City Game Studio News

Hello everyone!

Well, here we are! Exactly, the biggest update of City Game Studio. What to say about this update? Honestly I thought about upgrading to version 2.0, that's how big this version is!

Behind this update there is a lot of sweat, tears and even BLOOD. There are so MANY changes that it's going to be hard to detail everything here, but I'm going to do it anyway!

Let's go for the presentation of the v1.11.0

[h2]Events[/h2]
You know that little icon at the bottom of the screen that looks like a letter? Yep, that's what we're going to talk about. Events have been added in 2019, and barely changed since then. So I had to roll up my sleeves and add some icons here, some formatting there. Consoles' announcements have been grouped together, so your mailbox is going to be lighter. In addition, there are new recurring events.

From now on, your fans are going to write to you. Sometimes they are happy to hear from you, and they tell you so, sometimes they are not so happy. So when they ask you for something, I advise you to listen to them, your wallet will be grateful. Fans are going to contact you mostly to talk about your games, to ask you for updates, sequels...

When you release a game, there is a slight chance that it impacts the popularity of the themes. When it happens, as my great-grandfather would say, cool beans!

[h2]Your consoles[/h2]
There have been some changes. The console sales algorithm has been revised, it's a bit more balanced than before, especially when you release several consoles. But the biggest change is the ability to make your consoles backwards compatible. That's a great feature.

By making your console backwards compatible, you ensure that you can port your entire game catalog with 100% compatibility. This means that porting a game will cost you less and make you more money. However, making a console backwards compatible is not cheap either.

[h2]The interface[/h2]
The pièce de résistance! Almost the whole interface has changed. Gonzi, a player of City Game Studio, helped me a lot to improve the aesthetics of the menus of City Game Studio. Icons, buttons, panels, so many things have been changed, and for the better, I hope!

The dark theme has been improved, making it easier to read all the text and images. The comfort of the dark theme is as good as the default one.

Selling a studio, what an ordeal. Where is this button? In which menu? Well, from now on you can sell a studio directly from the bottom menu, right next to its name. Very convenient! Renaming a studio works on the first try, and every time!

The staff management panel has been redesigned as well, replacing some hidden icons with visible tabs. All this for a more instinctive result, and therefore more pleasant.

[h2]Optimizations & fixes[/h2]
Playing with a modded version of City Game Studio could be a bit of a pain. Game slows down during some periods of the year, and freezes most of the time. Sometimes it even hangs completely. Well, I did my best, and I think City Game Studio is much better optimized. It now uses a unique resource loader system, so there's no need to load the same resources several times in a row. Shaders have been standardized, stored in a nice folder, and their invocation is done through an interface that saves me from duplicating shaders to replace existing ones. Some shaders could not be deactivated properly, so the game slowed down on old machines

As for the fixes, there are many. The Game of the Year stopped working when there were not enough contestants to elect a game. City Game Studio had to be restarted to make it work again. It was also impossible to develop a game of the year, well, that's fixed too.

[h2]Currency adjustment[/h2]
Don't worry, the game's price will remain unchanged in Euros and USD. However, other currencies are going to be adjusted thanks to the new tool that Steam provides. Indeed City Game Studio's price has barely varied in other currencies for the last 4 years, so I think an adjustment is in order.

[h2]To conclude[/h2]
I have not listed all the changes, there are really many, some are less visible than others, I have listed the most important. But City Game Studio is more and more complete and stable.

I still have some changes to make in the game. I would like to add the possibility to make games with 2 genres, add achievements, and maybe review some other things. In the meantime, this new version of City Game Studio should delight the most ardent of you.

That's all for today.
I wish you a good game.
See you soon for the rest.
Xavier AKA Binogure

[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Feature[/h3]

• Add events when a player releases a game gets a chance to:
  
  
  • Theme trends event: A theme can gets trending via an event
    
  • Community's excited, so they should publish an update ASAP
• After 3 years, if a game has more than 90% score, fans can ask for a sequel
  
• Add backward compatibility for consoles
  
  
  • Add the backward compatibility to the existing platforms (Grantendo, Saga, Gamestation...)
    
  • Add tooltip on platforms (add name of the backward-compatible platform)
    
  • Rework the custom-platform algorithm to take into account the backward-compatibility feature
    
  • Rework the gameport-algorithm, to take into account the backward-compatibility
• Digital store: Can port a game to the digital store via a game update

[h3]Misc[/h3]

• Update the console market share (Gamestation 5, VBox Series V, Grantendo Swap, Teamdock)
  
• Number of competitors (use the game creation to define how many of them)
  
• Group platforms announcements
  
• Add following items to the yearly financial report:
  
  
  • Furnishing studios
    
  • Buying servers
    
  • Building studios/universities/convention
    
  • Acquiring a competitor
    
  • Buying competitors stocks

[h3]Bugfix[/h3]

• GOTY: Stopped even with competitors spawned
  
• GOTY: Cannot dev a GOTY
  
• Game crash when upgrading computers
  
• Custom-platforms: When releasing the next-gen platform, sales of the old-gen doesn't fall.
  
• Custom-platforms: Cancelling a platform might lead to random behavior
  
• Custom-platforms: Do not send platform bought event for custom platforms
  
• Map shader: Cannot deactivate the season shader

[h3]Optimization[/h3]

• Switching between studio takes less CPU/memory
  
• Optimizing navigating through menus ("creating a new game" panel should load faster)
  
• Use a ResourcePreloader instead of preloading all resources at launch
  
• Add paginations for staff instead of yielding
  
• Refactor models and controllers to use node system instead of dictionaries
  
• Trade panel: Tooltips optimizations
  
• Improve studio/map background rendering
  
• Add C++ function to sort IntArrays

[h3]UI[/h3]

• Replace "filter by" by "sort by" on the right panel
  
• Improve dark theme
  
• Rework the main interface of the game
  
• Improve in-game notifications, better description, better tooltip
  
• Trending themes: put the top 3 themes
  
• Shop: Replace button by switch (auto-furnish) and add a tooltip
  
• Game engine: Add a tooltip when creating a new engine while there's no studio available
  
• Improve feedback on game creation
  
• Can sell a studio from the studio list
  
• In dev items: Revamp all the panels
  
• Replace staff panels icons by tabs with text (more readable)

[h3]Mods[/h3]

• Difficulty: Add moddable parameters for fan based events
  
• Famous employees: Cannot rename famous employees

Hi everyone!

Well, are you waiting for something? Just kidding, I've been working hard this week too with adding details to the game like wearing glasses. So yeah, that's pretty useless, but it's done. Maybe later I'll add the option to wear a mustache or to customize your character more. I'm not sure that's super important for a management game like City Game Studio, so you tell me.

Otherwise, this week, I fixed a major bug that made City Game Studio crash. Also, it's the stabilization of the unstable version, I corrected about ten minor bugs this week. In other words, I'm giving you an update with little details if you know what I mean.

Preparations for the anniversary update of City Game Studio, which is going to celebrate its 4 years already, are going very well, we're in time. Come on Tuesday, there will be a lot of cake!

See you on Tuesday,
Have a good weekend to all
Xavier aka Binogure

Hello all, I hope you are all well,

I hope you are in good shape because this week I have been busy.

On menu:

• - Game optimization
  
• Improvement of the popup
  
• Redesign of the achievements

[h2]Where do I start?[/h2]
Game optimization is mainly about the competitors. When loading mods in City Game Studio, very often they add many competitors.
City Game Studio had a hard time to manage several hundreds of competitors. So I worked on it, I had to simplify a small part of the interface, however the game remains fluid even with many competitors.

As for the pop-ups, it's the continuation of last week's work. I've redesigned the icons so that they look better on big screens and also on smaller screens. The background of the pop-up is darker, to better read the text. Also, the pop-ups themselves are more attractive, with nice curved shapes!

So let's talk about the biggest part of the job. I struggled to find the right idea of how to manage the achievements in the game. I was worried about adding too many pop-ups, and drowning you in a lot of useless information. And in fact, the way I set up things works pretty well, it's actually really nice as it makes you feel like completing all the achievements. And I have plans to add even more achievements.
Let me give you a sneak peek. You get an achievement if you can make a AAA game in the 90s or if you can make a console before the 90s.

Well, that's for next week.
Oh boy, it's already the 10th, the next update is coming soon!

I'm going back to my keyboard, coding stuff!
Have a great weekend everyone!
Xavier aka Binogure

Hello folks,

As usual on saturday, I'm going to tell you about the latest developments of City Game Studio!
Like last week I made a lot of work on optimization but also on the interface.

[h2]Adjustment of the price of the game in some currencies[/h2]
No worries, the price of City Game Studio remains the same, 15,99€, or 15,99$. The only thing that will change is the price in some other currencies, such as the Turkish Lira, or the Argentine Peso. Steam has implemented a new tool that automatically adjusts game prices for different currencies. Previously I was doing this poorly, now Steam will take care of it.

[h2]Optimization[/h2]
Shaders management in City Game Studio has been harmonized. It helps me to better manage the shaders and their options, but also to manage how they are loaded.
On top of that there are new optimizations when it comes to load the game resources. In short, City Game Studio should start faster and feel smoother in general.

[h2]Interface details[/h2]
Much work has been done this week on the interfaces of City Game Studio. For example, all the panels of the games in development have been overhauled. It's more pleasant to the eye and better optimized. I figured out a trick to avoid using shaders while having the same result, kudos!

As you may know City Game Studio is using Godot Engine v2.1, a rather old version, but it's open source. Thus I can add features and fix bugs that may be present in the engine. Why I'm talking about this, well it concerns directly the interface of City Game Studio. All popup icons are slightly blurred on high resolution screens. I added a scaling system for the popup icons to be able to use high resolution images. As a result, the image is much sharper.

I'm not showing you anything, I'm just talking, it's all voluntary. When the update arrives, on February 21, 2023, I want the announcement to blow your mind. And for that, I need some new images of the game. Obviously if you have already tried City Game Studio on the unstable branch of Steam, you know already how the update should look like, but for the 90% of you who stay on the stable branch, you should like it a lot!

Well, we are already at the end of this post, I hope you liked it!
While waiting for the next update, don't hesitate to play again!

On that note, have a good weekend!
Xavier aka Binogure

Hello folks,

I do hope you like these posts! I intend to write one post a week to update you on the progress of City Game Studio!

Last week I worked hard to optimize City Game Studio, fix bugs and enhance the interface!

[h2]Optimization[/h2]
Buying, selling or even changing studios used to take up to a few seconds, and sometimes even crash the game. I took a look at the studio loading algorithm, and it should take one or two seconds to load the biggest studios, and almost instantaneously to load medium and small studios. When switching between two studios, no studio is displayed, which makes it go faster.

Additional optimizations include the use of ResourcePreloader. A node that I didn't know existed until recently and that is incredibly useful because it allows you to keep previously loaded game scenes rather than loading them into memory each time you use them. Very practical, mainly because it improves the stability of the game on OSX.

[h2]Interface[/h2]
Again there are some changes. New tooltips have appeared. With much more meaningful statements. In fact the interface has been revised to help new players to better understand City Game Studio.

In addition to that, there is a slight redesign of the themes, well, how they are displayed. Instead of showing the first and the last theme, the panel will show the 3 most popular themes.

In fact there are many other changes, and you can already taste them if you switch to the unstable branch of Steam. In the meantime I haven't implemented everything yet, I still have to make a panel for the annual results of your company.

What is sure, is that I am still going to add a lot of features, and still rework a lot of things!

For those who are wondering, the 1.11.0 update should be released on the anniversary of City Game Studio, that is February 21, 2023. It will be 4 years since the game is available on Steam.

On that note, have a good weekend
Xavier aka Binogure