Hello mayors ! We’re happy to release this new version of Silicon City, 0.27 . We worked on many improvements to make the game easier to play.
We did also a lot of work to prepare the next version we will release next month : the “Abondance” update. This version will bring a lot of very exciting new features, such as the Story mode for beginners and advanced players to understand better the game mechanics. Other features and more missions will be added too.
TWEET, TWEET AND TWEET
We improved the readability of the Population interface. The window is smaller and contains less data. It’s a new small step towards the UI of tomorrow! Before
After
Tweets are longer displayed from the main population interface but contextually when a Silizen is selected. Before After
LOOK UP IN THE SKY !
Planes are now randomly flying across the sky above your city. Look how cute they look!
WE NEED MORE MONEY
You can now manage the budget of the different public departments of your city. Increasing them will make the related jobs more attractive and will ensure your city will be more protected. In the other hand, lowering them will save your money to build new infrastructure. It's up to you !
THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD !
Are you ready to manage danger and crisis in your city ? With this new update, big fires can start and potentially a very huge rock coming from space could crash into your city. As soon as something big happens in your city, the local news will cover the event. We implemented the natural disaster engine in the game. The meteor is the first one of a surprising list of disasters that could happen to your city. Who said mayor life’s easy?
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY
We redesigned the map generator with a more realistic and more efficient random generator. We also increased the map size possibilities from 32x32 (extra small) to 256x256 (big). You can now generate up to 17,592,186,044,416 different map so… it will be a huge challenge to play them all
MISC IMPROVEMENTS
Firemen jobs are more easily filled in
The game difficulty has been adjusted regarding the budget
Pressing F will select the bulldozer and pressing F again will select back the previous tool
Silizens can now walk on tree alleys
BUGS FIX
A lot of translation issues have been fixed
The game do not pause anymore when a fire starts
The water disappears as well as the ground when the distance is too far
Silizens who where looking for a job were not visible when the Work map layer was enabled
Game is not resumed anymore when the objective window is closed (if the game was paused before)
The second objective do not validate anymore before the road are really constructed
The Silizens were not able to go home correctly. This is now fixed.
”Too many height contraint” error message is no longer appearing
v0.25 update log
SERIOUS CITY TRAFFIC
Integration of intersections is now automated while laying out road in your city. Automatically, traffic lights are generated and synced together for your cars. Vertical and horizontal streets are synced and traffic lights durations are fixed to a 4 minutes cycle. Pedestrians also respect traffic lights and cross streets alternatively with cars.
Creating intersections automatically generates the appropriate lanes. They get colored from green to red according the amount of traffic that sits within. New cars models and colors have been added. There’s more diversity in the streets!
TRAFFIC MAP VIEWS
The whole map of your city generates the ways layout for your citizens to navigate from a point to any another in your city. These waypoints are made for pedestrians as well as for vehicles. If you show up the Traffic view, you’ll see different ways the citizens can use and you’ll also see them navigating along their paths.
Please have a look at the following video for a quick overview of a neighborhood animation during the day on youtube here: [previewyoutube="Tpt9bdhoZtg;full"]
NEW PARKS AND OTHER BUILDINGS
Finally, some new types of entertainment buildings have been added. There are a tennis court, a swimming pool and the iconic skatepark that can be built in your city as soon as you’ll reach rank 2. They provide a nice daily or weekly outdoor activity opportunity for your citizens. They’re cheap buildings and raise the land value around them. Also, from now on, when you have an active soccer team in your city, every night at 8PM a match will be played and will attract many tourists according to the popularity of your team.
You can now buy a solar power plant that will distribute the greenest energy , as much as a wind turbine, however it becomes powerless at night
MUSIC & AUDIO
The second most significant change in this new update is the addition of music. Composed by Yves Days specially for Silicon City, it offers the player a better immersion in the game with a playlist that will also get new songs in the future.
Sound effects were added too as both audio feedback for when the player build or destroys buildings, but also environment audio. Move your camera closer to the ground and you’ll hear the traffic, the birds chipping in the parks or sometimes the soccer game going on at night. If you hear a siren, they is probably an emergency going on and the police is on the way!
BUGFIXES AND SMALL UPDATES
Navigation for citizens has been improved. The path finding is still confusing for the citizens but they navigated better in town and always reach their goal, by car and walking. Citizens with a car will park it as soon as they arrive nearby their destination to continue walking.
Game speed has been decreased to allow a slow play mode at a realistic pace.
Camera don’t get stuck anymore underground
v0.24 update log
Hello mayors!
There’s a new update for Silicon City! Here’s a brief list of the new features it includes:
Steam achievements
Bank loan and budget details
Game performances
Achievements
Silicon City Achievements popup We’re going to start with 20 achievements! They are unlockable if you play connected to Steam, and not in sandbox mode.
I’ve added the basic achievements with the city ranks to reach. Also some classic counters on the amount of houses / shops / offices you can have in your city. For exemple, you’ll receive the first achivement with 100 houses in your city, the second at 500 and the last one at 1000
Also are some unique achievements for special buildings you can have in a city, or some related to your soccer team. A secret one is already in the list, but not likely to be found yet. I’ll place some hints here and there about hidden objectives during the development of the game in the blog.
Bank loan and budget panel
Suggested by a member of the community, there is a new option for the mayors having trouble with their finances.
As soon as you finances go below 0$, the banker will give you the opportunity to build a bank to take out a loan. This will go into your gifts and you’ll be able to place the building for free in your city. Then select the bank and you’ll see the loan panel in the building overview:
Now you’re able to take out a loan. You can decide ho much money you wan to borrow, up to a certain limit, based on your city rank. At Rank 1, it is only 10,000 $ but can go up to 200,000 $ at Rank 5. You’ll be able to track the loan cost in the budget panel.
The design here has been reviewed for more clarity and to use less space in the interface.
The city expenses have been broken down into three categories: Roads, Parks and Public services. Some red and green arrows at the very right of the panel gives you indications on the evolution of your budget compared to the previous month. The chart is now interactive as the population one, and you can show or hide some parts of the cart to focus on a specific data.
Game performances
A big work has been done to make the game faster. The time the main screen takes to load has been drasticly reduced. I found more opportunities to improve the game in general so more updates on this topic will follow in the upcoming releases
Linux and MacOS support
The game is now compatible for Linux, but some issues are still here. I had to delay the release for Ubuntu 12.04 (and more) for the next version.
The support for MacOS is pending because it requires Apple’s notarization and might take a day or two. I don’t have any Apple computer to build the game and have to use somone else’s to do the tests, this is why it will take a bit of time. If the results are positive, this version (0.24) will be published for MacOS during the next week. Otherwise, it may come with the Linux version, for the end of the month. If you have an old spare macbook, you can donate it to Silicon City 🙂
Bug fixes
The leaderboard screen has been updated
The electricity propagation has been fixed. It now navigates better through the city
The pedestrian paths were improved for buildings with entrances, such as the police station or the soccer field.
French translations are now complete and include the tweets of the silizens
v0.23 update log
Hello mayors! Here’s a new update for you. This one is the introduction to the sandbox mode! And some other changes such as:
New camera movements
New buildings: the green spaces
Bug fixes
It’s been only 2 weeks after the previous update, ans what we have here to celebrate is huge! I really hop to keep the pace going, but first, let’s get an overview of…
The sandbox mode! Unleash your creativity
If you don’t know about sandboxes, not the ones from your early school years, but the ones you find in simulation games, let me introduce you to the concept. A game you play in Sandbox will have no limitation nor restriction on budget. Everything is free! However you don’t have access to any mission and the leaderboards are deactivated, that would be too easy.
The sandbox in Silicon City lets you first use all the new basic tools to create the foundations of a city, such as the roads, the alleys and the small parks with the new greeen space (check it out below). You also have access to the 7 zones and once again they all cost nothing. Now you also have access to your blueprints. These can be bought during a regular game (non sandbox). You can select (almost) any building in your existing city and buy it’s blueprint. The price is based on the level of this building, from 2,000$ (lvl1) to 32,000$ (lvl5). Once you’ve bought the blueprints of your favorite buildings, you can go back to the sandbox mode and place any of these buildings for free anywhere it pleases you.
It’s time to get creative and build the greatest cities ever made in a grid based City builder! Also checkout the new building added for more creativity!
You are now ready for making the craziest cities without any budget limitation
New camera movements
This new feature has been requested by the community and I’m very happy I spent some time implementing it. The new rotation system used to manipulate the camera is way better than previouly. There is a new setting in the main settings screen and let you decide which kind of camera rotation you want to use. The new one, called pivot mode, has been chosen by default but you can change the setting back to its original if you want.
The pivot camera rotates around the focused object. The opposite was more like an FPS camera looking to its left or right.
New building: The green space!
To come with the sandbox udpate, here’s the latest building of Silicon City, and it’s made for creatives. The green space is available from the beginning of any game, and is a simple park that extends like the zones or trees would do. Select the green space building and place them using a drag and drop on the map. Using the same green space tool, click again on a block with a green space and change its design. With the multiple combination of paths, borders, trees and alleys, create new tow centers more beautiful and friendly than ever! Share your work using #siliconcity hashtags!
Bug fixes
An issue where the taxes were not displayed correctly was fixed.
Electricity navigates automatically where most of the power is needed
Items in the main menu are now correctly selected when using them
v0.20 update log
Hello mayors! I'm very excited to finally announce this update of Silicon City. It's been 2 months since the last one. Today I'm going to introduce you to the newest updates and show the evolution that happened in the game.
Go Soccer Teams!
Once a soccer field or a stadium is built and has hired eleven players, you'll be asked to choose more about your city team! Follow your team's score against other cities and gain from your teams popularity and results.
Avenues and new road laying tool
The reason this update took so long is mainly because of the impact of the new road features. I was inspired by the previous software I made, to integrate a proper navigation system. Brace yourselves for the most major update given to Silicon City until today.
It was the best opportunity to finally include the avenues as a new kind of roads in Silicon City. Avenues are a 2 blocks wide road that can connect to smaller ones from intersections.Cars starts to go around town from working buildings, a hospital would pop ambulances and the fire station will send firetrucks in your city. Traffic is not managed yet (no traffic lights nor stops), so cars still go around freely but they will soon in the next update or the next one.
Navigation routes for silizens, cars and electricity
As you might have seen from the previous video about the merge of Rushhour and Silicon City (link), the game is now getting a new dimension into deep simulation: way finding and path navigation.
The routes used in Silicon City also connects electricity. Power from your wind turbines or Coal plants will use the electric lines created by your roads and the buildings themselves.
Your silizens now follow more realistic paths to go from their house to their workplace. They will use sidewalks and crossings to walk around town. The further they'll find a job from their house, the more time it'll take them to go to work, and the less money their company is going to generate.
Building entrances
Some buildings are now subject to entrances. This only allows pedestrians to enters the building from one or more specific block neighbors. Make sure to place a road over there for an access. In the updates to come, this will help making intersections with roads for cars entrances and better handle pedestrians paths. The ideas of 'hands' to connect blocks to each others came from the roads themselves. Here's an example of the connections made from road bits to each others.
Leaderboards
Who's the best mayor? Is it you? Compare your best scores with Steam leaderboards. Have the most populated city of attract the most followers to rank up the ladder! Click on the leaderboards button in the game main menu to see the best scores.
v0.19 update log
[previewyoutube="4NocvmP9x2c;rightthumb"] - Social Network - Map views - Difficulty levels - New buildings - Bug fixes
Social Network All the citizens in your city have a social network profile to post messages about their daily life. When they move in, get or lose a job. As a mayor, you can read all the tweets sent by your silizens and understand how they feel. Follow them to keep a closer look at a close group of interesting citizens, some of them will write relevant information. Themselves can tag their own friends or relative in their tweets. They will notify you when they have something important to let you know about, such as why they left the city.
Map views New views show more information. Works lists the total jobs available in your city, among all comercial, industrial and institutional buildings, and how many of these jobs are active or vacant. Similarly for residences, you can see the capacity of your city. This number evolves as soon as houses and apartment grows or when you lay down new zones. And finally, the energy view that shows your electricity consumption vs. what you’r providing.
Difficulty You can now choos any of the 5 modes of difficulty when you create a game. Once a city is started as easy, normal or hard, it is impossible to change. In a harder game, you start with less money and it is harder to please the citizens to have them to move in.
New buildings - News Agency will be gifted to you when you reach 500 silizens. It allows the creation of newspapers, which are institutional and trusted sources of information. This use the Twitter messaging system to broadcast more detailed information about the city. - The Silo farm is a special unique building unlocked after a secret mission. It provides around 20 farmer jobs and also brings a bit of clean energy. - Offices: High tech Startup (3 different levels) - Irish pub, wine bar, and different shops.
