What's going on?
Hello Commander,
Chris here, Producer for Sphere - Flying Cities.
We are working towards the exit from Early Access of this game and today I need to tell you that we are pushing out that date by one more week to the 13th of October.
Since we just recently moved the date already, I wanted to take the opportunity to let you know what we are working on and what changes you can look forward to for the main release.
Before we get into that, we truly appreciate all your input and your patience while we are working on this. I am sure a lot of you will find your feedback reflected below.
So, let's just dig right in, shall we?
Resource Management
Let’s get the big thing out front: At release, Sphere – Flying Cities will have over 20 different resources to gather, mine, store, produce and keep track of.
We are pumping up the resource handling and production chain muscles of this game tremendously. Some of the basic resources you already know if you played the game before, like water, different food types, oxygen and energy. These stay mostly the same although they might get different uses here and there.
New resources are either gathered/mined like limestone or topsoil. Or they need to be produced using other resources. For example, concrete is produced using limestone in the processing plant, one of the new buildings we are introducing to support the new production chains.
Before we introduced this change, a lot of things in the game relied on a global resource we called “material”, they were used for building structures but also for producing energy in power plants.
This created all kinds of problems where building too much or not having any ruins anymore to gather any materials from quickly led to the collapse of your energy infrastructure.
Now, every building requires a specific combination of resources (for example concrete, steel and electronics) and basic power plants run on fossil fuels which can be gathered or produced in several ways.
As you can imagine, this is a drastic change to the basics of the game, and it needs a lot of refining and balancing. This is the main reason why we decided to skip the release of the logistics update and kept working on refining this feature up until release.
Randomized World Map
You read that right. Sphere – Flying Cities will get a randomized global map.
That means that every time you start a new game, the locations of resources, survivors and dangers will be different. We are also introducing more customization options for the sandbox mode so that you can make use of the randomization features as much as possible.
This adds endless replayability to the game and makes every flight with your city a new journey of discovery.
We also introduced a couple of mechanics that make sure that you always find enough resources and survivors around your starting position and that you don’t run out of elements in the long run to fuel your research.
Tutorial
We always knew that we would need updates to the tutorial elements in the game considering how many new gameplay elements we have added throughout the early access phase. At the same time, it became quite tedious for experienced players to go through the same tutorial steps every time they would start a new campaign and it grew harder and harder to cram all the necessary information into campaign missions.
With the full release of Sphere – Flying Cities, we are adding a dedicated tutorial that can be accessed from the main menu. It is self-contained and goes through all the important elements of the game, from camera movement to energy management, from production cycles to education and navigation.
At the same time, sandbox and campaign modes now are free from tutorial elements and the campaign mode starts off with more elaborate quests so that the player is not handheld so much if they jump into the campaign and have some time to build up the city their own way before they start pursuing the campaign quests.
Balancing
We previously already made a lengthy blog post about how tricky it is to balance a survival city builder.
In case you missed it: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1273220/view/3131694291139090107
Part of the truth though also is that developers will play their game day-in and day-out and will often underestimate the challenges a “real” player will have with their game design.
That’s not to say we are best at playing our game. Most of the time, we are not. But we might do some things automatically because we know how the code behind them works without even thinking if that is how a normal player would interact with the system.
Listening to players and doing user research tests are the best ways to find out where our assumptions are wrong. We did both throughout the EA phase and one thing that became clear was that we should both offer a broader variety of difficulty levels and make the easier difficulty levels even more accessible to new players.
At release, both the normal and easy difficulty modes will be more forgiving than they were before. But hardcore players will still find a challenge in the higher difficulty levels.
On top of that, we will have a special build mode that lets players just build their city without any strict fail states to try out different city setups, get acquainted with buildings and systems and generally have a more relaxed time.
At this point, we would like to give a shoutout to our friends at Gentlymad Studios who shared their vast experience from working on Endzone: A World Apart with us, especially when it comes to balancing and difficulty levels. They rock, you should play their game as well!
New UI
User Interface is one of the most difficult things in game design, especially for strategy games.
There are hundreds of pieces of information that a player could need at any given time, and it is hard to decide, what should have prominence on screen and how players should interact with the UI elements.
Early Access games pose an even bigger conundrum in that regard because developers tend to add more and more functionality and features throughout the EA phase. Functionality and features that need to find their place amongst the other already existing menus and buttons.
When working towards the release version of Sphere – Flying Cities we took a step back to determine which information was the most important for the player with all the features we now have in the game.
One thing that we had a look at is where players spent the most time in the game and which menus are important for their success in the game. And we had to see that those menus are kind of scattered all over the place. We decided that four main screens should be centrally accessible from a switch in the main HUD:
[olist]
Each of these now has a button at the bottom of the main hub and the player can switch back and forth between them at any time.
These buttons also all carry the main information the player needs at any given time.
The research button shows if research is going on and at what percentage of completion it is, the navigation button shows the arrival time when the colony is traveling, and the mining button shows if any mining is going on and lets the player switch auto-mining on and off.
We hope that this setup lets the player find information and make decisions more quickly and thus add to a fun game experience.
As a survival city builder, Sphere relies heavily on the player always being on the brink of collapse. And for that to be fun, the player needs to always understand where the danger is coming from. What is threatening their colony.
Over the months of EA, this became harder and harder to communicate. So, we have made some very central changes to the information portrayed on the main HUD.
The most dangerous thing for the player is the collapse of the AG device. The central element on the top of the screen reflects this. It shows how much energy is currently produced more than used and how that fills the batteries. Once this number turns negative, the battery bar flickers red while the energy from the battery is drained. Once the battery is empty, the shield starts collapsing.
So, with a more pronounced red blinking and a longer lead-up time for the collapse, we are giving the player more time to enact counter measures and more clearly communicate the thread they are facing. If the player has more battery buildings, more excess energy can be stored which of course gives an even longer lead-up time.
Next up: Population. We discovered that lots of players fail because their population collapses. Either their people are unhoused, get sick or overage without the player even noticing. This may have been because the information about population was not visual enough.
There were more and more numbers about population (sick, very sick, house/unhoused, skilled/unskilled, underage/senior, etc.) but they were all numbers on a board. So, we thought about which of these numbers were most important for the player and how we could visualize them best.
The result is a dynamic population bar on the right side of the top UI bar. It shows:
- How many people are in the right age to work
- How many of those people are unhoused (if any)
- How many of those people are sick (if any)
- How many of those people are skilled (if any)
- How many underage / seniors the city has
The effect we hope this will have, is that players will take one look at this bar and know if the problem with their city is that they don’t provide enough health care or housing. Or that they overage their population. Or that too little of their workers are skilled.
Visualizing this with strong colours gives the player a better chance at seeing and tackling those problems early and effectively. For players that want to dive deeper into data, there is of course the statistics area that holds more information about the details of the population, but the most important info is front and centre.
Oh, and for those of you that are interested in the behind-the-scenes, here is some concepting we did on that UI element:
Green Cities
One thing we always wanted to do is give the player some satisfaction when they kept their city alive for a long time and it is thriving. Now, we can finally do that.
When the city survives long enough, air pollution is low and the player has reached a high technology level, the area under the shield dome will slowly turn green and vegetation will sprout within the city wherever no buildings have been built.
Aside from grass textures, we also have 15 different tree types that can grow in your city. While this is most probably not as impactful as other new gameplay elements, it is beautiful visual effect and perfect to wrap up this lengthy blogpost about all the cool things coming to Sphere – Flying Cities once it launches on October 13th.
See you soon, Commanders!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1273220/Sphere__Flying_Cities/
