Neongarten 1.3 has been released! This update includes a new Endless Mode option from the Victory screen. If you win a game, you'll have the chance to push your luck even farther. Endless Mode was something that players have been asking for for a while, but I've resisted adding in for two reasons. The first thing to consider is performance. Unlike other games of its ilk, Neongarten has a permanent playing field. You add a building and it's there forever. Buildings and their 3D models have lights, textures, animations and so on, and the game (at least on my five-year-old laptop) can already chug a little bit once it gets to Day 64. Especially if I'm using lots of neon. I wasn't sure if the game's performance would suffer too much if any given player got to, say, day 128. The second thing was a game design conundrum. Neongartern is what I call a "broken build" game - discovering (and then building up to) building combos and synergies that make boatloads of cash. I didn't want a situation where the player is just waiting for their weekly rent to slowly increase past what their nightly income (based on some uber-combo) can sustain. Boring! I think I've solved the problem to my satisfaction. Endless mode unlocks and you can build upwards. But! The player doesn't actually get any more play area to build in. When you unlock a new layer, your oldest layer (the bottom-most one) gets taken out of the play space. The buildings are still there, but they just won't generate any new income or contribute to other nearby buildings. That way, you still gotta struggle to make it past the next week. (And the rapidly increasing rent amounts will quickly deplete any existing stockpiles of cash.) I'm hoping that this solution strikes a nice balance between acknowledging earlier uber-combos while still maintaining a certain level of challenge.
(Of course, I could be wrong! Let me know, haha.)
Happy building!