Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator
Urban Venture -> Taxi Life | We're changing the name for Urban Venture
With Gamescom coming up, we have some major changes coming to Urban Venture that we are proud to announce. From today, Urban Venture will now be called Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator!
The reason for this change is because we have signed a deal with our publisher Nacon to publish the game under their current "Life" series of games, which you can find here.
We go a little bit more in depth about the change in a press release, which you can find here as well.
We will have more news to share during Gamescom as well as on our social media.
We hope you all are just as excited as we are about this partnership, and looking forward we know we're going to be able to bring you a driving simulation game never before seen.
See you in Barceona!
Mike
Simteract Community Manager
Urban Venture | Dev Blog #5
Hello Drivers,
Welcome to the 5th Dev Blog for Urban Venture. Time flies, doesn’t it? But this won’t stop us from keeping you guys up to date on the latest news from our development process. Today is going to be quite a short one to be honest, as during the past month we have been working on 2 major concepts that we brought to realization in our recent build. And that is new Police mechanics and a new vehicle model.
Keep in mind, everything that you see in this Dev Blog is subject to change or get iterated upon in the future. Nothing is final. With that out of the way, let's get into it!
Law and Rewards
Police in Urban Venture have made their way into the city of Barcelona. Now, you will be under the watchful eye of the law. But don’t worry, you have nothing to hide, right? There is a new system we implemented that will give you bonus XP after a certain time of following the rules of the road. If you break the law in front of a Police Vehicle, the siren will turn on, the player will get a ticket and pay some money from your funds. In case you’re thinking if you will be able to participate in a police chase, then no, you won’t. Remember this isn’t GTA!
New Vehicle Model
We’re going to keep this one short and sweet. We added a new “luxury” vehicle into the game. This car is better in every way that the first vehicle you guys are familiar with. Currently, we are only able to view the car in TPP mode and are still working out some kinks with the cabin and FPP. We will share more info on that once its ready.
That’s all for now!
Thanks for taking the time to read some small updates from our side. As usual, we will keep you guys updated on our socials with news and behind the scenes’ stuff from Urban Venture. Next Monday July 25th 2022 @ 7PM CEST we’re going to be doing another livestream with our producer Alex! Don’t forget to check out some gameplay we have to share on our Twitch channel! Until then, we hope you have a great weekend!
Urban Venture Developer Blog #4
Hello drivers!
Welcome to our fourth blog post for Urban Venture! Once again, we are happy to show our community some of the things we've added and have been working on since our last update. Today, we’re going to be talking about the in-game garage, new features for TrafficAI, as well as a new and improved night mode!
Before we get into the blog post, I wanted to remind everyone that everything you’re about to read/see is subject to change. Game development is a process, and everything can be changed or iterated upon at a moments notice.
With that in mind: I know you are all excited to see what we got in store this time around, so without further adieu, let's get into it!
The Garage
The garage is going to be one of the central gameplay features of Urban Venture. Everyone likes pictures or videos of WIP stuff in game development, right? So, take a gander at this beauty:
The main purpose of the garage will be for players to customize, repair, refuel and browse their fleet of vehicles. Car parameters such as your vehicles' endurance levels, tire pressure, and engine durability will factor into its performance. You will also be able to buy and sell your cars from here, as well other functions we are still working on. The placement of the garage is still something that we are figuring out where to put in the game, currently what you see in the video is a placeholder location for now.
Once we have some more progress made on the garage, we will share more, so stay tuned!
TrafficAI Features
TrafficAI™ is a term that we have thrown around in previous blog posts here and there - and it’s something that we think people will be excited over when they get a chance to play the game! When the game has driving at its core, we think players will really notice and appreciate our dedication to our traffic models to help with proper immersion.
For those that are reading this article for the first time, let me explain what TrafficAI™ is. TrafficAI™ is a technology that we developed in-house to teach real-life autonomous vehicles to learn how to drive. So, we figured, hell, why don’t we put that in our next game, and that’s exactly what we did. We even made some improvements...
- AI’s stopped honking on red lights (believe us, this was a huge problem when all you could hear is honking throughout the entire game)
- Honking is now based by the AI driver’s frustration.
- Honking is now activated once AI is emergency braking.
- The AI are now acting slower on the arcs – no more traffic jams at roundabouts and turns! (This is something that we noticed was a problem when the AI drivers were making moves at roundabouts. The cars would basically get stuck causing humongous traffic jams. Now this shouldn’t be an issue)
- AI density reacts to the day cycle – there are more traffic jams in the morning and afternoon, much less during the nights
For us, the last point is all about player immersion once again. We want the player to experience full day and night cycles on the roads in the game, as you would in real life. The same goes with our dynamic weather system which will influence to how the world around the player reacts. When it rains, there will be less people on the street and braking distance is increased, cars might drive slower and so on.
Nighttime Improvement
Nighttime in Urban Venture is a tricky topic. When we started implementing a day/night cycle, we had the challenge of illuminating the roads with streetlights. At first, it was very dark, like too dark! We also had to adjust the traffic flow at night so there could be less cars.
In the pictures below, you can see some before and after examples of light density on the streets. Nighttime driving can bring its own set of challenges in any video game, but in Urban Venture, we wanted to bring as close to an authentic experience as driving in real-life nighttime as possible.
THANK YOU!
That’s about all from our side! We hope you’re enjoying our monthly Dev Blog updates and if you have any feedback to give about how we’re running things here please don’t hesitate to leave a comment under the post!
Make sure to join our official Discord channel, and follow the development process on socials!
See you all in the next one!
Hasta La Próxima,
Mike
Simteract Community Manager