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Foundation

A New Era of Organic City-Building Simulation!

Devlog #16

Greetings Lords and Ladies!

With the new UI out it’s a good time to take a look at what else we have been working on and where our focus is now headed.

Before we do though, we would like to mention our growing team here at Polymorph Games. As a relatively new indie studio we are always looking to expand the team and as such we have seen some new faces since the last Devlog.

We have recently been joined by a senior gameplay programmer that will help us as we move our focus to new and improved gameplay features. We also have been swelled in ranks by a new engine programmer as well as a gameplay programmer that is completing an internship with us.

Getting back to the team’s focus, the first thing of note is that in a revised change to our roadmap earlier this year, we are planning to bring you a game update in the Autumn/Fall whilst in the background we also work toward the bigger Core II update.

Let’s take a look at what the team has been working on…

Art

The art team have been hard at work overhauling the current buildings to create a more cohesive and detailed style throughout the game.

You can see an example below of the completed bakery revamp in all its splendor.

Before/after shot of the Bakery

You’ll see the majority of these as part of a larger update, most likely sometime next year, however we will be bringing 2 new buildings to the game much sooner that have been designed from the ground up with the new and improved styling already implemented.

Currently the focus is on these two buildings which will see both a Candle Workshop as well as a Common Wares Workshop added to the game in the Fall Update. Check out some concept art of the Common Wares Workshop below.

Common wares workshop concept art
Gameplay

In the longer term the gameplay team is now focused on Core Update II which will see a complete overhaul of the Estate system and progression. The final design of the Estate system overhaul is now almost complete and work has begun on its implementation. The team are also working on balancing tools to make for easier balancing as we add more content to the game.

In the more immediate future however, the team has also been working on implementing a new feature for the Fall Update that will bring more immersion when building your village. This feature will see construction step bundles implemented to the game.

These bundles will create a more logical construction process, where materials will be required on construction sites in a relevant order. For example a building’s foundation/basement will be built first and require a specific portion of the overall building resources on site before construction begins. The next step might be walls that require the next bundle of resources.

Construction step bundles essentially break down the overall resource requirements into separate bundles that need to be delivered to construction sites prior to builders starting work on each construction step.

UI/UX

We are still working to further improve the UI with subsequent updates such as the recent UI/UX patch. We still have many more improvements to come.

To this end, the UI/UX team is working on a number of important small improvements and fixes that will come in the Fall Update. Alongside this the team is also working on UX design for the bigger core update, in support of the Estates overhaul, which will require a number of new screens and information panels.

Game Engine & Modding

As you can probably imagine the Engine team is busy working to support any processes that the whole team are working on, such as new Hurricane editor tools for feature integration.

Furthermore the team continues to collate and analyse any crash reports coming in and fixing any instability as quickly as possible. Our crash rate is at an all time low with the biggest crash issue now being graphics drivers. Note: if you are experiencing any crashing on startup please update your GPU drivers with (importantly) a clean install of the GPU drivers.

Modding is also one of the larger projects for the Engine team which has seen them continue to work on exposing more features, such as exposing the mandate system to create custom mandates. They have also been looking to support modders even further with work on Lua debugging support.

In addition to this we continue to work closely with the modding community to gather modding feedback and suggestions, as well as look at ways to improve our feedback gathering to better support the modding community.

We will bring you more news as soon as we have it and keep an eye on our social media channels for more teasers, as we get closer to the Fall Update release.

 

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