A new digital store, FriendSlop and a ton of fixes

Hey everyone!

I'm thrilled to announce that v1.28.0 is out! This version fixes a ton of bugs, improves performance and adds a lot of content! Lots of fun ahead, so buckle up, I'll walk you through it right now!

The digital store gets a makeover

I'd been wanting to do this for years, and with v1.28 I finally took the time to rework the digital store interface.

The important info is right at your fingertips: you see your revenue first, along with the number of concurrent players. Then come market share, the number of games published, and the slider that sets the cut you take. And finally, the list of digital store features.

And here's the big news. As always, features can be turned off, but now some of them also need a bit of fine-tuning. One is about the digital store's network: it lets you assign a network administrator to reduce server load. The other lets you organize festivals, and once you assign a marketing specialist, everything runs on its own. A great way to boost your game sales!

Feature development has been slightly reworked too. It takes fewer clicks to get the same result. And I know you love this kind of change.

Market research

The old interface was really, really cluttered and pretty hard to understand. Knowing that there were two types of market research, and that you had to juggle both to discover 100% of the tips, was kind of a pain.

So I simplified the interface a lot. There's now only one type of market research, which makes it much easier to unlock all the tips in the game.

And since I was already knee-deep in it, I fixed quite a few bugs. Including one that let you run the same research several times, wasting your money and your time. Not to mention that running the same research twice can be pretty confusing.

The interface

Now let's talk about the game's interface more broadly. The construction panels have been reworked. It's now much easier to tell whether you're building a convention center, a university or a massive studio! The colors change, it looks nice and it's way clearer!

The HR interface is changing too. HR can now send employees on vacation when they're unhappy. Basically, you can say that when an employee's happiness drops below 50%, they go on vacation. Super handy for keeping your team fresh and productive! And on the higher difficulty levels, it helps prevent mass resignations.

The game genre panel got a light rework. Genres that were combinations of other genres are now hidden. Action-Adventure, for example, is hidden since you can build it by combining Action and Adventure. That freed up some room in the genre list, which let me add a brand new genre: FriendSlop. Among Us is the best-known FriendSlop out there. So now you can make your own Among Us in City Game Studio!

Still on the interface side, you can now adjust your own salary. You can either make yourself filthy rich, or save every penny to hold out as long as possible.

Another change that really matters. When you start a new game, the fields are now pre-filled with the settings from your previous games. It's a small detail, but a real quality-of-life boost!

Optimization and bug fixes

Game startup has been reworked yet again to make it even snappier. No more endless waiting: the game loads fast, and it only loads once. In previous versions, once the game had finished loading, well... it loaded all over again. That was entirely my fault: I had a signal firing too early, which made everything load twice. Theme management has also been reworked and uses fewer resources than before.

Now let's talk bug fixes, because there are a lot of them and they make a huge difference!
The very first fix is about interface management. Previously, the game stored every window in an array, which is how it knew which window was on top. The problem was that when lots of windows popped up at once, the window manager could miss one. The result: the game stopped responding, and you had to kill it and restart it. I spent several weeks trying to fix this bug. But I had to face the facts: it was an architectural bug that I could only fix by completely overhauling the window manager. Something I really didn't want to do, because I was afraid of introducing even more bugs. And yet, I tackled the problem head-on and rethought the interface. Now there's no more central array: each window has its own logic, driven by the interface manager. And the interface manager relies on the engine's own features to list the open windows. The result: everything works like a charm, the original bug is fixed, and on top of that it's smoother than before! All good news!

The second critical bug that got fixed was also a crash. Basically, if you had a certain type of USB device plugged into your computer, the game would crash. It all came down to the number of buttons on your USB device. If it had more than 17 buttons, the game crashed. So I patched Godot 2.1 to prevent the crash. It really was something simple, and it affected about 10% of the players who requested a refund on Steam.

Now for the less critical but still important bugs. Contracts weren't being renewed properly. You could end up stuck with contracts on consoles that no longer exist, with no new ones coming in. That's fixed.

Now a small visual bug. When you paused the game, your employees regained their energy. It was purely visual though, because as soon as you unpaused, their energy dropped right back to the correct level.

Another interesting fix for Windows users. When you quit the game, HDR wasn't being restored properly. That's fixed now.

Game of the Year awards got a fix too. Previously, competitors automatically won Game of the Year if there weren't at least 3 game companies around. That was a bit unfair, so it's fixed.

There are tons of fixes that improve the gaming experience, so I invite you to start a new game and check it out for yourself!

The DLC

As you know, I've been working on a DLC: the Supporter Pack. The idea is to give you some extra content that doesn't change the game itself. Basically, you get new logos for your company, a few extra animations when loading a save, slightly different magazines to review your games, extra furniture to place in your studios, and that's about it. So if you're interested in the DLC, it's right here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2893100/City_Game_Studio_Supporter_pack/

What's next

v1.28.0 just came out, and v1.29.0 is already in the pipeline. I promised you I'd work on specialist powers, and I've done part of it. HR now has an extra power, and marketing specialists and network administrators can work on the digital store. But there's still work to do on the marketing specialist side. I'd like them to be more autonomous. But that's for v1.29.0.

I think that covers everything new in City Game Studio! But Fortune Avenue has just left Early Access, so feel free to check it out!

As usual, see you next week for the next v1.29.0 devlog.

In the meantime, take care of yourselves.
Xavier aka Binogure