Hey everyone! Welcome to my first devlog that combines 55 devlogs and whole development process into one devlog!! ːsteamhappyːIt's time to take the step back and take a look at the big picture! We will go through all of the system, and current development status and see how far we have come with all the systems and game development. Enjoy! First of all we will go through all the game design and evolution of the game design during the development process.
Game design has changed and evolved during the development of this game. The idea was open market with many cities, countries and free trade with AI competition in real time. It was even spoken of graphic 2D or 3D for cities and trucks/logistics etc. During the development and my previous experience working with html and building SaaS-Style platform for school project. It hit me, wait, I can build a SaaS-Style platform as a dashboard controller for your business that player controls from their 'office', also, since we need simulation of days, and decisions without having pressure and racing with the time, turn based. You make decision, adjust prices, set routes, and then click next day. And that was it!! It clicked, and I was yes! Using UI Toolkit , decided not even to try using canvas, because UI toolkit/uxml, was perfect for this!
The original idea with many cities, and slowly spreading to others with all products unlocked, was then changed to cross city logistics, whereas each city starts with the different resource, where player has to decide which products to buy and where. Then the further idea development went towards each city having different product needs. Which would mean that each city is producing a different product that is needed for the other city.
So here we were, set in stone ( for now haha) , game starts with few cities, each city has different resources/factories/mines and each city has different variety of products that are needed! Sounds great!
City growth was the original mechanic idea, but now, the growth depends on the tier of city, and the amount of products necessary for the growth of the city. Bigger city needs more products , smaller needs less. After crossing the threshold of the tier limit, the city goes into next tier, demanding more products to keep growing!
Each city has different average salary, wealth index, starting amount of population and other stats.
In total , up to today, we have many systems working together and intertwined to combine and simulate the total decision based economy. We will dive into that more, but for now brief summary. Lets start! :)
What was done: A system that controls the city growth, unlocks products when the city crosses a certain threshold, calculates and creates demand , calculates average salary, wealth status and other city related things.
How it affects the gameplay: It calculates each turn based upon all the data, whether the city grows or shrinks, average salary, and if it should upgrade to new tier, as well as whether and which products it demands.
What was done: Workload necessary for any buildings/trucks/stores to function. Different office, different efficiency per worker, and maximum amount of workers/workload. Not enough office workers would result in the loss of efficiency across all buildings and subdivisions in the given city.
How it affects the gameplay: If there isn't enough workers in the office and there are too many buildings , hubs, workers, the efficiency across all divisions will drop.
What was done: Transport Hub, this is the hub that you have your trucks in, and can use to create routes and logistics to transport goods from your subdivisions, or import/export.
How it affects the gameplay: If you need more trucks to be able to transport goods, you can either upgrade the existing one, or build a new one.
What was done: This is the main mechanic that actually is used to supply the cities with goods. By selling the goods at the right price and right market share, you can get most profit or most satisfaction and city growth!
How it affects the gameplay: If you want to sell goods in a store, or you want to sell more than the size of the store can support, you can either build more stores, or upgrade existing. You also set price for each product at which you want to sell it to the city.
What was done: Most complex system in the whole game. This is split into 2 states. We have state owned industries( or privately owned AI ), where they decide when to grow or shrink, increase or decrease production, adjust prices based upon the current market and global market. The second state is player owned industry. Where player can build different factories and make production chains to produce and then distribute goods to cities helping them grow and getting a better margin than when buying from state owned industries.
How it affects the gameplay: You build industries, develop industry chains through logistical networks with trucks, and transport goods from the suppliers, then produced goods ship to stores or export.
(P.s. sorry for the icons, there is a mistake with icons apparently haha)
What was done: This is a system that controls the Loans, amount of loans that can be taken and interest rate/amount of remaining turns to repay the debt.
How it affects the gameplay: You can take loans, in the certain amount , as it is limited by the assets you have overall. Also, you can choose the interest rate by the length of the credit, whether you want to pay less daily repay rate, or short but paid fast.
What was done: Calculates all the financial transactions and displays them in the Accounting Tab, calculates taxes and other technical stuff :)
How it affects the gameplay: It shows all the data in the Accounting Tab. A ledger with all financial transactions for each day that you can inspect and control.
What was done: Calculates all the assets based upon the city,average salary, wealth, amount of goods, their market and global market price, amount of workers etc. Then displays it in the accounting page, and also serves the purpose of determining the real assets that are used to offer max amount of Loans to player.
How it affects the gameplay: Shows the current assets and calculates how much your company is worth, based upon the state of cities/wealth/ and global market prices. Also determines the selling price for subdivisions.
What was done: One of the most complex systems in the game, it serves the purpose to decide how many people and which product will they buy depending on price and offer of each store, based upon the max amount of store output, and calculate demand for each product afterwards.
How it affects the gameplay: It determines how much of each product is purchased from which store at which price is set by you. Price too high and the purchase amount is greatly reduced, while at cheap good price, it is sold in great numbers :)
What was done: It's a system that trucks use to know where and what to deliver. How much goods can fit in each type of truck, based upon the size of each product. To know, what and where to deliver from each subdivision, import/export. When to charge and when not to charge. The complexity of this system lies in the cross city system, all the possibilities of cross industry/main, intermediate or raw resource product, also where it can deliver goods from and to different cities, as well as import/export outside the country.
How it affects the gameplay: You use it to connect and transport goods, raw resources, products, from and to each building, or simply to export or import it. Also, you can pick from different trucks with different costs per day and cargo capacity.
What was done: This is a system that is essentially the global market, with all the products and prices depend on global events, but they do affect the local producers and industries. Also fuel cost, import goods, and raw resources. A disruption or event in the Global Market System can seriously affect the local prices, and profit margins.
How it affects the gameplay: It affects local prices, local industries and raw resources. Also fuel cost. It also creates and can have global events that severely affect the profit margins and disruption in logistics.
What was done: Different types of warehouses, different capacities and upkeep for each warehouse type.
How it affects the gameplay: This one is straight forward, it can be sent to , or sold to from the warehouse to store, industry, import/export. Can be used to keep resources there for later export/import, or to keep overproduced goods and sell them later when necessary.
What was done: Most of the events have been introduced, warnings , dangers etc. Not yet fully finished.
How it affects the gameplay: It's a system that serves the purpose of firstly notifying player about what has happened in previous day/days, and also as warning player, or reminding about certain construction/upgrade events or dangers like oversupplied stores or negative profit stores.
These are all the systems for now that are all intertwined and interconnected. And that is the beautiful part about this whole system.
Also everything is still being polished, developed and improved!
City average salary and wealth, depends on the amount of people, that depends on amount of supplied goods, upkeep and all construction, each industry, each store, depend on city development status/size/tier, which cost and upkeep cost depend of the development of the current city. As the city grows so does the expenses but also the prices and size of the product markets that the city needs. Global prices affect the local producers and raw resources, fuel, which directly impacts your own profit margins, logistics and trucks transport costs.
Economy of the game is based on supply/demand , market growth, overall population, global events, size and impact of the player company. It is made so it simulates the real economy, real price movement, reacting to the supply and amount of goods accordingly. Oversupplying the economy would result in drop of pricing, undersupply would result in price increase accordingly in most simple terms. The growth of markets/cities and economy in general, result in changes of prices overall.
There are about 50 products all together in-game for now. They include final products, intermediate products and raw resources. They will be all utilized by the player in order to supply the city with required goods to make it grow. (Planned in development is Research and Development which will need to have product/industry blueprint researched before it can be constructed and produced goods).
There is still a long way ahead of us! But very exciting!! Behind us is hundreds and hundreds of hours developing, refactoring and optimising economy and code, but the game is now stable, connected and ready for what is coming next! Some of the future checklist:
Lots of balancing, lots of UI tweaks and changes, visual elements.
Music (partially done), sound design.
Aiming for Steam Next Fest, October 2026
Lots of bugs...yes, the ones you only noticing by calculating yourself why was I charged 'that upkeep' when it clearly says 'this' hahaha.
Add it to the wishlist if you haven't already because we are approaching new heights!! kidding. Thank you!
-Andrija L.