Author: Matthias März

Hello Together,

in the last 16 days we worked on a couple of things. But this time not primarily on new features ingame, more on generell things.

In the beginning we created some new designs. We started to assemble a new nice looking color palette. The colors have to fit into your game in every aspect. They’re a well-conceived choice to reinforce your atmosphare of the game. We worked on the menu colors and a flat looking Design. On the menus you have to focus on the ergonomic aspects. How can you impart a lot of information in an user friendly way. This is something we always have to improve.

The next smaller thing we worked on was the language. We don’t want to spend a lot of money for a translator. So we thought we can handle this with our well known world wide web. So this gives us not the best translations but it is a first step to have a lot of languages with less effort. In the end we have 26 languages and with this amount we can cover the most players:
English
FRENCH / FRANÇAIS
SPANISH / ESPAÑOL
GERMAN / DEUTSCH
ITALIAN / ITALIANO
PORTUGUESE / PORTUGUÊS
RUSSIAN / РУССКИЙ
GREEK / ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
TURKISH / TÜRKÇE
DANISH / DANSK
NORWEGIAN / NORSK BOKMÅL
SWEDISH / SVENSKA
DUTCH / NEDERLANDS
POLISH / POLSKI
FINNISH / SUOMI
JAPANESE / 日本語
SIMPLIFIED CHINESE / 简体中文
TRADITIONAL CHINESE / 繁体中文
KOREAN / 한국어
CZECH / ČEŠTINA
HUNGARIAN / MAGYAR
ROMANIAN / ROMÂNĂ
THAI / ภาษาไทย
BULGARIAN / БЪЛГАРСКИ
HINDI / हिंदी
HEBREW / עברית

In the end we also created some new textures and worked on our finetuning. So the numbers in the game is the really high prirority stuff we do now.

We’re still planning to publish a really alpha version of Summer Islands in the end of 2017. But we can only work on Summer Islands in our free time.
So be patient if things not going well and fast enough. We’re really love Summer Islands and to create new features for it and we will definitely publish this awesome game.

In the last 14 days we started to improve the leveldesign. So with the prozedurale generator we wanna have a nice impression for the player in the whole map. The map has to be realistic and playerfriendly. So there musst be some nice places to start your holiday paradise. We decided that only in the brighter spots you can raise the map. With this decision the player cant connect every holiday paradise and it gets a little harder. On the other side it gets a lot faster for the ships to calculate there way thru the map. With this restriction we decided that the player can only build a port on the edge of the brighter to the darker water fields.

In the other days we implemented a A* algorithm for the pathfinding from the ships. From this algorithm we needed an array with the field where the ship changes his direction and the algorithm needed to be fast. Because of a map size of 2000×2000 fields it has to be fast. Otherwise we would switch calculation on the Serverside.

A next big step we did had to do with the finetuning in the moneycalculation ingame, for example the buildingcosts, how many tourist can in the building and so on. These numbers musst be perfect balanced otherwise it is too easy or too hard. There is probably a lot to change in the future but this is the first step to test this numbers and see that the AI will survive.

In the next weeks one of us can only work on little bugs or so, because of his masterthesis. But the others will work on the textures, numbers and features. So we apologize for a maybe slower progress of the game. But we plan to have a early access on steam in the end of 2017 or the begin of 2018.

For now please visit our twitter account or our page on IndieDB with the presskit and enjoy our video about the island types:

Ships, planes and cars everywhere. https://t.co/5sXvWyWT5O #gamedev #indiedev #games #pixelart #screenshotsunday pic.twitter.com/lYc5slhHN6

— SummerIslands 🏝️ (@SummerIslandsQA) October 29, 2017

indiedb.com/games/summer-islands

So, there was a lot going on in the last two weeks.

In the beginning we worked a weekend together, to get more performance from the AI and guess what: We did a good job :). a nice performance boost. With that we can push the AI a little bit more. The Basics are almost complete. Next step on the AI would be some individual choices from every AI.

On the client side we integrated a Map Editor. So, you have the possibility to create your own maps and play them. It would be nice to have also the steam workshop integrated so you can share them easily. I mean you can already share them if you copy and send them. But that wouldn’t be user-friendly.

We also got our steam account ready. So, we tried the greenworks lib to get the connection to steam. We had some trouble in the beginning, but after that in the end it worked great. There is a lot to do with this lib and we probably do this just before the Alpha.

Another great news was the integration to support a gamepad like the Xbox controller. We found a good library called ZIM. So, we will definitely support gamepads. But this is really a feature we will do at the end. We will see.

But please enjoy this beautiful nice port from our lovely artist. Wouldn’t it be nice to live there?

This month we worked a lot on the lobby mechanics. So the work was made in the background and you won’t see these things. You only see the effect.

But that’s not everything. On the AI we rework the basic functions to make it more efficency and for the textures we created some new Buildings.

For the next month we try to work on the weather and catastrophes. We tried some effects in the game. But its really hard to get the right amount of rain and also realistic rain. So maybe we need some more month for this.

But for now you can enjoy the small ingame buildings teaser:

This month was all about textures. It never ends. We work a lot on the buttons and the menu. Since were have a lot more textures we want to make ingame videos. But they will take at least the next month.

On the other side we’re creating a map Editor. So that you can create your personal maps ingame and also on a website. On the website you can download the map and implement it to your game on your PC.

The AI did a lot of progress in the last weeks. We implemented the main architecture, so that we can create the individual AI’s now.

The next Month we work a lot on buildingstextures and the eventsystem from the news. The news will show you the weather forecast and new buildings.

We hope you like the ingame pictures from the SummerIslands (Pre-Alpha 🙂 ).

This time we focused on the AI and some new function with the buildings. We’re making good but slowly progress with the textures. The buildings will have a lot of details :). But for now we will provide a small video about the nature and the island texture. Enjoy 😉

We worked in the last weeks mainly on the textures. The landscape, the buildings, the nature. We hope to show you some ingame videos in the next weeks once we have almost the textures ready 🙂

We’re really happy to announce that we have almost constant 60 fps with the new StageGL. The new createjs Update is really awesome!

In the last weeks, a few major steps have been taken with the AI. Its great to see the map beeing filled with buildings.

There are still a lot of bugs. But we’re making good progress. Now we create some new textures and in the next weeks we would like to make the finetuning with the buildingscosts and so on.

Now some explanantions about the pictures. These are some ingame pictures with the flat mode. you can easy activate the flat mode with space. So you see what is behind some big buildings. Because We definitely did not wanted to turn the view of the map.