listen to. Using the holowatch, you'll be able to easily change which one you'd like to ear. All will feature varied styles, from punk rock to latin music, probably some electronic music too.



In between the tracks, radio jingles and news will pop up. These will be designed to immerse you even more in our beautiful city of Le Mascaret. By the way, do you know what Mascaret means? It's french for a tidal bore, a wave that goes backwards: from the sea, up the river!

I must tell you something: listening to hours of music for work is a lot less fun than it sounds! (pun intended) It's about finding which tunes suit best, writing them down, grouping them together, trimming the list again and again... It's a lot of spreadsheets! DJ'ing isn't just about showing off on stage, it would seem.

Let us know which styles you think would be best to drive to!

[h2]Next Week[/h2]
By the end of next week, all three mini-games planned for the demo should be working. Maybe we will show you the other two. There will probably be many surprises for us by then. Maybe the new name of the game? We'll see!

See you next time and remember to take good care of yourself!

Bonjour ! as we say over here.

We're still looking for the new name of the game. We tried a few things on Steam. Sorry if you were wondering where did we go, ahah! The contenders are:

• Safe and Sound
  
• Unscathed
  
• Highway to Heal
  
• Pulse Fiction
  
• Rushing Siren
  
• CARE!
  

Let us know what you think of those! We're open to suggestions too. Come chat on our discord server.

[h2]Visual Effects[/h2]
Our partner Apologue FX is currently shipping their first batch of visual effects for the game. It's going to rock a lot more! Here's a few work in progress animations to give you a taste.

Here's what happens if you brake your siren. Go to the nearest garage or pharmacy to fix it!


I bet only the garage can you help you on this one.


[h2]Game Design[/h2]
As stated last week, we are putting the patient forward in the hope that you take good care of them. But that can't be at the expense of your dear ambulance! Not only you will be able to upgrade it, but the more upgrades you have, the more resilient it is! That's because your upgrades will always brake before your wheels or your siren. To that end, we are re-designing the interface of the game and it will look more or less like this:


[h2]Next Week[/h2]
We can hope that we will finally have the new name of the game. This is one of the hardest things to do while making a game. It's the toughest of all the decisions we have to make because it's not something you can change easily when the game starts to be noticed all over.

What we are more sure of is that progress will have been done in implementing the new game design so expect to see versions of what you just read here but more polished and all actually working in-game!

Reach out if you'd like to play our demo before everyone. We'd happily take your feedback!

You can also follow us on social networks to get early glimpses of our progress.

See you next week!

Hello!

This week shook a bit the development team. We started rethinking a few things including... the name of the game! With "City Ambulance: Rescue Express", we noticed people often thought our game was a simulation or a cheap mobile game port. For the moment we just renamed it to "CARE!", its initials, but we will probably change it again. Stay tuned!

[h2]Hologram Effect[/h2]

As eco-friendly as we want our game to be, we still want it to be set in the future and that must show somehow. So, in the world we are designing, engineers have figured out how to make small starwars-like holographic projectors that work quite well and don't consume a tremendous amount of energy to operate. This was not very visible in the game yet, only a few touches here and there. We finally gave the characters a bit of treatment so that they convey that concept too.



[h2]Patient's Care[/h2]

Thinking about marketing and the title of the game made us change a few things in how the game plays too. We're going to have the player focus more on the patient by constantly showing its health bar. In CARE! the health your patient depends on their state when you pick them up. While you're driving, it's health can worsen unexpectedly due to their condition or... when you drive bad!

Driving properly is key to help your patient the best, but you can do more. If you drive perfectly, an aura charges around your ambulance and stays as long as you don't hit anything. As long as your aura is maximized, your patient health increases, like they obviously would if they were in an insane level of coziness.



But this process is quite slow and hard to maintain, so the game offers you an alternative: from time to time, a health mini-game will pop-up above the ambulance. The better you handle it - remember, while driving! - the more your patient's health will increase in an instant.

[h2]Next week[/h2]

You might have noticed that I lied last week, as I did not talk about those health care mini-games that we have. Indeed, development of indie game by a very small team makes for unexpected changes. Maybe next week I will get to show you those, maybe I will have more to tell about the new gameplay, maybe we'll talk music... Surprise!

Let us know in the comments if you're interested in participating in a private play-test! The game is quite light to download (only 250MB right now, we're targeting a maximum of 1GB for the final game) and has about an hour of gameplay available.