Summer Islands News

Hello together,

it's been 3 weeks since the last update. Sometimes the "day job" is holding you up longer and lately in Germany also the weather. At 40° Celsius one would rather not switch on any heat-producing devices in the apartment.
But don't worry. We are constantly working on Summer Islands and would like to present you version 0.1.5 today.

So what's new for you in version 0.1.5:
First of all we were extremely happy about the pictures that some of you uploaded to Steam. We think it's really great to see your holiday paradises and how you earn your money. But we were also a bit surprised how you could earn so much money in such a short time. We know that we have to implement some goals in Summer Islands, like a highscore list that you can share with friends or some missions.

The first step was to improve the finetuning building a bit. This only happened slightly. But I guess you will notice an effect during the game.
In detail, we have reduced the advertising boost and the neighboring buildings flow more into the buildings popular.
The bots also build more densely than before. This way you don't get so often the chance to place your buildings in another player's city.

To increase the player ergonomics we have added the possibility to select your desired position from the icon menu bar.
Moving the mouse to every edge of the screen is fun but time consuming. But everyone as he wants it to be.



Furthermore we fixed some smaller bugs. The construction crane animation didn't run through properly or even the creation of airplanes, cars or ships is now calculated differently based on: Popularity of the building + number of already created objects + a bit of chance.
But what we only noticed now: The demolition and the sabotage explosions animation were no longer visible. Unfortunately two lines of code were missing. In some Let's Plays that was a good laugh. Because you tore something down and suddenly the house was gone, just with one click.



A propro Let's plays. The requests for free CD-Keys have fortunately decreased. Also some negative reviews were preceded by unanswered requests.
Nevertheless, we can say as a conclusion:
Also Let's Plays that were clicked more than 100.000 times didn't give us any change in the purchase statistics. We as a 3-person developer team, which operates Summer Islands only as a sideline, it's relative whether a marketing strategy is successful or not. But I personally prefer to play a game myself rather than have it pretend. Everyone sees it differently, of course. I just wanted to address the issue of influence and doubt the marketing strategy, at least in the gaming industry. Probably it depends also strongly on the Influencer and their Community. Nevermind.

We are looking forward to providing you with new Summer Islands updates and hope you have fun with Summer Islands.

https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands



-SERVER: reduce advertising Boost
-SERVER: neighbor buildings Boost
-CLIENT: Build field/Sabotage/Destruction Animation Bug Fix
-CLIENT: Moveable Objects depending on: Popularity of the building + number of already created objects + a bit of chance
-CLIENT: flexible MenuIcons position
-SERVER/CLIENT: Javascript stability/efficiency

Hello together,

the first stress has gone and we get into the mode to release new features. Additionally there is also Steam Summer Sale and of course everyone is busy with sales of other games :)
We've gathered all the feedback and packed with our ideas. Out came a Trello board where you can see a lot about the future planning of Summer Islands. It's not yet so perfectly arranged and colored. So WIP:
https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands

But let's get to the innovations for this week:
Today we proudly present the Linux Support. Some bugs and implementations had to be done. But we made it to the end. The MAC support mentioned above is still in progress. We are still testing and hope for positive results.
Since we are not the experts of Linux and MAC we hope for your help to fix bugs. In addition I would like to refer to the "BUG REPORTS" rider in the discussions:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/731650/discussions/

Of course we also implemented some small things that disturbed you.
The button for infinite money will still not be available! :D Little joke.

As a small change we have arranged the New History antichronologically. So the latest news are always at the top of the window. This way you don't always have to scroll and we should have integrated it right away.

Furthermore, we have looked at the compulsion to road connections and loosened this a bit. For some buildings there is now the possibility to place them a little away from the street without getting losses. There may be a maximum of 2 fields distance to the next street, no matter in which direction.
Currently the buildings can be: beach volleyball, tennis, beach chairs, ice shop and surf shop.
But we are still considering to mark this directly in the building menu with a small icon or something.

(Picture will be handed in later. Steam overload.)

The campsite has also been upgraded. As soon as a campsite is connected to a street, you can build as many campsites as you like on it and the others on it. Thus a large camp site can be realized. However, at least one camp site must be connected to a street. Somewhere the visitors have to get to the campsite.

That was it for this week and we hope you are looking forward to the coming weeks/months, just like we are:
https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands



-LINUX support
-CLIENT: News History antichronological
-SERVER: Streetnetwork: a few buildings can have two fields between building and street to connect (Beach volleyball, tennis, beach chairs, ice shop and surf shop)
-SERVER: Tents can connect other tents if one tent is connected with street.

Hello together,

it's really been a few hectic weeks since the last blog entry. We are really happy that we are mostly rated positive on Steam. But let's start chronologically from the beginning. What's happened since the last blog entry.



The two weeks before our release on 21.06 we had made ourselves a good plan. What things still have to be integrated. What definitely has to run stable. We have divided up our time well and have tackled things with priorities. It was really hard to let go sometimes.
Unfortunately we were a bit too optimistic with the submission to Steam. Over the last weekend Steam had checked the game for the first time. Unfortunately many critical results came back there. So we had to deactivate a lot of things for the first time in order to submit the game again as soon as possible. We did that on the Monday before the release. MUCH TOO SHORT!! As already said we had to switch off many things. Mainly the operating system support like Linux and MAC. But that should be only temporary. We all work in our team with Windows. Therefore we never had the possibility to test MAC or Linux. Only after the release we switched on the virtual machine and started Linux. But more about that later. So we switched off many features and hoped that Steam would check the game before the 21.06. That went almost wrong. Because in the morning on 21.06 we received the feedback that Summer Islands was ready for Early Access.
To be honest that was quite a relief. Because Q2 2019 was only June and there were a lot of Steam comments asking for a release day.
So we were lucky again.
But now came the much bigger task. We released Summer Islands with the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere on 21.06 at shortly after 12 o'clock. It was an incredible feeling. Even if it was just a click on a button somewhere in the Steamworks account.

With the release came the first problems. Due to our limited hardware test possibilities one could of course not test the almost infinite number of hardare combinations. This was already pre-programmed that some errors would come. We were always awake the weekend immediately after the release to fix the bugs. In summary, we did our best. There were a few bugs with the different hardware. But also errors with variable declarations in rare cases. In the end we managed to fix the biggest bugs and with the current version 0.1.3 Summer Islands is enjoyable. For all of you who WANT to enjoy Summer Islands!!

Nowadays you have to emphasize such sentences a bit more. Because some negative ratings simply cannot be understood. Give money back and still give a negative rating. We have often mentioned that Summer Islands will not be a substitute for childhood memories. Even if we have integrated a similar concept and much more Features into Summer Islands. Tip on the side: you don't have to flatten an entire island to build buildings. But we're working on another conzept.

Therefore we are twice and three times grateful to you for the many positive reviews and emails with feedback. The people who understood the meaning of Early Access. The people who even take the time to send us suggestions for improvement. With all these people who follow us on twitter, support us on steam or wherever and motivated us, recommended us to others, to these people we want to say THANK YOU!
Without you the game would not have been possible.

So and what comes now?
We continue to work as before and even better. Because we work with even more feedback from you. We already have a rough roadmap which we want to show you in the next weeks. But all in all there will be things like that:
-complex nature (more alive)
-Call integration with impact
-Many more consultants
-Weather Forecast
-Other catastrophes
-Campaigns
-BOT Increase difficulty
-....
-....

I hope you notice that there will be a lot more to come. It is still screwed at all places and we try to consider each feedback and if possible to integrate it.

So we hope you'll give us the opportunity to implement the planned features and we promise you Summer Islands will develop its potential in the game feel yet.

The finanz icon works again after loading a game. :)
We worked on the BOTs init method after loading a game.
And in the end we integrated a reload init method after a black screen when starting the game.


-CLIENT: Finanz menu date obejct BUG FIX
-CLIENT: Canvas init reload after error
-SERVERCLIENT: Javascript stability/efficiency extended.

We hope the freezes are now complete gone. :)


-SERVERCLIENT: Javascript stability/efficiency extended.