Hello city-builders fans!
Game development isn’t child’s play. Our dev team’s journey is full of unexpected twists - bugs, missteps, hilarious (and sometimes terrifying) glitches, and constant trial and error. Today, we’d like to share a little story about how something as “simple” as building a bridge became one of the most surprisingly complex parts of our game. You’d think it’d be easy, right? Think again.
While working on this feature, one of the first bugs we encountered was triggered by the destruction of the bridge connecting the starting island to the calendar island. Sounds harmless enough, except that when it came time to clean up the leftover debris, the workers struggled to reach and collect the remaining resources. We managed to fix it, feeling pretty proud of ourselves. But as you might guess, that was just the beginning...
The next two bugs were just as entertaining (and frustrating). In the first case, workers would attempt to build a bridge by walking to the starting point indicated in the bridge’s blueprint. This meant that if you were placing a bridge from left to right (from a neighboring island to the starting island), it couldn't be completed because workers kept trying to reach the wrong side of the gap.
In the second case, after a bridge was demolished, workers could still magically walk across it, as if the bridge had never been gone. Sounds convenient? Maybe. But not for us.
And if that were all, maybe this post wouldn’t even exist. As time passed, we found that the bridge, which initially appeared harmless, ended up creating far more problems for developers than we expected.
Next issue: players were able to place other buildings right on the path leading to the bridge. This led to workers getting completely stuck while trying to navigate, blocking themselves in the process. Once we finally ironed that out, a new issue popped up - this time involving animals. Animals that walked onto the bridge couldn’t get off. They just froze at the very end of it, seemingly forever.
Let’s not forget about the road system either. Initially, we wanted bridges to support roads, since roads give islanders a speed boost. But once we enabled this feature, things got messy. Workers assigned to build roads on the bridge would often get stuck and never come down. Their navigation broke completely, and the two systems (bridges and roads) started clashing. Eventually, we decided to merge the systems so that every bridge now has a built-in road component by default. One less thing to break. Hopefully.
And yes, among all the chaos, there was still room for some funny glitches. In certain areas of the map, players could place bridges through existing objects like rocks. Not very realistic, but hey! At least it looked cool 🙂
We’d love to end this post on that amusing note, but thanks to your ongoing support and constant feedback, we’re still uncovering new quirks and odd behaviors. The bridge may be a vital part of The Whims of The Gods, but it’s also one of the reasons we’ve been losing sleep at night.
Let us know with a like if you enjoy these kinds of behind-the-scenes dev stories. We try to keep it honest (and humorous) as we share the daily ups and downs of making a game. Also,
come hang out with us on Discord! You can chat directly with the dev team, or even jump into a match and play our demo - either in multiplayer or solo mode. We’d love to see you there!
Best,
PJ GAMES Team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2960200/The_Whims_of_the_Gods_Demo/
