Last week, we talked about the stress factor that shapes our dreams and said that we'd be able to build our personalities in the dream universe. Maybe, it's better, for now, to talk about how we accumulate the stress and deal with it in Circadian City.
During the day, we should take care of a lot of things: Money, hunger, energy, sociability, happiness, and stress. According to these, we developed the mood metric system.
The stress is the only metric the player try to keep low. There are many stress factors in the game. Higher stress affects the subconscious and dreams of the character as well as the quality of work, while low stress causes a decrease in overall productivity.
The stress level plays also a huge role in the sociability as well. If you are too stressed in the game, you won't be able to communicate with strangers. They may call you "crazy". But, how to lower the stress level? Maybe, you might ask your best friend for help or think about going to some relaxing activities. After all, it's totally up to you and your personality type.
Moods define what you can and you can not do in the game. Even the romance works the same way.
Do you want to fall in love? Just find your right mood and a good match.
ART PROGRESS
We decided to use our Twitter account in a more active way. So, we focused on our marketing assets last week. If you are interested to know about other Circadian City Citizens, we advise you to follow us twitter.com/circadiancity .
Have a wonderful weekend, dear citizen and feel free to ask any questions in the comments and discussions.
See you next week.
WU#2
Relax and sleep on it
Hi Circadian City Citizen,
It's time to talk about the unique part of our game: you can play the dreams in it. Maybe it's a bit early to describe what it means "dream" in Circadian City. But we can reveal the idea behind the dream universe of our game.
We believe that we build our personalities while sleeping. Generally, during the day - in real life-, we cannot find time to evaluate our feelings and/or our thoughts. Most of the time, we let ourselves go with the flow, and then we sleep on it. This is where our subconscious starts to work. It helps us to see what we missed during the day.
The critical question for us as the developers of the game was to define what triggers a light dream or a nightmare. So, we created the stress level in the game. During the daytime of the game, you need to take care of your stress because that's going to shape your dream. If you are too stressed, you'll probably end up with a nightmare, and if you don't make the right moves in the dream state, you won't wake up full energetically.
Stress accumulates over time, and it is possible to reduce it or decrease the rate of accumulation with specific activities and some cooking recipes, but having lots of energy and happiness helps a lot, as they reduce the rate of accumulation dramatically.
So this is the primary explanation behind the dream.
GAME ART PROGRESS
We have nearly finished the financial district: Jules Street. We are still working on the lights, but to give you some idea, we share the M Bar visuals with you. We hope you'll like it.
Don't forget to stop by M Bar. The barman of the place, Marlon, has a fascinating story to tell you.
Have a wonderful weekend, dear citizen and feel free to ask any questions in the comments and discussions.
See you next week.
WU#1
Be my friend, please
Hi Circadian City Citizen,
We want to keep you informed about how our game evolves each week.
Mainly, our primary focus will be the game design and visuals. Hope you'll like them.
This week is about our game design. Let's start with some motivational questions :)
We spent a lot of time thinking about how we become friends with someone, especially in a big city such as ours.
What does it mean "close friend"?
How many close friends can we handle in our lives? Is it the same amount for an introvert and an extrovert person?
Where is the line between friend and best friend?
Sure, it's tough to simulate the real life, but, we may have found answers to these questions in Circadian City. So, we've created degrees of relationships in the game: Stranger - Acquaintances - Casual Friend - Close Friend .
All you need to do is to chat with other people... to find something to talk about... to share the same interests with them...
and much more...
Here is a challenging question for us: How do you understand that your best friend is not your best friend anymore? It's better to experience Circadian City to see our answer.
GAME ART PROGRESS
On the visual side, we were working on the financial district of Circadian City: Jules Street. Your office will probably be here, and also if you are looking for fine dining or excellent cocktails to drink after work, this is the place to find it.
Who knows, maybe one Friday night you'll come across an opening at Slowdive Art Gallery or you will have a game of darts with your friends in Brogue - The Irish Tavern.
Have a wonderful weekend, dear citizen and feel free to ask any questions in the comments and discussions.
See you next week.
Thank you for the love so far, weekly updates are coming.
Hello everyone,
We are a bunch of monkeys who were working on a script of Hamlet and we found ourselves developing Circadian City by an accident.
As a strange twist of fate, it seems that people like the concept of a life sim in a big city where we develop our personality in our dreams.
So we decided, we should keep you less stressed about the status of development by weekly updates on Steam and with the help of a newsletter.
In this update, I would like to tell you about how this journey started.
A very brief resume of humankind that are not so kind all the time
A little while after the vertebrates leaving the oceans, some mammals adapted to the new environment and created a game called "The Sims".
Humans are known to fascinate the idea of projecting themselves on a platform and looking at their lives from a 3rd point of view since they've been painting on caves walls. Sims, helped that habit particularly well.
Some time after, another monstrosity came to life and it caused the space-time continuum to shift due to the dangerously high levels of cuteness generated from it. It was Stardew Valley.
Stardew Valley seemed to satisfy all the needs of humans except the ones necessary for survival and reproduction. Some argue that it was the highest intellectual creation of humankind only to be compared with a cold beer in the afternoon.
Our monkeys, charged with the crimes of developing Circadian City are found playing these two games for no apparent reason. Later investigations showed the excessive amounts of playtimes on their Steam and Play Station accounts.
It is still unknown if it was Nowhere Studios convincing Way Down Deep or vice versa to start working on a game like Circadian City. But it is believed that the concept below was the unusual halt of the Hamlet writing task.
https://youtu.be/N5JwTbbEjw4
Go to our webpage to join the newsletter and learn more about the project. You will be awarded by an exclusive ingame item. It will be a very useless item. Probably the most useless item in the game. Exclusively for you.
Join Our Discord for a chance to our closed alpha
We started hitting the road with Circadian City and gathering a community around the game so that we can reach as many people as we can when our early access period will start.
We will have a closed alpha with experienced players of the genre before the early access. If we receive meaningful feedback from the alpha testers we will shower them with keys as we see them part of our team and the pillars of our community.
