City Game Studio News

Default version of the game, we want to make sure to have a chance to discover bugs and adjust the balancing, to give you the best game experience possible.

Access the Unstable branch on Steam by right clicking City Game Studio in your Steam library, and then select ‘Properties’. In the new window, select ‘Betas’. The Unstable branch should now be available for you to choose from.

Please leave any feedback you may have in the appropriate channel in our Discord, or in the subforum on Steam.

As always, remember to be considerate towards players not partaking in the Unstable, in case they want to avoid spoilers.

Please make sure to make backups of your save files before playing.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Banker[/h3]

• Game over is now only triggered by the banker
  
• The banker offers you the possibility of selling your game engine to avoid bankruptcy
  
• The banker offers you the possibility of selling your latest custom platform to avoid bankruptcy
  
• The banker offers you the possibility of selling one of your studio (including all of its employees) to avoid bankruptcy

Hello folks!

I have some great news. The banker's integration into City Game Studio has begun.
Under the hood, the banker is there, but visually nothing has changed for you. Only the presence of a `banker.gde` file that allows me to show the banker and his interaction.
Nothing has changed in the game, for the moment. Because the banker doesn't provide any solution, he just appears, you click a button and it's game-over. So I'd rather not to show him in-game.

Hopefully, by next week, you'll already be able to sell your game engine or console to replenish your company's treasury.
Which means that next week, you should be able to start negotiating with him.

After all, this week I've mainly been working on optimizing the game. As last week I reviewed Steam's detection algorithm, I've took a close look at what happens when you launch City Game Studio.

As I keep adding new features to City Game Studio, I want to make sure it doesn't get any slower. So I've looked at memory consumption in detail. As an example, opening the game and staying on the main menu takes up around 2.5G of RAM. Then when you load a savegame and land in the middle of your studio, City Game Studio uses around 3G of RAM.
Therefore, I've overhauled the way the game's assets are loaded. Rather than preloading everything in memory, assets are now loaded on demand when the game needs them.

City Game Studio launches faster, and takes up less memory. It saves around 1G of RAM. Furthermore, as assets are loaded dynamically, performance is not affected. So it's really a win-win situation.

I also took the opportunity to fix a few more minor bugs that were affecting the gaming experience. Thanks to XHFlame for pointing them out!

That's about it for this week, next week will be more exciting for sure!
Until then, take care
Xavier aka Binogure

Default version of the game, we want to make sure to have a chance to discover bugs and adjust the balancing, to give you the best game experience possible.

Access the Unstable branch on Steam by right clicking City Game Studio in your Steam library, and then select ‘Properties’. In the new window, select ‘Betas’. The Unstable branch should now be available for you to choose from.

Please leave any feedback you may have in the appropriate channel in our Discord, or in the subforum on Steam.

As always, remember to be considerate towards players not partaking in the Unstable, in case they want to avoid spoilers.

Please make sure to make backups of your save files before playing.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Misc[/h3]

• Clean up the code base, removing 2 files that are no longer used
  
• Game launches faster (uses slightly less RAM):
  • Main menu uses ~1.3G of RAM instead of ~2.5G
    
  • In game uses ~1.9G of RAM instead of ~2.7G

[h3]Bugfix[/h3]

• Move camera using WASD while building studios
  
• When a competitor buys another competitor, it buys it at a lower value as the player can acquire it.
  
• Employees' generated points are automatically cleared as soon as the task they are working on is over.

Hello everyone!

Summer's here, so I'm easing off a bit. I admit I haven't been very productive on the development front lately. Lots of small fixes, some rather old bugs and a few small visual improvements.

Community-wise, as always, I've been present, I've read you, and you've come up with some great ideas for the banker. Thank you for the ideas you've shared, and let me tell you what's going to be added for the banker.
For the easiest difficulties, the banker will offer you some nice choices, but not without consequences.
Following on from your ideas, in the first three difficulties, the banker will suggest that you sell your game engine, if that's possible of course.
Or maybe sell your console, or your competitors' shares. He may also require you to work with a competitor to publish one of their games.
Granted, these aren't always pleasant choices, but a banker is still a banker, and a banker rarely gives you good news.

OK, let's move on to higher difficulties. The banker will force you into more painful choices. He may force you to close one or more studios and lay off all its employees. You're going to give a good impression of a responsible manager who pleases his creditors. The banker may ask you to resell one of your games to bail out the company. He may also demand that you sell your dematerialized store, which you can only get back in exchange for a substantial fee.

In short, implementing the banker's discussion is easy, though it's the choices he'll give you that give me a hard time. There's nothing in the game about disabling certain features, or reselling a game, console or game engine. However, closing studios is already an easier thing to do, as is laying off employees, selling market share or even working for a competitor.

As for the banker's face, it may change and I may draw a more contemporary one.
Next week, I'm going to start reviewing bankruptcy management in depth.
Until then, take care.
Xavier aka Binogure

Default version of the game, we want to make sure to have a chance to discover bugs and adjust the balancing, to give you the best game experience possible.

Access the Unstable branch on Steam by right clicking City Game Studio in your Steam library, and then select ‘Properties’. In the new window, select ‘Betas’. The Unstable branch should now be available for you to choose from.

Please leave any feedback you may have in the appropriate channel in our Discord, or in the subforum on Steam.

As always, remember to be considerate towards players not partaking in the Unstable, in case they want to avoid spoilers.

Please make sure to make backups of your save files before playing.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Bugfix[/h3]

• Fix a bug with the employee panel where it generates ton of errors in early stage
  
• Fix a bug with the employee panel there's no studio selected it always by the current studio instead.
  
• Add the file "steam_appid.txt" next to the executable, so the Steam API is initialized correctly (not more Steam cannot be reached)
  
• Rework the Steam detection algorithm
  
• Rework the "Steam cannot be reached" panel.