The next few days are going to be really special for us, as we’ve teamed-up with the amazing folks from One Gamer Fund and have put our entire library of Good Shepherd Entertainment published titles on sale for the lowest prices each respective title has ever been available for here on Steam to benefit the One Gamer Fund during its inaugural charity weekend.
The One Gamer Fund is a new philanthropic initiative comprised of seven gaming nonprofits: AbleGamers, Child’s Play, Games for Change, Global Game Jam, the IGDA Foundation, Stack-Up and Take This. Between 10 a.m. PT on Sept. 21 to 10 a.m. PT on Sept. 25, half of all proceeds generated by purchases of Good Shepherd games after Steam’s share of revenue is factored will be donated directly to the IGDA Foundation on behalf of the One Gamer Fund and subsequently dispersed among all partnering nonprofits.
This is not all though! We’ve also just launched a special new Good Shepherd Entertainment Bundle to coincide with this sale. This bundle will allow those whom already own some of our games to easily complete their set at a special additional 25% discount! This means that you can add even more gaming goodness to life whilst helping these seven amazing charities and causes.
A number of Twitch personalities will also be hosting special streams to aid the One Gamer Fund throughout the weekend. Individuals can learn more about ways to participate by visiting www.OneGamerFund.org and following @OneGamerFund on Twitter.
We can’t tell you guys how much this sales means to us and how proud we are to be a small part of helping these amazing causes. None of this would be possible without all of your help though, so on behalf of everyone involved in this benefit sale, we just wanted to say thank you very much for your continued support!
Here’s to the power of gaming!
Greetings,
The Good Shepherd Team
Transport Fever release date and gameplay preview
We are very happy to officially announce the release date of the Train Fever successor: Transport Fever will be available worldwide for Windows, Mac and Linux, on November 8.
Please find the gameplay preview video here:
The 15-minute gameplay preview shows typical scenes from the endless game of the current beta version.
We wanted to express our gratitude to all players of the former game Train Fever by offering a 15% loyalty discount. In addition, there is a 10% pre-order discount, and both discounts can be combined: so everyone who owns Train Fever on Steam will be able to purchase Transport Fever at 25% off up until the game’s release. Pre-order is possible here.
We hope that you like our newest development and say thanks for your interest!
Transport Fever officially announced!
We are incredibly happy to finally announce our newest development: Transport Fever is a next generation transport simulation game coming to PC this fall.
Transport Fever is a successor to Train Fever and brings many new features, including aircrafts, ships, two historical campaigns, heavily improved construction tools and much more.
Please find the complete announcement and the official trailer at the new website:
http://www.transportfever.com
We hope that you like our newest development and look forward to your feedback.
Next transport simulation game announcement date set
Urban Games and Gambitious Digital Entertainment are ready for takeoff and extremely happy to officially announce a next generation transport simulation game on Monday, April 11, 2016.
Details about the new game will be uncovered on April 11 accompanied with a trailer and a new website. While the game will be packed with new features, trains again play the central role.
Once announced, the community is invited to give feedback and discuss the development on the website, forums and social media channels. Release is scheduled for later this year.
A lot of work has been put into the development of the new title and both the Urban Games and Gambitious Digital Entertainment teams can’t wait to finally show their latest project to the public.
Tram catenary, asset tool, map import and many improvements
Update February 25, 2016: Today we released the build 7753 which improves on the previous build 7554 by adding an option allowing to adjust the growth behavior of towns. Also the compatibility with integrated Intel GPUs was highly improved. Please find the complete release notes here and the release hints here
We are very happy that today the newest build 7554 was released.
This update introduces three widely requested features and also aims to further enhance the gameplay, usability, as well as performance.
Trams finally get their long awaited catenaries. Players can now upgrade streets with electric tram tracks. Next to presenting a visual eye catcher, catenaries are also an optional new gameplay element.
A very flexible and highly modable asset placement tool opens a wide range of new possibilities to polish and decorate maps with any objects. Because we have observed that the modding community wants to snap assets to tracks, we have also implemented track-aligned assets.
With the new option to use height maps for generating landscapes, player are now able to create truly realistic and beautiful sceneries. In combination with the possibility to include predefined seeds, this allows for creating various challenging and diverse scenarios.
In addition to these new features, based on the feedback of players many improvements have been made:
Trains behave more predictable when changes are made to the track and stations. Industries grow twice as fast than before and decline much slower, making them less sensitive to fluctuations in the transport network. We also optimized city development resulting in an increased performance and reduced lags at the end of months.
The modding possibilities have been significantly widened, giving content creators more control over how the game behaves and looks.
Our volunteers from the community put much effort into improving the translations and Swedish was added as a completely new language.
There is also a long list of various small improvements and bug fixes. Please find the complete list in the release notes
More information on how to use height maps and an example map can be found in the release hints.
We put as much effort as possible into this build and we did our best to consider as many wishes and suggestions as possible.
Let us express a big thank you to all players, modders, testers and fans. Without all the suggestions and testing effort contributed by the community, Train Fever would not be where it is today. We hope you enjoy this final update and we very much look forward to see even more great contributions from the modding scene.
At the moment we are working very hard here at Urban Games and we look forward to soon share some very exciting news with you.
Update announcement and Happy Holidays!
During the last couple of weeks, in our blog series “Behind the scenes”, we gave you insight into various topics developers usually don’t talk about. In return we received a lot of positive, interesting and valuable feedback! It’s time to conclude the series and start looking forward again.
Let us say a big “Thank you!” for a great 2015! We would like to bring the holiday spirit to Train Fever and present you with a little gift in the form of two announcements about our current and our next game.
There is a long list of features which could further enrich Train Fever. With so many people still playing, the list grows constantly and a game like Train Fever will never be truly complete.
No matter what we would like to do, we have to consider the financial aspect of the development. Finding a good balance between investing time (and therefore money) and maintaining a healthy business is challenging. As a consequence, more than a year after the release, we have to concentrate our efforts on our next game.
Nevertheless we feel the necessity to show our appreciation to our loyal players. Thus we decided to work on a final update for Train Fever!
We are excited what players and modders can achieve with the Train Fever engine. To further support this, we will introduce a tool enabling the free placement of trees and various other assets in the game world.
On top of that we would like to open more possibilities for generating maps. We are working on a way to allow utilizing external sources like height maps. If successful, we are confident that modders can then create their own landscape scenarios and thus enable completely new challenges.
We will also treat you with a widely requested improvement initially developed for our next game: Tram tracks can finally be electrified and therefore get the long awaited catenary.
To support our ever growing modding scene, we will also extend some shading modding possibilities. The first project benefiting from the changes will be the “Nordic DLC”, an extensive total conversion, created by our community over at train-fever.net .
In addition, the upcoming patch also features a list of various improvements and bug fixes. We will give our best to make the gameplay more fluent and less daunting.
The patch is scheduled for release in early 2016.
And to finally answer the most frequent question: We are very happy to disclose that we will officially announce our next game in the first quarter of 2016!
Let us emphasize, that all your feedback – no matter if yet realized or not - anyway fell on good soil. Our next game will highly benefit from everything you told us and what we have learned.
We wish you and your loved ones pleasant holidays and a happy new year!
Behind the scenes blog
While there is a lot going on at Urban Games, development of Train Fever is continuing. As we have noticed, there is quite a lot of interest and need in behind the scenes information about the game.
Therefore, we today start with a series of blog posts where we will write about various topics ranging from what makes developing a game challenging to how we handle feedback and suggestions. The blog will be updated every two weeks and the first post focuses on modding and user created content.
If you are interested in hearing and discussing about topics developers usually don’t talk about, please find the blog on our official website.
Diamond crossovers, better usability and many improvements
Update September 15, 2015: Today we released a new build 6219 which improves on the previous build 6181 by fixing a couple of bugs and adding a new way for modders to change the vehicle load configurations. Please find the complete release notes here.
Right before the 1st birthday of Train Fever, we are happy to announce the release of the newest build 6181.
With this game update we fulfill some of the most common wishes by introducing a new rail switch type, improving the usability and the user interface, as well as adding new ways to modify and customize the game.
Parallel Track building and upgrading is much easier and forgiving. Not only can you upgrade crossovers to diamond crossovers, it is now possible to upgrade tracks at any time regardless of whether the track is used by a train or not. The length limit for multitrack tunnels is gone.
Another big enhancement is how the different cargo types are handled by vehicles. To achieve a more realistic simulation, a truck or wagon is now fitted on purchase to haul one specific cargo type.
A significant effort was also put into improving the user interface. Windows are now arranged and aligned in a more intelligent way. Better window layouts and new buttons, overlays and filters make Train Fever more accessible and easier to use. There is more direct control over vehicles by allowing the player to reverse trains at any time and send it to a depot effortlessly.
To provide more influence over how industries and cities behave, more parameters are now exposed to modding, allowing for a way to affect how a map develops by customizing the maximum size of industries or the grow rate and starting size of cities.
To bring more life into the simulation, a new animation type was added giving any object in the world the ability to play animations in a continuous loop. This opens a lot of new possibilities to modding.
Last but not least thanks to the everlasting support of our community we were able to eliminate yet another couple of reported bugs including disappearing vehicles and issues with track building.
Thank you for your continuing interest in Train Fever! We hope you enjoy the newest improvements and additions.
One hundred thousand thanks
Since its release in September last year, Train Fever has been sold more than 100.000 times. We are incredibly happy that our debut title was received so well and we would like to take the opportunity to express our thankfulness to everyone who contributed to this success story.
In particular we wanted to express a big thank you to the modding community (most important: www.train-fever.net). More than 1.000 mods have been developed and make the game varied and long-living. It’s exciting to have such an active and motivated modding community and we are heavily impressed by all the creative creations.
Similar respect and thankfulness is addressed to all YouTube authors. An uncountable amount of YouTube Let’s Play’s demonstrates game-play and have inspired many followers. These contributions had a very positive effect on sales and they also helped us to get a good understanding of how people actually play the game.
This said, we wanted to let you know that we are still improving Train Fever and for sure there will be additional game updates. However, because we also started working on our next game title, Train Fever updates will be less frequent in future. Therefore, we kindly ask you for a bit of patience in this regard.
Today we can tell you that our next game title will be a transport simulation game again. Development has already started and we are currently finalizing the budget and game design. We are very confident that you like our plans ;) and we would love to share the exact plan with you. However, because the plan is not 100% final yet we will announce details at a later point in time.
Thanks to our successful debut title our company is expanding. In future, seven people will work at Urban Games. One particular highlight is that one of our employees will work as a community manager. As a consequence, you can expect that our communication and community support will be much better in future.
Finally, let us mention that currently there are two open positions. Urban Games is looking for a full-time software engineer as well as a 2D / 3D artist intern. If you are interested in one of these positions, please find the job descriptions here.
The whole Urban Games team say thanks again for your interest and contribution!
PS: The same update including an image can be found here.
Better performance, more robustness and a bunch of improvements
We are happy that today build 5746 was released.
The game update brings a significant performance boost (especially in the late game), fixes most of the remaining bugs and improves the game at various places. In other words, the train runs faster, safer and offers additional services!
Not only the game runs at a higher frame rate now, there is also less stuttering (e.g. at the end of each month) and the first view is faster now (i.e. when exploring the terrain and towns for the first time). Furthermore, sorting of large user interface lists (e.g. the vehicle and station lists) does no longer slow down the game, and loading of save games takes less time.
We are confident that with this update most of the remaining bugs are history. Most important, thanks to the help of various players, we have fixed a bug which caused some save games to not load anymore. With this update, all save games should correctly load again.
A bunch of improvements complete this update. In particular, players can now set an individual color for each line and the save game dialog was re-worked (all save games are shown, replace warning is displayed and double click is working). Also, we have added an option to control the style of the vehicle lifetime notifications (text or 3d in the main menu interface settings), because many player have requested this option.
We have followed many discussions about the future of Train Fever. Some players even suspected that Train Fever is dead and won’t be improved anymore. Let us clarify here that there will be additional game updates for sure. However let us also state that a part of our resources is needed for planning and preparing the future of Urban Games.
With a next update, we want to focus on new features. Probably the most requested feature is better track construction including X-crossings. You can be sure that we do everything to realize this request.
Thanks for your continuing interest in Train Fever and best wishes!
