Hello everyone!
It's back-to-school season, and v1.28 is coming up fast. I've planned to release it on September 23rd, 2026! There you go, I've dropped the release date for v1.28.0! I hope you're just as excited as I am for this update!
This week's recap
Since we're getting close to the release date for v1.28, this version only contains fixes, and rather minor ones. Let's start with save management. It could happen that if you loaded a save while already in-game, well, it just wouldn't work. So I spent quite a bit of time testing to track down the bug and finally fix it. It was a simple fix, yet a necessary one.
Another, slightly odd bug concerned employees. When you paused the game, their energy bar would still go up. Meaning they could end up going on vacation while the game was paused. This little bug took me longer than expected, since normally, when the game is paused, the energy bar's animations are supposed to be paused too. But that wasn't the case. So I reworked that part and completely disabled animations when the game is paused, to avoid this kind of small bug.
The last bug is a nasty one, and fixing it took me the rest of the week. It concerns how City Game Studio manages its interface. Basically, every time a panel is displayed, the game stores that panel's information in an array. The game then uses that array to know how many popups are currently displayed. In the vast majority of cases, that works fine. But there are certain edge cases where a popup ends up not being properly registered in the array, and so it's no longer accounted for by the game. Yet that popup is still there, and that's what causes the bug.
So what's the bug, you'll ask? Great question. In that case, the popup is present in the game, it's invisible, but it blocks all interaction with the game. In other words, you can't click on anything at all, yet the game isn't frozen, it still responds fine, but that hidden popup blocks every interaction.
While this only happens rarely, it's a major issue, since it pauses the game and blocks all progress. So I completely reworked how popups are managed, so that the interface manager dynamically asks how many popups are currently present in the game, instead of storing each popup in an array. That way, even if two popups appear at the same time, it's not a problem, since the interface manager will dynamically count the popups present.
Put like that, it sounds pretty simple, but I had to do a full pass over every interface in the game to make sure they all worked correctly. And to really put it to the test, I used a tool called an auto-clicker. That let me simulate 1,000 clicks per second while spawning about a hundred popups. Result: it works well and it's rock solid. So I'm happy with the outcome.
What's coming next
So I'm pretty happy with myself, the game is fairly stable now, and quite a few bugs have been fixed. As a result, I'm going to allow myself to work on adding features. I'll admit that during my long testing session, I had a lot of fun doing a full run of City Game Studio, but I would have liked more impactful in-game events.
I did have events that had an impact on me. Fans asking for an update, or a sequel. A theme becoming popular after a game's release, interviews, console or exclusivity contract negotiations. That's already quite a few events. But I think we're missing events involving employees. In the end, you interact a lot with the different players in the video game world, manufacturers, journalists, players, but rarely with your own employees.
So that's what I'm going to focus on. That's it for me, this devlog is already over, thank you for reading.
See you next week,
In the meantime, take care of yourselves
Xavier aka Binogure