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