Cities: Skylines II News

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Hello everyone! It’s time for another development diary, the last one in our mini-series taking you behind the scenes. Today, we take a look at the tutorials available in the game, how they work, and what kind of helpful information they provide.

Our goal with the tutorials in Cities: Skylines II is to provide you with a thorough introduction to the game and guide you toward building a successful city. While we had small in-game guides in Cities: Skylines to explain different services or features, they were quite limited, so we developed a new system for Cities: Skylines II to help both players familiar with its predecessor and players new to the genre.

Tutorials can be enabled at the beginning of the game and function as a guide bringing you essential information on how to start a city. They provide easy step-by-step instructions on the basic city needs and help set up the city for future growth. As the game progresses, the steps of the tutorials provide more information and fewer step-by-step guides letting you take the reins and choose the direction for your city. Tutorials have no time limit on how long to take on each step and are shown for services and panels when the service or panel is opened.

Tutorials work together with tooltips and other information in panels, which provide more in-depth information about what the feature is, while tutorials focus more on how and where to build and place the feature. Together they provide a good overview of how to use each feature to make a successful city.

For beginners, the tutorials provide an easy start with more guided and instructional beginning with additional information and hints as the city expands and more features are opened. For experienced players, the tutorials provide information on the features that are new and a helpful resource if stuck on something or uncertain about how a feature works. Tutorials are optional and can be turned on or off at any time, and even when turned off they are easy to reach in the Advisor found at the top-right of the screen. Just open the panel and select the feature you want to learn more about.

There is also an option to restart or continue the tutorials. These options can be used on the same map while continuing to build the city already started, or on a new map, with a new city.


[h2]STARTING WITH TUTORIALS[/h2]
At the beginning of the tutorials, there are a few basic instructions on how to move around. These are called Camera Controls and will get you started. In addition to the basic camera movements, there are quite a few keyboard shortcuts to use. The keyboard shortcuts are listed in the options menu under Input. Each one can be changed from the default to whatever feels most comfortable, and reset bindings will restore them to the default settings if the need arises.

Camera Controls Tutorial cards appear in the middle of the screen and display the appropriate instructions depending on whether the game uses a keyboard and mouse or a controller. When the movement has been successfully completed, the instruction text will turn green and the next step is shown.


[h2]HOW TO BUILD A CITY[/h2]
Once you have a hang of the controls, it’s time to build a city. The tutorials give you a short list of tasks to fulfill which cover the basic needs of a city. Each task has the goal of building an essential utility for the city and showing the very basics of road building and how to zone. These task tutorials are aimed at new players and beginners but contain information about new features in familiar services for experienced players. When the tasks are done, the city is ready to start growing and expanding with more services and controls. During the task list, tutorials are not skippable but become skippable when the list has been completed.

TASKS in the task list are tutorials that will start by pressing the play button. You can take as much time with each tutorial as you need, and return to any of them to look through the information or do the tutorial again, by pressing the play button. Tasks will remain gray and locked until the previous task has been done.


[h2]DIFFERENT TYPES OF TUTORIAL STEPS[/h2]
Tutorials are broken down into a few different types of steps with guides to help you find the relevant place to go. There are balloons that point to features, center cards with information, and task cards that have instructions on how to build something.

FIRST STEP BALLOON
The first step balloon points to the item it’s talking about and highlights it with a green outline around the icon. These give overall information about the features, like roads or services, and the green outline is animated to encourage you to click the icon and open the menu to move to the next tutorial step. If the panel or service is closed before the tutorial is finished the green outline will appear around appropriate icons and tabs to show you where to go.

The green blinking outline guides you to where the service or feature is found. To move the tutorial forward to the next step, the icon needs to be selected.

BALLOON STEPS
Balloon steps are next. These point to things like assets and tools. You can freely move backward and forward through these steps to get familiar with the tools and controls before moving on to building. These steps will point out some of the common useful tools and their controls, highlighting new additions that might go unnoticed otherwise. The explanations are short and more details are displayed in the tooltips or panels about the feature in question if you want to learn more.

The balloon step will point to the feature it’s talking about. The number between the arrows shows what step you are in, and how many steps there are in total. When the tutorial has been completed once, the steps become closable.

TASK CARDS
Task Cards are often the last step of a tutorial sequence. Task cards are instructions on how and where to build and will complete the tutorial when done, though not all tutorial sequences have a card with a task at the end. Tasks are given when there is something to build. While the task list is active there are more of these task cards, but once it’s completed the task cards will show up only for more complex builds like public transportation. The text will scroll if it’s too long to fit in the space and the card can be minimized while building without closing the tutorial. To minimize the card, close and re-open the card with the small arrow on the title bar.

Task cards have an image, text, and if relevant guides to keys or selection buttons to use. When the task has already been done once there will be a checkmark next to the card number to close and finish the tutorial without needing to complete the task again.

CENTER CARD
Center Cards are used when there is no specific icon, tool, or panel to point to. These will show you information about things like info views and might pop up to draw attention to a new type of problem in the city. Center cards can be looked through by selecting the arrow. When the card includes a task, the panel will close after the task is done or it can be closed without completing the task.




[h2]HINTS[/h2]
What’s the difference between a hint and a tutorial? Hints are tutorials that pop up between the task list tutorials and are short information balloons that don’t have a task and can be closed once read. Hints point out tools that are particularly useful at the moment. After the hint has been shown it will appear at the bottom of the task list and can be accessed later in the Advisor along with all the other tutorials.

Hints point out things that could be handy to know. They don’t need any action and if the information is not useful at the moment they can be closed. If you want to see a hint again select it in the task list or Advisor and it will open.


[h2]TUTORIALS AFTER THE TASK LIST[/h2]
After the task list is done, the tutorials will show up when a new service or panel is opened for the first time. New features have a green indicator at the top right corner of its icon. These tutorials function the same as they did during the task list, except that they can be closed at any step and don't need to be completed. When they are closed they will be added to the Advisor where they can be opened again at any time.

Tutorials will open when a new service or panel is opened. New services will be unlocked as the city grows.


[h2]TEXT HIGHLIGHT[/h2]
Text Highlights are bolded text in the tutorial that shows the most relevant information in that tutorial. Reading just the bolded text will give the short answer to what the feature is and the rest of the text adds more detail. There is a lot of information to read when combining all the tutorials, tooltips, and panels, and highlights give you a quicker way to scan the information and pick what interests you the most at the moment.

Highlighted text is bolded and is the core of the information in the tutorial.


[h2]ADVISOR[/h2]
After the task list is completed the Advisor will appear in the top-right corner of the screen, or if you play with tutorials turned off, it will be available from the start. Simply select the question mark to open the Advisor and access its collection of all the tutorials in the game. Tutorials are divided into five groups: Services, City, Info Views & Notifications, Citizens, and Interface & Tools. Under these groups, you will find subgroups like Electricity where all the tutorials relevant to that service can be found. To expand or close a group select the small arrow icon and select the tutorial to open it. If the tutorial has more than one step, select the top step or skip to any step you want to start from. Steps are marked with a small dot to make them easily recognizable. Tutorials are added to the list when services or panels are unlocked.

The Advisor collects all tutorials that have been completed for later use if needed. When tutorials are off, all tutorials are added to the advisor without being played.


[h2]STARTING WITHOUT TUTORIALS[/h2]
You can choose not to have tutorials on and open them manually from the Advisor if you need them later on. Only the tutorials for the services and features that have been unlocked will be visible in the Advisor, and each time a service or feature is unlocked the tutorials relevant to them will be added. Tutorials can be turned on and started at any point, even after a city has grown to a larger size. Tutorials provide information on what’s new and how old and improved services work. With the tooltips and panel information you can either take a quick look or a deep dive into how things function in the game.

That concludes our behind-the-scenes development diaries. We hope you enjoyed this look at our goals and philosophy behind certain aspects of the game and a peek at our processes for bringing it all to life. If you’d enjoy more of these, don’t hesitate to let us know what kind of topics you’d love for us to cover. For now, we’ll be counting the hours to release as we’re so excited for you to finally get your hands on Cities: Skylines II.

Hi and welcome back to another development diary for Cities: Skylines II! We’ve talked about the people living in your cities before, their wants and needs, and how they affect the simulation, but today we focus on the models themselves, our goals for them, and the process of how they came to be.

From the very start, we had a distinct goal: we wanted a clear and definite upgrade from Cities: Skylines in all aspects. The new Photo Mode camera allows you to get pretty close, so citizens had to have a level of detail to match this. But we also wanted our citizens to have much more variation to create a more inclusive and realistic gaming world. It was essential to us that the characters in Cities: Skylines II represent a broad spectrum of humanity, including different ethnicities and body types.

Achieving this diversity required a flexible and efficient system for creating character models across all the different age groups of the game. It was clear that a tool was needed to combine all those aspects and on top of that a great variety of hair, clothes, and accessories needed to be added. Lastly, it was also a major requirement that animations should work with any type of character model regardless of the body type.

Real cities are full of diverse people and we wanted Cities: Skylines II to reflect that reality


[h2]POPUL8[/h2]
This is where Popul8 comes into play. We partnered with Didimo, who created the Popul8 character design software that perfectly addresses our design needs: Create a lot of varied characters quickly and easily. We had our own art style for the characters and for this, Didimo created a base mesh to represent that style. With this external tool groups of citizens could easily be created for different seasons, age groups, and jobs, and then these could be imported into the game.

We had a set of early placeholder characters during development, which did not have much variety, so getting the first batch of final characters into the game was quite exciting for us. Suddenly the game came alive with a myriad of people walking the streets, doing yoga in the park, or taking selfies in front of interesting buildings. It brought in both young and old, tall and short, heavy and light citizens of all different ethnicities, bringing realism and diversity to the city. And when they started to choose their clothing according to the temperature, we took another exciting step toward more realistic citizens.

A sneak peek at how characters are created in Popul8


[h2]GROUP OF CHARACTERS[/h2]
As we wanted a lot of variation in the game, this meant a lot of character models. The game has children, teens, adults, and seniors all of which need to be done separately and set up so that their physical appearance remains the same through all ages. Some might change their hairstyle or gain or lose some weight but in general, they are recognizable throughout their lifetime. When working on new characters, we usually create a group of 100 characters with similar setups at the same time. As an example, let’s say it’s a group of adult people during wintertime.

100 adults in winter gear in Popul8. Color variations for hair and clothing are not shown as these are set in-game.

HOW IT’S DONE
We have several sliders which control variables for age, tall or short, thin or fat. There are also several sliders for different ethnicities to ensure the characters look just right. As this is a group of adults the age slider is set to about middle with some allowed variance. Other sliders can have full range to give the group a good variety of height, build, and ethnicity. Next, we create sets of winter boots, jackets, trousers, headgear, and accessories from which clothing is randomly picked to form the characters in Popul8. Additionally, we have several versions of hair and tattoos for even more variety.

Once the characters are generated, they are checked to avoid any combinations that look way off. Some weirdness is okay, we want characters to reflect experimenting with different styles, but occasionally some just go a little too far from reality. Once we are happy with the group, it is exported from Popul8 and then imported into the game.

INGAME SETTINGS
The original texture assets are usually a neutral gray to allow for even more variations of color for the clothing, hair, and accessories. Once in the game, artists choose color palettes for the characters. It’s a fine balance between too garish or too dull and we have included both common and rare color choices to represent the variations you find in real life. Some people love a splash of color while others prefer more muted tones, and our character models should represent that.

Selecting a jacket for the character

Getting your hair done


[h2]CHALLENGES[/h2]
There were quite a few challenges with the character models for Cities: Skylines II. Some of these challenges were technical and expected, like what is the art style, what are the proper blend shapes, how clothes work when they are layered on top of each other, and how to compress animations. Other challenges were trickier to solve, like how different sizes of characters fit onto motorcycles or retargeting animations for children so they all look correct. Then there was just picking clothing combinations that looked realistic but interesting and not too odd - that was more of a fun challenge and it was great to see all the possibilities of the tools.

Looking to the future, we want to add more variations in character blend shapes, clothing, and pretty much all aspects of character models, so the city has a wider spectrum of citizens. This also includes animations and accessories for disabled characters and much more. While we have many ideas ourselves, we are always eager to hear from you about the kind of citizens you would like to see and which ones grow to become your favorites.

This brings us to the end of this development diary and we hope you enjoyed another peek behind the curtain. We’re back tomorrow with the last of this mini-series, where we cover the Tutorials & Advisor and how they can help you build the city of your dreams.

Hello and welcome! It’s a new day and that means a new Cities: Skylines II development diary. Today we take a look at the companies and billboards in the game. In the effort to make a more realistic city-building game, we have given companies and their billboards a significant upgrade from the original Cities: Skylines. Companies now play a role in the game mechanics, and billboards represent the companies that reside in the buildings.

Cities: Skylines II introduces companies as a working entity. They will move into the city if there is enough demand and influence the availability of jobs and the type of education needed. Companies contribute to city wealth and can import and export goods from outside the city. These features can greatly influence how you build public transportation within the city and outside connections to neighboring cities. The types of industries that are in the city also impact the types of companies that move in. Industry types will attract companies that can utilize the materials from those industries.

So let’s dive right in and start looking at all the different ways this shows up in the gameplay.


[h2]COMPANIES[/h2]
Billboards have a function and meaning beyond being static advertisements on buildings. After a location has been zoned, companies that operate in that zone type can start to move in. When a company moves into the building it will display its logo on the billboard. The amount, size, and style of billboards on a building varies and is not the same each time the building appears in the game. For the company to stay in the location it will need utilities, materials, and workers, while also being profitable. Access to the location plays a big part in this as does the level of education in the city. Cargo routes can be a great help in keeping companies in business. You can learn more about all of this in our previous development diary Economy & Production.

The company that moves into a building will have its logo on the billboards of the building

BUILDING COLORS
When a company moves in they can also paint the building in the company colors. Different buildings may take on more color from the logo than others. The color can show up as a highlight color in the details of the building or as the main wall color. Some buildings can have more than one color from the logo in different elements.

Companies have three colors picked from the company logo that are used as color variants in the buildings

COMPANY CHIRPS
Chirps inform you about what’s happening in the city. Citizens chirp about their lives and service providers about how the services are working. Companies also chirp about moving in, opening new locations, open positions, and more. They can be found in the chirper along with the other chirps. Companies show an icon of their logo next to their name, and the street address of their location is often in the chirp.

Selecting the street address highlighted with green will focus the camera on the location of the company

COMPANY PRODUCTION CHAIN
Companies are a part of the production chain, and one company can own and operate a production chain from harvesting and storing raw materials to producing and selling a final product to customers. Each company has a zone type where they can operate and a material they produce or sell.

One company can be seen in several facilities in different stages of the production chain


[h2]BILLBOARDS[/h2]
Before a company has moved into a building the billboards will advertise space available in that location. These were designed to make it easier to spot where there are still empty buildings without a company.

There are a few variations on the empty space available advertisements, but they can all be easily recognized from further away by the similar blue color scheme.

COLOR VARIETY
Creating a large amount of logos in a variety of styles to make sure no one color dominates the billboard landscape proved an interesting puzzle to solve. Our approach was to make a chart with the background colors in columns and build a logo on top. The tricky part was to add an equal amount of logos to each column while keeping the colors and logos different enough from each other. There are some old familiar names from Cities: Skylines that have gotten a makeover and plenty of new ones. The brands also include a few nods to our developers and some word plays.

Example of some of the logos for companies arranged by color, to make sure enough color variation is present.

ACCESSIBILITY
With the colors chosen, it was time to make sure that each logo was distinct and readable. That meant checking that some logos were darker, some were lighter, and that there were some bright colors and some muted tones. In this process, we also made sure that each logo was readable for the colorblind. Finding the color combinations that would fulfill all these criteria was quite challenging and a little frustrating at times, but one of the most interesting and fun things to figure out.

Here is an example of logos checked for Deuteranopia and Protanopia.

That’s it for today. We hope you enjoyed this look at what’s behind the billboards and a sneak peek at all the brands available in the game. We continue this series tomorrow where we go behind the scenes of the Citizen Characters, so stay tuned.