Neongarten News

Neongarten 1.1.2 is now ready for everyone! This update rounds out the optional Black ICE challenge tags with four more options.
- Inflation: At the beginning of each week, the rent due increases by your current nightly income * 7. So if rent would have been 263 for week 2 and you come in with an income of 30 per night, your new weekly rent due is 473 (= 263 + 30 * 7).
- Balance: If any faction has 3 more buildings than another faction, then all buildings of that type get a -1 Multiplier.
- Bad Neighbors: Buildings of the same type that neighbor each other give each other x0 Multipliers.
- Power Multiplier: +Power effects are now +Multiplier bonuses instead.

I've been able to win games with all four Black ICE challenges, and even with multiple ones enabled at the same time. I'm not sure that it's possible to win with every single one enabled, but I have had some fun trying to beat it with four different ones going at the same time.

There's also a small bug fix with controller navigation for the Options menu.

Enjoy!

This is a small patch, but it should punch above its weight class in terms of quality of life.

1) If the player selects a different language, that new language is now saved. It no longer needs to be reset every time the game is launched.
2) There's now a button on the Options Screen for Windowed mode. If the player changes from full screen to windowed mode (or back) via F11 or by the shiny new button, that choice is saved and will be set when the game is launched..

Happy building!

One of the common issues voiced by players game is that you reach a point where it's just too easy. Once you get a hang of wrangling building combos, there's not much more challenge there. (There's always the challenge of trying to break a billion, but not everyone out there is a score-chaser. I respect that.) In order to help with this, I took some inspiration from Hades and added "Black ICE" to the game. These are optional difficulty modifiers that you can select at the start of a game.

Currently, there are four Black ICE options available:
1) Captain - once you play a building, it's removed from the draw deck.
2) No Perks - what it says on the tin
3) Ugly Shanties - All shanties give -1 income to all neighboring buildings
4) Roof Ban - All uncovered or partially-covered buildings get -1 income.

I particularly like the Captain ICE. It doesn't necessarily make the game more difficulty per se, but it does change how you play the game. Some buildings become worthless (like the Gruel Plant, which needs two neighboring Toxic Waste Dumps in order to trigger its bonus) and some become more valuable. (With 75 buildings in the game and 64 days to pick 'em, you are extremely likely to get that rare building. You can plan around this.) Also, there's some fun Hack strategies you can use to double up on the "unique" building guarantee. True hacker fashion. I'll be looking for more ideas like Captain in the future.

Other changes:
- Fixed some issues with the UI losing focus when you double tap the build button on a controller
- Fixed a bug where shanty apartments would rarely get placed in the same position when the map is full, causing weirdness with saved games and saved cities
- Fixed a crash that could occur if you traveled too far away in photo mode with a city containing many lit buildings
- Fixed a bug where controller navigation of the perk bar was incorrect.

There are four more Black ICE modifiers currently in development, but I wanted to get this first batch out before the #TurnBasedThursdayFest starts on June 2nd. Enjoy!

This should be the last of the small patches before the first larger content update! Fun stuff coming soon. Change list coming now:
- The Needle game mode is now 3 x 3 x 14 instead of 3 x 3 x 12. This brings the total number of grid spaces (126) more in line with Stack (128) and Cube (125) than its previous number of spaces (108).
- Fixed a bug where building placement could go crazy when the game's FPS dropped.
- Fixed a bug where the Basic Builder perk causes the game to freeze on Reroll.
- Added an escape hatch to the "Unique Reroll" guarantee added in 1.0.10, since it's already resulted in two unexpected crash bugs. Reroll tries to guarantee different building options for 100 re-draws. If it fails then, then it just gives you the next re-draw.

A small patch update to fix a bug introduced in the previous update. I blame the cat.

- If you hack a building and freeze it, and then you press Reroll, the game will no longer freeze up while it goes into an infinite loop.
- The Alphabet Agency now properly applies its Power to the number of Hacks it gives you.