City Game Studio News

[p][/p]

[p]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.[/p]

[h2]Changelog - rc1[/h2]
[h3]Feature[/h3]

• Added a new server item to furnish your studio

[h3]Balancing[/h3]

• Set the maximum number of units sold for custom platforms to 1.25 billion
  
• Servers from 2007 are no longer available after 2020

[h3]Bugfix[/h3]

• Fixed a bug when manually upgrading a server
  
• Fixed a save game corruption caused by a 6th difficulty slot becoming selectable after starting and canceling a new game. Selecting it worked once, but the dynamic difficulty data was never loaded, corrupting the save on subsequent loads

[h2]Previous changes[/h2]
[h3]Interface[/h3]

• Added the hype value of announced games directly to the in-dev game panel
  
• Improved the server panel readability

[h3]Cheat Codes[/h3]

• Added the ability to set the custom platform score
  
• Added a 'man' command that lists all existing cheat codes
  
• Added a cheat code to instantly complete a DLC or an update

[h3]Bugfix[/h3]

• Fixed a bug in the studio view preventing the computer upgrade panel from showing on the desk itself

Hey everyone!!!

v1.27.0 is already here. Don't worry though, it's not the WHOLE v1.27.0 landing at once, just the very first iteration, adding a few nice little things.

[h2]This Week's Recap[/h2]
I've been working on the interface again. Mainly because I took the time to put together a small guide showing you how to make an online game that lasts for years and stays profitable over time. Basically, imagine you're building a League of Legends where your entire studio depends on that single game (wink wink). For anyone curious, the guide is right here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3686057168

And with that came a few interface tweaks. First up: hype. You know how when you're working on a game and you announce it, there's that red vertical bar filling up on the left side of your screen? That's your hype meter. When it's full, it's time to release your game. The problem is, knowing exactly when it's full has always been a bit tricky, since that bar is only accurate to about ±10%. So I added a small text overlay showing you the exact value. That should make all the min-maxers out there very happy when timing their launches!

The other change is about the server management panel. Yes, you can have servers in City Game Studio. I felt that using the cloud wasn't intuitive enough. So I reworked the interface a bit. Things that looked disabled no longer do, the slider adjusts properly, and more numbers are displayed. It was needed, and it looks a lot better now.

On top of that: the in-game console. This time I mean the terminal for cheat codes. I added a few new commands. The man command lists all available cheat codes, super handy when you want to see everything at once, though fair warning, there are a lot. Anyway, among the other new commands, there's one for your consoles: you can now fake your console scores. And you can also complete any update or DLC in a single command. You asked for it, it's done, and I'm happy.

[h2]What's Next[/h2]
I'm planning to rework the banker. That's the next big thing, making sure he gives you more chances, while also making it not too easy to pull one over on him. I mentioned it in a previous devlog, so you already know what's coming.

On top of that, I'm planning to add new, more powerful servers that should arrive during the 2020s in-game. Because late game shouldn't mean you've got nothing left to do. New PCs for your employees too, just to refresh the hardware a bit. Visually they'll look almost the same, it's what's under the hood that'll change the stats.

I also have some things planned for the digital store. I'd love for you to be able to organize festivals in there, which means new things to implement. So yeah, there's quite a bit in the pipeline, I hope you're excited! Especially the arrival of Skylight 12 and Linux Kernel 7.

Alright, I think that covers everything.
Thanks for reading,
See you next week,
Take care of yourselves in the meantime,
Xavier aka Binogure

Hey everyone!

The Steam Spring Sale kicks off on March 19th, and City Game Studio is part of it!

From March 19th to March 26th, both City Game Studio and its OST are 55% off. If you have been sitting on the fence, or if a friend has been eyeing the game for a while, this is a great window to jump in.

The game just received a massive update with v1.26.0, performance overhaul, rebuilt save system, Steam Deck improvements and a lot more, so it is a good time to start a fresh save and build your gaming empire from scratch.

The OST is composed by Conciliator, and it holds up extremely well after hours of gameplay. Worth grabbing alongside the game if you enjoy the atmosphere.

Sale runs March 19th to March 26th. See you in the city!

Xavier aka Binogure

https://store.steampowered.com/app/726840/City_Game_Studio_Your_Game_Dev_Adventure_Begins/

[p][/p]

[p]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.[/p]

[h2]Changelog - rc0[/h2]
[h3]Interface[/h3]

• Added the hype value of announced games directly to the in-dev game panel
  
• Improved the server panel readability

[h3]Cheat Codes[/h3]

• Added the ability to set the custom platform score
  
• Added a 'man' command that lists all existing cheat codes
  
• Added a cheat code to instantly complete a DLC or an update

[h3]Bugfix[/h3]

• Fixed a bug in the studio view preventing the computer upgrade panel from showing on the desk itself

Hey everyone!

So, I did not plan for any of this. But here I am talking about 2 updates in one post.
v1.26.1 brings some significant optimizations, while v1.26.2 squashes all the bugs introduced by both v1.26.1 and v1.26.0.
So yeah, there is quite a bit to cover.

[h3]Optimizations[/h3]
It started with a message on Discord and an email I received, and yes, I do read every single email, thank you for the kind words by the way. So following your reports, I noticed a pretty serious slowdown in v1.26.0 when running a lot of Studio Directors at once. The thing is, you can have up to 16 of them, which means up to 16 projects running simultaneously.

Under normal circumstances, without Studio Directors, you have somewhere between 2 and 8 projects in development at any given time. The game is optimized for that. But with 16 Studio Directors, you have 16 active projects. And that is where things get complicated. Every time an employee, visible on screen or not, produces a point, every single active project checks whether that point belongs to it. With 2,000 employees and 1 project, that is 2,000 checks. Fine. But with 16 projects, you are suddenly looking at 32,000 checks per cycle.

So I went through every possible micro-optimization to make those checks as lightweight as possible. The result is pretty solid. I will be honest though, I already have a plan to go from 1 check per active project down to a single check for all of them at once. Which is beautiful, right? But I am saving that for a future major update.

[h3]Bug Fixes and Balancing[/h3]
I had received a report about a display issue on ultrawide screens. After looking into it, the main menu was indeed getting misaligned in that configuration. That was a fairly straightforward fix.

Another piece of feedback was about the end-of-life panel for consoles you manufacture. I added the console's score to that panel along with a small animation to make it a bit nicer to look at. So less of a fix, more of a polish pass really.

On the balancing side, I had to revisit something important: online games. Up until now, online games could not expire. Meaning unless you manually pulled them from the market, they would just keep selling forever. The problem is that if you have 200 online games running at the same time, the game tanks in performance. Hard. So I introduced a condition: an online game can stay on the market for up to 20 years. After that, if it is still generating more than $10,000 per month, it stays. But if it dips below $10,000 per month for 6 consecutive months, it gets automatically delisted. I think that is a much more realistic behavior.

There are a handful of other fixes too, mostly around furniture placement in studios and employee display, but nothing worth going into detail about.

So, two updates merged into one, City Game Studio is now smoother, better optimized, and a bit nicer to look at. Thank you for your feedback, because honestly none of these changes would have happened without it.

That is it from me for now.
See you next week for the first v1.27.0-rc0. I think you are going to like it!

Take care of yourselves,
Xavier aka Binogure

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Optimization[/h3]

• Optimized game development process
  
• Optimized game sales algorithm
  
• Optimized in-game achievement system
  
• Optimized in-dev game panel
  
• Removed unused code

[h3]Interface[/h3]

• Fixed main menu display on ultrawide screens
  
• Replaced quality label with platform score on the discontinued platform panel

[h3]Gameplay[/h3]

• Online games now expire after 20 years

[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

• Fixed studio item placement issue (sprites sliding away)
  
• Fixed employee information display from studio view