The big thing this week was the Steam launch of course (check here for instructions on how to retrieve your Steam key if you’ve bought the game before it was on Steam).
It went pretty well! The ratings are at 97% positive right now and there haven’t been too many major technical issues - we’ll have to see how things look in a couple weeks, but so far so good :)
In development news we’ve released a patch version (Alpha 1a) since last week that mostly fixed some more small glitches and added a couple minor features (most notably block sections are working as intended now and the Mac/Linux versions are running much more stable now).
The last few days we’ve mostly been reading and responding to feedback. The most common complaints so far are:
The game is not available in my language
This is something I wish we had been a bit more prepared for… we had translation support in the game for a long time but didn’t get any translations done. We could have handled that way better.
We got lots of offers from people to help with translations so to rectify this we’ve set up crowdsourced translations over here, which means anyone can help with translating the game into their language.
We might still get some professional translations done for the more common languages but for now this is the fastest way to fix this and allows us to add support for rare languages too.
There is no campaign
This one is a bit tricky - it simply doesn’t make any sense for us to work on a campaign before the game is feature complete. We’d have to redo it all and throw away a lot of work to update campaign levels as more content gets put into the game in the future.
While the Steam description says that the game only has a sandbox mode at the moment and that a campaign will be added in the future some people don’t seem to read that and then become disappointed after purchase. Not sure yet how to solve this best so we’ll just observe for a bit longer to see if this complaint keeps coming up.
There is no tutorial
For now we’ll add more informative tooltips and such, I think that’s generally a good idea. The coaster builder is a good example for that: it should tell you exactly why a certain build option is currently not available instead of just taking it away. Not a big fan of traditional tutorials personally but we really might need a small one that teaches the basics eventually.
Noticeable FPS drops if zooming out all the way in big parks
To improve this we’re mostly waiting for Unity 5.4, which brings some new features for improving performance if there are many objects on screen at once. The planned release date for Unity 5.4 is June, so I think we’ll have some improvements for this in the game by the end of July if everything goes well.
I’ll also check if we can do some other optimizations before that, but the biggest performance hit for zoomed out views specifically is from rendering all the thousands of individual objects in the park so I expect Unity 5.4 to help more with this than anything I can do right now.
It’s an Early Access game
Yes, it says so on the store page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All of our older players are helping a lot with this addressing these issues (thanks so much!) and things seem to calm a bit down now, so we should be able to jump right back into normal development and have some more interesting news again next week :)