Octohill Ski Tycoon News

The next important chapter which should be considered essential for a ski resort tycoon is finally complete: helicopters. In the game, they play several roles:

• Bright red search and rescue helicopters for urgent medical evacuation. Quick rescue will not only save lives but also help you mitigate the reputation penalty for injuries.
  
• Heavy-duty cargo helicopters for remote areas construction. High speed and no terrain restrictions will make them indispensable for late game resort expansions.
  
• Diverse private helicopters for passenger transportation. They bring in less visitors than buses or cars, but these visitors pay a lot more to land their helicopters right next to the slopes.
  

All of them also have their own advanced buildings equipped with helipads, more efficient and expensive than their helipadless counterparts. They will become an important part of your tycoon when the number of visitors gets closer to a thousand as land-based vehicles won't be fast enough to handle all the work.

Helicopters and related buildings will not be available in demo but only in the full game. Stay tuned for more updates!

Hello and Happy New Year! This post contains few updates on what I've been doing over the last weeks.

[h2]Discord server launch[/h2]

Octohill now has an official discord server! You can join it from links on Steam pages, or through a new button in demo UI. There's not a lot going on there, but feel free to discuss any topics related to the game with me or other players.

[h2]Visual effects[/h2]

Skiers and snowmobiles now leave pretty trails in the snow, and cast snow dust clouds when breaking snow at high speeds. It is already part of the demo, the screenshots and trailers will be gradually updated later to capture these effects.

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

A couple of rare but critical bugs are fixed now so hopefully no crashes for demo players anymore. Also, AMD GPUs support for Linux has arrived (this includes SteamOS)!

[h2]Localization[/h2]

Multiple language support has been in progress for quite some time now, and it's finally ready.
So far, 7 languages are supported: English, French, German, Russian, Chinese (simplified) and Japanese.
Languages other than English are prepared using machine translation (LLM based) with some surface level validation, please report any inconsistencies here in Steam discussions (or if you didn't find any issues with translation also mention it there, so I can remove the "machine translation" label from the language choice list)

If you want to play the game in some other languages, please indicate so, with sufficient demand I may add more of them.

[h2]Dark mode[/h2]

One highly requested feature was dark-colored UI scheme which is delivered as alternative dark mode.
The default light color scheme also has been slightly adjusted. Hope you'll like the new colors!

When the game is launched for the first time you'll have an option to select the language and color scheme, or you can easily switch them from the game options at any moment later.
These features are already present in demo.

[h2]Next plans[/h2]

Currently I'm working on some visual improvements, such as snow effects and trails for skiers and snowmobiles. It may take some trials and errors in order to make these effects performing good enough (there's a lot of skiers after all) while fitting the overall style of the game, we'll see how it turns out.

Free demo is finally out for everyone! Please give it a try and share your feedback!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3355160

While the full game is still under development, your opinions on demo may change what the final version will look like. The demo itself will be updated over time as well (no new content will be added as it will go directly to the full version, but the UI, gameplay and graphics will be kept in sync).

[h2]Playtesting notes[/h2]

Huge thanks to everyone who took part in the demo playtesting, all your feedback was extremely useful (both positive and less so). I started addressing the issues from the first day and now all the urgent ones are fixed which is why this demo can be released now.
Keep an eye for future public playtests!

[h2]Full release date[/h2]

With all of that, the full version finally looks scoped out now which means I can announce (approximate) release dates. Octohill is coming live in March 2025, in just a few months!

Everyone registered should have already received an invitation. The registration will stay open for the weekend, make sure to click "Request Access" on the main page if you're interested!

[h2]Feedback reminder[/h2]

Please leave your feedback via:

• Steam discussion thread if you want a public discussion
  
• "Send Feedback" button in the game if you'd rather keep it private (or anonymous)
  

The playtest will stay open uo to 29th of November, you can try the game demo anytime until then.