It is with a heavy heart that we have decided to put a pause to the development of City Block Builder.
We had ambitious updates in the works but we have decided to learn some hard lessons and move to a fresh project for now. We hope to share more with you in the future for CBB. Thank you so much for playing with us!
Here are the few items we have worked on.
Notes
Prop preview windows now scale and zoom based on the object size.
An alternative camera mode has been added. Open the pause menu to access.
Financial data is now saved.
Deleting saves now has a confirmation.
Guests should be more responsive to restaurant seat openings.
Fixed several issues with staff AI breaking.
Patch Notes v0.09
Hey everyone,
We’re still working on some sizable content updates, and hope to have that in your hands for play soon. However, we’ll be taking a hiatus for the winter holidays and will be resuming updates in January. We hope you have a wonderful rest of the year. Looking forward to coming back strong in 2023!
Notes
We’ve received multiple reports of crashes from users and have added in-game back tracing in order to receive automatic error message reports which will hopefully help us identify what’s causing problems for some users. These reports will only be sent if you’re connected to the Internet, and we do not gather any other information about you or your machine whatsoever. We value your privacy.
Individual staff UI has been implemented. Right-click staff to access.
Added a delete button to save files.
Patch Notes v0.08
Hello everyone, this is an interim patch attempting to fix some crash issues some users are experiencing trying to load the game.
Notes
Made several changes that may have resolved certain crashing issues, but we are not fully certain it has covered everything.
If you are still unable to start the game or make it past the first loading screen, it would be extremely helpful to provide the automatically generated log file and send it to us (preferably on Discord). Thank you so much!
The log file location is C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\LocalLow\Tentworks Interactive\CityBlockBuilder\Player.log
Patch Notes v0.07
Hello everyone! Here are some details about the new patch:
UI
Guest overview UI has been implemented, and its corresponding button at the bottom of play mode bar has been enabled.
Individual guest UI has been implemented. This new UI will expose new data about preferences, stats, and activities for each guest.
Some of this data in these new UI has not yet been implemented fully yet, and actionable gameplay is planned for a future marketing update.
Improved text visibility of incoming transactions (can be found at the bottom-right of the screen).
Audio
The radio now starts and is present in the main menu, and the song + radio station persists after starting a new game or loading a save file.
Flavor
More guest formations have been added.
Performance
Certain parts of the UI should be a little more performant.
Patch Notes v0.06
Hey everyone,
We’ve still got a lot cooking but wanted to provide an update in anticipation of more in-depth staff AI behavior.
Staff + UI
Staff UI has been updated to reflect some current stats.
New UI for hiring staff and viewing current employees.
Added a hireable staff talent pool. When the game starts, there are a limited number of staff that you can hire from each category (security is still not implemented yet).
There are varying qualities of staff determined by two new stats: mobility and efficiency. Mobility affects how fast staff can walk and efficiency affects how fast tasks are completed such as cooking, cleaning, and repairing.
Staff now have daily wages, and their overall quality affects how much they have to be paid, with some variance. Hire costs are also affected by this.
The talent pool is refreshed every day at midnight.
Staff from previous saves will have default values but future staff hired will be part of this randomized talent pool.
We would like to add a leveling and unique trait system for staff but they are currently not implemented yet. As of now we just have a couple placeholder non-functional traits.
Performance
Starting the game from the menu should be faster now.
Patch Notes v0.05 (17 September 2022)
Hey everyone,
We’re currently working on multiple fronts in terms of features that aren’t quite ready to release yet (related to guest and staff UI and associated behavior and gameplay effects as well as localization). For this update, we’re adding the following:
Lighting and Environment
The moon, moonlight, and a starry sky has been added to the game. Night time is now no longer pitch black but instead a pleasant twilight blue.
Performance
Celestial bodies (sun and moon) now operate on their own thread.
Resolved some occlusion culling issues.
AI
Added slight randomness to group walking formation positioning. Different types of formations still to come.
Upcoming Direction + Patch Notes v0.04
Upcoming Direction
Hello all, in this patch we have some more bug fixes, some based directly off of community feedback so far. We are trying our best to address game-breaking issues first before adding more content to the game, as we believe content would be meaningless without a stable foundation.
This brings us to addressing some community concerns. We understand that generally games that label themselves as “early access” misadvertise, overpromise, and fail to deliver, and we apologize for any misconception about that. While it is true we have worked on this game for a few years at this point, it has been a bumpy journey to say the least, with multiple internal reworks, vision changes, and unfortunate but unavoidable turnover in our ranks. However, we’ve soldiered on and are committed to making steady improvements to the game.
Some people may not agree with the state of the game as a playable game, and we totally understand that frustration. We do believe that we qualify as early access in the original sense of the program - it is simply access to those who are curious about the state of a game that is still very much in development. We hope that the wildly varying standard of “early access” used by other games does not diminish your view of our game too much.
We are hoping that after a few more major bug/stability fixes we will be able to add more content to the game. We also have several features in the pipeline that have not been merged into the public version of the game as they still require some tinkering. However, they will serve as stepping stones to adding more depth and management to gameplay.
For example, one of our top priorities is to release a new UI exposing guest preferences, thoughts, and motivations as well as better staff management and personalization. From there, we will build a business ratings system and allow players to analyze trends in guest desires. This is just one example of components to a larger ecosystem we want to expand upon to keep adding depth!
Patch Notes v0.04 (2 September 2022)
Build Mode
Zone stretching has been re-enabled.
Stretching zones no longer cause props to suddenly disappear.
Fixed various issues related to undoing/redoing zone stretching.
Fixed various issues with prop states that are sold/destroyed due to stretching.
Developer note: This was a very complex issue and took a significant amount of time to resolve. Please let us know if you encounter any more issues related to this feature.
UI
Zone warning/error overlay should not disappear anymore.
Developer note: We received reports that this would sometimes disappear - unfortunately it seemed to have occurred very rarely at random. We think the issue has been fixed, but we could not determine a reliable way to recreate the problem. Let us know if the issue persists and if you can recall the circumstances.
The grid should now properly stay when switching directly between different build states.
Added Not Yet Implemented (NYI) tags to research nodes that still don’t have an effect.
Patch Notes v0.03 (26 August 2022)
Patch Notes v0.03 (26 August 2022)
Another weekly update! We deployed a patch last week but didn’t seem to post the notes so it will be posted below just for a historical record. We’d also like to note that as we make patches to the game, we will try our best to preserve backwards compatibility on saves but there’s no guarantee that old saves will work or if everything will work correctly once loaded. We thank you immensely for your patience and will continue to make regular improvements on the game.
Build Mode
Zone stretching has been temporarily disabled due to a critical bug associated with it. A solution is in the works but is taking much longer than expected. We will re-enable this when it has been fixed.
Research
Menu size limit research nodes now work correctly.
Missions
Your current mission and progress will be saved.
UI
We added a message to the save screen, indicating some features are missing (our save system is still incomplete unfortunately).
Additional Notes
As you might notice, the current missions, research, and props in the game lean more towards introductory and proof-of-concept. We plan to introduce sweeping balance changes, new additions, and more comprehensive and story-driven missions as future releases come.
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Patch Notes v0.02 (19 August 2022)
Our first patch of the game. It is light but we plan to have a patch every 1-2 weeks starting next week. Keep the feedback coming!
Lighting/Colors
Color, shadow, and saturation adjustments to make the interiors of zones appear less dark and make the colors pop a bit more.
UI
Added the Main Menu.
When stretching zones, the cursor now follows walls more accurately.
Research
Slight adjustment of node connections in “The Great Indoors” line.
We are aware some of the research nodes don’t do anything yet! Hang tight.
Dev Byte #14
It's been quite a while since we last posted anything about City Block Builder but that's because we have been hard at work to get you the best early access game possible! We are getting closer and closer to our goal and we should be getting CBB out very soon. Until then, here is a little bit about what our incredible 3D Artists do for the game.
Working on City Block Builder, the main difficulty we faced was matching each other's style and working as a unit. Each artist in the team had their own style. However, trying to match each other's styles helped us learn, grow and improve.
While constructing the props we had to think as if we were in the player's mind. We had to construct the props according to the money the players spent. More money equals more detail in the props and vice versa.
We worked closely with our dev team in order to optimize the game. We have made LODs (level of detail, which is the process of making less detailed versions of your models that are swapped-in when the object is further away from the camera) for all the elements in the game. This lowers the strain on the computer allowing it to render more objects while maintaining a high frame rate. Even though City Block Builder is a tycoon game where we render hundreds of objects at once, LODs will always help it perform seamlessly, making it run smoother on lower-end hardware.
When it comes to our characters that we’ve created in CBB we have designed them so that when they are rendered in game, it always runs butter smooth. Keeping a stable frame rate no matter what is happening is very important to a tycoon game like this, and we've achieved a consistently stable and high frame rate thanks to the tireless work of the devs who made everything in the game render at a high level of visual fidelity whilst never dropping frames. The game renders thousands of objects and characters in real time. To achieve the best framerate we had to limit the number of TRI’s (triangles) for each object, while at the same time looking great in game. We wanted to ensure the game was accessible to all types of computers, rather than making gamers spend on mega-expensive PCs (looking at you, GPU prices).
There are some iconic buildings and views that the players can enjoy as well.
Games are Fun! But what is more fun than creating the game for others to entertain?
Thank you for your time!
Riyaz Husain, Manali D. Senior 3D Artist
Update and Progress on City Block Builder
A quick update on our progress with City Block Builder. We'll be talking about the upgrades we have made to the art side and our AI side of things! Along with that, we will also be talking about our highly anticipated Story Mode! So make sure to be there ːsteamhappyː
You can ask us questions on the chat and we'll answer them right there.
Make sure you join our Discord server to be a part of the community discussions! Link - https://discord.gg/UPxnDeD4TV
We post regular updates on Instagram and Twitter and we have some exciting content planned for the upcoming weeks. Make sure to follow us on both platforms through - https://www.instagram.com/tentworks_interactive/ and @CityBlockBuildr
