well, what can I say. This delay was definitely not planned. At the beginning of November the new update was planned and now it's already December!!! But for different reasons the day job keeps me on overtime so much that there is not much time left in the evenings. I try my best to integrate the remaining features for the update and plan 1-2 weeks for it. I would like to inform you about the changes now, so that I can possibly get some feedback from you. But mainly so you can look forward to the next update.
Preview:
Let's start with the biggest changes. The consultant salary levels:
Each consultant has 3 different salary levels. At each salary level you unlock information/features but it costs more. You can terminate the consultant as soon as his/her protection against dismissal has expired. When hiring or increasing the salary level, the protection against dismissal takes effect for a certain period of time.
Let's take a closer look at the individual features and functions. I have always marked salary level 1 with RED, salary level 2 with ORANGE and SALARY LEVEL 3 with GREEN.
Repair Manager:
As before, you can automatically repair your buildings. At salary level 1 you can only do this when a building has only 40% of its health left. At level 2 you can repair your buildings at 90% health. A new feature is the automatic reconstruction in case of disasters. This means that if a building is destroyed by a disaster, it will be rebuilt by the repair manager. ATTENTION: If you don't have insurance, you will have to pay the building costs again.
Resort Analysting:
The picture is already known to you. Only the information will be shown to you with the individual salary levels. Tourist occupancy rates in each building category are shown with salary level 1. For the supply buildings with level 2. With level 3 the occupancy rates of the enemy buildings are only shown to you at the edge of the buildings, as an example in the picture to see.
PR Manager:
There will be a change in the PR manager. You no longer have the possibility to set the advertising to the maximum from the beginning. Therefore, at salary level 1, it unlocks advertising to " average " and the progress of reputation with details. At salary level 2 you can unlock advertising up to "very much" and only at salary level 3 you can set "ultra much". In addition, there is also a PR boost.
Weatherfrog:
Here comes the weatherfrog. A very quiet consultant who only explains himself with gestures and facial expressions. Now you're thinking "Why does he cost so much money?". The weatherfrog is a special consultant who also needs special food. He can tell you exactly when and where disasters will come. His gestures and facial expressions will be shown directly to you. At food level 1 you will get the period when there will be disasters again. It is estimated that there will be no disasters even about every 3-5 years. At food level 2 it can show you the compass direction where disasters will come. Lastly at food level 3 it shows the exact location of the next disasters. I know, I know, I know.... UNBELIEVABLE what's out there.
Security Guard:
The security guard, on the other hand, is not changing much. It protects your buildings and makes it harder for enemies to sabotage them. At salary level 1 it will be 30% more expensive for enemies. At salary level 2, it becomes 50% more expensive for enemies. At salary level 3, it becomes 100% more expensive on the opponents.
Saboteur:
The saboteur gives you more sabotage options with each pay level. At salary level 1: Release cockroaches. Damages the health of the building At salary level 2: Corrupt construction time. Construction time is shortened for your buildings and vice versa for opponent's buildings. At salary level 3: evacuate people and depart buildings. BOOM!
Finally, here is a summary of all the salary levels and consultants
New buildings:
As you have already seen, 8 new buildings are also coming. In which categories, what costs,.. is currently still being reviewed by the architects.
2 vacation cottages
2 villas
1 hotel
photo shop
climbing park
skate park
Further:
The end of the update comes with a new version of the frontend engine. I have already done the migration (https://github.com/pixijs/pixijs/wiki/v7-Migration-Guide). But there are still some details to be corrected.
Furthermore I wanted to test the compatibility for the steamdeck. Let's see how far I get. Apart from that I'll try to add some small bugs with the remaining time, for the extra search fun ;)
You may have wondered and asked: "Why is no new update published? It's been more than 6 weeks since the last update. I have to wait here every day and the guy doesn't do anything. What is this? I want potato chips. What are these tourists doing on the islands and where do they even come from? Why are there turtles? What am I doing here and who is this Summer Islands guy anyway?"
All good and valid questions that I will try not to answer all.
I think the most important point is this: I'm back to work on the next update!!!
Reason for the delay was a short summer vacation and then an incredible amount of work at my day job (which is becoming more of a day and night job). But this is only a temporary deviation, a small fluctuation. It almost seems like the earth doesn't want me to work on the next update.
I can tell you this much already: The next update will contain new buildings again, the disasters will be revised by the frequency, improvement of the consultants and let's see what else is included. Of course, I will also integrate a few bugs, for the seekers among you.
I am looking forward to developing the Summer Islands feeling with you and to your feedback.
Update September 2022 [v0.8.3] with Speedmode, ways and more
Hello everyone,
attached the new features:
I think the biggest innovation for you will be the speed mode. So double speed to shorten the one or other waiting time. I admit, I had a hard time deciding whether to integrate this feature. But artificially extending the game time should be a thing of the past. The focus should be on the fun of the game.
The other major feature that you will always notice are the new ways for bikes. The new ways have the same features as roads. With two limitations: There are no bridges and only bikes can ride on them. Otherwise, paths connect the buildings in the same way, um..., I mean tourists get to all the buildings in the same way via the paths.
Then there is also the possibility to edit dark water in the editor. I.e. you can completely try out terraforming in the editor and create your desired map. Basically the editor is the sandbox mode. You don't earn any money in the editor. But you have complete freedom with the buildings.
Furthermore, there are many changes "under the hood" for a performance improvement, especially in map movements, for example, the moving objects stop and are not calculated. You won't even notice it and it saves resources. Also, all menus are closed until the ESC menu is opened and i have also lowered the requirements of the missions.
Update June 2022 [v0.8.1] with engine migration and bug fixes
Hello everyone,
finally the time has come. It took a lot of work to switch from CreateJS to PIXIJS. So the change of the frontend engine. Because there were a lot of similarities in the methods I could save time. But some functions are just different and had to be tested extensively. Or some workarounds had to be integrated. Also I extended the engine with a few methods to simplify the transition. I think the result is well playable. For example the system mouse is used now. So if the computer is busy with other things, the mouse is still fluid. This gives the gameplay a much more positive side. In summary, you can say that the FPS are much more stable and run with a higher number. The engine is being developed further and there are still a few advanced features that I could not integrate yet. I am positive to improve this in the future. I hope the result will excuse the long waiting time. I tried to post my progress daily to give you an estimation. Every file and every line had to be looked at.
Unfortunately I am a bit surprised myself how long this took. My goal was originally to extend the editor. I had to postpone this to the next update. But I was able to fix some bugs from you. Thanks a lot for your mails and entries. Of course I have also on request the "Send money to other players" again integrated! Great function in multiplayer. But also funny to interact with the bots.
I will now look into more features again in the future. We have also received more requests for new buildings and I can already say: someone sits right next to me and diligently creates new buildings :D
There was also the wish to reduce the disasters. I have reduced the number to 50% for now. I would expand the whole thing in the future a little bit. The plan would be to have only disasters in randomly selected years. This means that you have e.g. 5 years no disasters and then comes a year with disasters. In addition a consultant could be created who could tell you the years and in which map area (north/south/west/east) these occur. Just as an idea.
As you have already noticed it is summer!!! (at least in the northern hemisphere) What I want to say is that Summer Islands is already available on Steam since 21/06/2019. I'm very happy to have been developing this game and working with you guys for 3 years now. You guys have really brought some great ideas to the game. It was never my plan to work on the game for so long. But I am very happy to have done it. I think the development is getting closer and closer to the end. Unfortunately some of the last updates were not very effective with the performance, so new features suffered a bit. I'm trying to get the focus back here in the future and some things that are already integrated still need some fine tuning. But the whole thing already feels relatively good.
Update May 2022 [v0.8.0] with map editor (renewed), performance and Spanish
Hello everyone,
this time I was able to integrate some performance improvements in some places. The performance is still not in my wishes. Some places I will work on in the next updates. But these are places to open the menus faster or other small things. The two bigger problems with the map and mouse movement are more complex and require an intervention in the engine.
As already announced the mapeditor is added again. Here I had to adapt the code and the texture. It's also worth mentioning that it's much more time consuming to work into existing code instead of creating something new. That's why I should try harder to finish a feature to 99% instead of creating a first version. I had planned some features for the map editor (event manager). But unfortunately I realized too late that it makes more sense to create a HTML element directly from it instead of a complex and not so performant ingame menu. So I tried to create something with Bootstrap and JQuery. But unfortunately I ran out of time. So this is coming for the next update. Also coming in the next update is the ability to change dark water in the map editor.
I must admit that I follow the YT channel Itchy Boots (https://www.youtube.com/c/ItchyBoots). So I decided to add a next language: Spanish. Since I'm not a Spanish expert, I hope the texts are translated well. Of course I'm always open for feedback!
Since the last update I noticed that the plants were a bit offset. So I corrected that and added some random positions. I think this makes the overall picture not so linear anymore. I also added a change to the alpha value for each wave movement. So the waves have a shading. I must admit I was surprised about the result with such a small change.
Update April 2022 [v0.7.9] with performance and new hotel
Hello everyone,
yes, with this update many things went wrong in the run-up. I have to admit that I often went in the wrong direction this time. During the optimization and restructuring of the game architecture I got into dead ends this time which set me back several weeks. My goal is still to achieve a frame rate of at least 30-40 frames/second. That's why I started to completely rebuild the architecture core of Summer Islands. After the new version was ready for testing, I was shocked to see that the frame rate was constantly at 20 frames/second. So I had to rebuild some things and was left without any features just before the weekend. So I decided to integrate smaller things (new hotel) and also the errors that were listed here in the forum (autosave, loading). I am still working on the optimization and hope to make progress in small steps this time.
The schedule, at the beginning of the year, in June to plan a release, has thus rather failed. I think that's a pity, because the calendar summer start was already used when Summer Islands came into Early Access. That would have been a nice round thing. My new plan is to release the game in September. I.e. until then all big features should be integrated. After the release, I still plan on bug fixes and minor improvements. Please don't get me wrong, I love to develop Summer Islands with you. Your support has brought Summer Islands a huge step forward. I'm just reaching the limits of the engine (also because it's no longer being developed). I am very interested in how efficient e.g. Unity or Unreal Engine would be and if this would not have been the better choice. But before I try such things, I want to have all features integrated for you in Summer Islands. Because nothing is worse than not finished projects ;)
