Neongarten News

Small changes and bug fixes for the end of release week. Thanks to everyone for playing! Here's the changes:

- Fixed an issue where The Biggest Loser achievement was not firing after the conditions were met.
- Fixed a minor bug where the Ministry of Profit did not properly highlight contributing residential buildings if you hovered over its income stat.
- Neural Net Weaver is now a rare building.
- The Memory Hole was like a worse version of the Bureaucrat Hatchery, so it's been changed. Instead of adding +1 Power to same-layer Government buildings if it's neighboring 3 Corp buildings, now it adds +2 Multiplier to same-layer Government buildings if it's neighboring 2 Corp buildings.
- Creative games no longer end if you have negative money at the end of the week.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you start a new game, the total money earned (across all games) is a negative number, and the player hasn't unlocked many building sets.

The previous patch (1.0.6) should have restricted players in Creative mode from earning achievements. Instead, it prevented players in the standard Stack game mode from earning achievements. That has been fixed.

Apologies in particular to the player on the Discord server who scored 35 million and did not get the achievement for it.

The first patch has been released for Neongarten, all of one day after it released. Modern game development, man. This patch focused on bugs and complaints that the wider player base came across during Day 1.

- Fixed a crash where a player could create an illegal building by hitting the rotate button after placing a 2 x 1 building in a legal position.
- Fixed the Memory Hole building. Its text indicates its bonus applies to Government buildings on the same layer, but in the code it applied its bonus to Government buildings in the same stack. (It now correctly applies the bonus to layered Government buildings.)
- Achievements are no longer earned during Creative mode.
- Fixed a bug where the Selected Building dialog could disappear until the game was exited. (The problem? The sun.)
- Smoothed out zooming for controllers.

More to come!

After lots of hard work, focus, and time spent hunched over a laptop screen, Neongarten is ready to release! It's been an incredible journey, from the first "three month" prototype for Tiny Mass Games (shortened to five weeks due to the arrival of my second son) to the awesome art upgrade to wrangling all the UI through a localization pass. I'm thrilled that everyone will have a chance to enjoy the game now.

There are a couple of games that match in style or gameplay that we've decided to bundle Neongarten with. First, the dark and moody cityscape painter Dystopika is another excellent take on "cyberpunk citybuilder". I think our two games make a great "compare and contrast" on the cyberpunk theme.



Next, there's the puzzle-y city builder River Towns. This one rhymes mechanically with Neongarten, and it might be closer to sharing a color palette and vibe.



Finally, my publisher (Goblinz) is putting on a sale called Strategems, which is dedicated to affordable and replayable strategy games (like Neongarten!) If you like what's on offer with Neongarten, you can find similar games on the sale page.



Thanks to everyone who helped make Neongarten a reality - my players, playtesters, the artists at Dream Powered Games who helped upgrade the art, my fellow devs at Tiny Mass Games and Boston Indies, the localization team at LocQuest, and (of course) my publisher Goblinz for picking up Neongarten and providing support and direction. Thanks, too, to my three-year-old son, who loves playing "the tower game".

Enjoy the game!

On April 22nd, Neongarten will be released! I know a lot of players have been looking forward to the new buildings and factions and seeing what crazy combos can be pulled off. Here's my top five things to look forward to in the new version.

1) New factions. The Cult of Volt and the Government factions have their own unique mechanics (or mechanical themes) that really set them apart from normal, illegal, and corporate buildings. The Cult of Volt buildings should be placed in a "chain", or orthogonally connected to another Volt building. (So it's like "neighboring" but without any diagonals allowed.) The longer the chain, the more powerful they get! They also have several buildings that power up other buildings based on lighting levels. A Government build is harder to get going - governance is rare in the dystopian future, haha - but they can provide powerful bonuses to other government buildings. One of my favorites is the Nanoeconomics lab, a 2x1 industrial building that provides a _negative_ x2 multiplier bonus to everything in the same stack. (Think on that one.)

2) New powerhouse buildings. The Hacker Shack gets all the love in the demo, but there are many more 'keystone' buildings in the full version that are worth building a strategy around. The Underground Rave, the Organ Harvester, the Corporate Incubator, and the Ministry of Profit have all powered multi-million dollar games for me.

3) New maps! The standard game has a 4 x 4 layer. 3 x 3 and 5 x 5 layers are also ready to explore. It doesn't seem like it'd be a whole lot, but it really seems to change the feel of the game - and the relative value of different buildings and powers.

4) Saving and Loading. The full version has an autosave. No longer are you forced to commit 45 minutes to a playthrough! After a game is over (win or lose), you can save your city and take a look at it later. You could even send the file for a high-scoring city to a friend for them to gawk over, and they can see exactly how you broke a billion.

5) Photo Mode. You can take screenshots of your city from a free-floating camera, watch a timelapse of your city grow from Day 1 to Day 64, and change day to night as desired.

There's going to be a lot to dig into! Stay tuned here for more updates!

Cheers,
Josh