Jul 1, 2021

Train Valley 2 - Osja AA-gun

Most recent Train Valley 2 Workshop submissions in this issue of Choo-Choo Weekly — levels for players, by players.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2527061536

A simply superb level to get us into train puzzle resolving business in no time employs a mixture of limit on the number of track tiles to build, Passenger Flow mechanics and ingenuity. You could try squeezing all the secondary routes in to bypass the passenger trains, but will you have the funds and time to control two separate track systems?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2524234334

A centerpiece in this one is a track you seemingly cannot connect to anywhere else :) There is our friend DNDATT** and his partner DNRT*** that will keep us company while navigating confined spaces of a baobab valley with its multiple branch supply chain and 15:30 time limit.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2525667855

A Passenger Flow action all the way in Australia, complete with Uluru / Ayers Rock and approximately one friendly engine-sized spider that keeps your gray matter railroad puzzles zone racing at all times. DNSAT*, no demolishing allowed and more stations to look forward too - good thing I have a spare mouse in my drawer :)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2524167501

Complex terrain, track tile limit, DNRT*** and plenty of time to account for everything - it is recommended to watch your trains' size. A walk in the Lake District was never this challenging before — an interesting design with a simple idea at its center.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2523191570

Ah, where to begin. We have a giant FROG — if you ask me it has no trouble crossing any road at all — that DEMANDS 5 cows for light brunch and dynamite for dessert. It also has certain interest in potions and canned goods, but we also have a small town on the other side of a very intricate railroad track system — with three autotrains constantly using said system — that needs some cows too as well as a lot of rethinking on their import/export tariffs. Check your time, control the autotrains, keep the DNRT*** in mind, succeed. A true rollercoaster of a level.

@LittleBear is our newest winner! A €10 Steam gift card will be delivered to them by our contact ASAP.

Don't forget to tell us about your TV2 workshop adventures and visit our Discord server for an upcoming LPT challenge. Until next week!

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*Do No Stop Any Trains
**Do Not Destroy Any Track Tiles
***Do Not Reverse Trains

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:tvhook: Train Valley 2 Discord Server.

:tv2computer: Our Twitter.

Jul 1, 2021

New Season / New Patch

Game Dev Masters - Doobachoo

Patch 1.4 is now online. All ladders have been reset, and we have now transitioned to "Steam Boards" instead of the epic boards. This gives new power over your data allowing things like total games from all savs to add to your max games made score board, and more.

This new patch should not break old saves. However, if you wish to post to the new leader boards you need to create a save after this patch. Some of the new changes might have weird results in older saves, but the core gameplay should be fine. If you wish to continue a previous save you may, but I encourage you to make new games, and post to the leader boards.

As always you can get the short bullet style patch changes in the GDM discord: https://discord.gg/WfbXE4cDVA

We are also starting a new give away (for a different game) you can enter in the discord.

Now for the main patch notes, let's get into it.

-Added the ability to change the name for acquired subsidiary companies. Once you control a company you can change its name from the manage acquisitions menu. Name changes take immediate effect; however, the change will not be reflected in the Top 10 Companies until the following month, this is when the top companies are measured and changed.

-Added more functionality to the camera button of the review page. This now on top of taking a nice shot and putting it in the buggit directory on your PC, calls for a steam screen shot to be taken. This should make it easy to take review screen shots to share on the discord to earn roles, or add them to the community pages.

-The top scores from the current boards were added to the Hall Of Fame for the June Masters league. If you were among them, you can now find your score in the hall of fame. If I made any typos on your names, my bad. Please contact me on and well get this fixed up quickly.

-Added the ability to reset all room colors back to a nice clean white. Some people were making some bad decisions, and having an issue finding white out of the current palate (its grey with brightness = white). So, we now have a reset color button you can use to fix any ugly mistakes.

-Changed the email message you get after completing a game that lets you know if you made any mistakes or were perfect (not topic / genre / target matches that's what game reports and research are for). This message now has every mistake you make added to the list. It used to just show you 3 regardless of how many mistakes you made.

-Added a short popup tutorial on your first medium game. This short tutorial explains how you need to drag and drop workers on to sliders for medium + sized games. Some people who haven't player other games such as GDT were confused by this change, and the drag drop was not obvious. This should help clear that up for new players.

-I have changed the default color values for the rooms from all white to some random colors I picked. I got tired of seeing players with white rooms. I knew they either didn't care to change color, or they didn't know you could. This way for those players they are at least not working in a fully white room. If you wish to set your room to full white you can, but that's on you.

-Made several text / language improvements. Thank you so much to everyone who keeps bringing these to my attention, especially Dycart gaming and his Grammar Masters streams. Working solo is tough, and I move fast. Some things get missed, or spell check flags them as correctly spelt words that are the wrong word. This really does help make the game a lot more professional looking, and I am very grateful to everyone on discord helping clean up the game's mistakes. As we add more stuff, there will be more mistakes to come, I am sure.

-Added a gameplay option to choose to have convention warning notifications come as a popup message. It is easy to miss a convention message, especially late game when more and more things begin to trend the news can be backed up. This popup can be used to ensure you never miss another convention.

-Added a gameplay option to auto skip the awards show. All of the game has been streamlined to feed into emails (if you chose), the only game stopping popup that was left was the yearly game awards. You can now have these also automatically run, you skip going but of course if you release the best / worst games you still receive rewards / penalties. This will allow late game players to go fully afk and let stocks / investments and what not roll in.

-Added the ability to hide the tip popup for view stats / train worker pages if you do a second click on the Info button. This is a very minor thing that some specific players have been requesting. I got you guys.

-Removed the penalty for using the same topic + genre back-to-back. With the new incentives for using fresh topics and genres, I feel most players will already want to do this. However, if you just want to make Fantasy RPGs over and over like some real companies, I think that is fine as well. The game promotes sequels / remakes / new topics and what not with other metrics I don't feel we need to punish anyone for just wanting to make the same game over and over anymore.

-Fixed an issue with workloads when using slider locks. There was a bit of weird math in the slider locks when applying workloads, this has been fixed and will no longer have any difference on workloads moving forward.

-Added the slider rule cheat sheet to every small game stage HUD. After players saw the cheat sheet I added to the new guided stage HUD tutorial, they were like "We want this all the time". I have made sure the math is very easy to remember 20/30/free/20/30. However, I hear you. I don't want to clutter the HUD and I don't want to shrink the cheat sheet down to fit neatly. Especially when it comes to medium + with the addition of workers / features. What I have decided to do as a compromise is include this cheat sheet for every small game you create. Once you reach medium it goes away. I think this is the best of both worlds, it helps you understand the rules but then it gets out of the way when needed.

-I have recolored a few things in the Stage HUD to make it pop a bit more. Such as making the words design / tech match the color for design / tech in the game. This helps keep things more obvious, and looks sharp.

-Added hyperlinks to the training menu for each stat. You can now use the drop down to pick training programs to jump to, or you can click on the stat of your choice to jump to that training program.

-Added a mail for trend changes for topics / genre. Now when something begins a trend (goes over 50%) as well as when a trend is over saturated and heading down (hit 100% and on way down to 0% to cool off) you receive a mail that you can reference later when making your next game. You no longer need to just rely on memory if a new trend comes up while you are already making a game, you can just save that mail for later.

-Added worker name plates for your workers in office 2/3 (not your manager you should know your name). This is an easy way to spot who is who when you want to decide to use skills. There is an option in the gameplay options to turn this feature on and off. I have it defaulting too ON. However, when you manually name your workers, it's easier to know who is who and you may wish to remove these labels.

-Added a new text below the hype bar (goes where the delay tech / design goal goes). This text will update as you change stages in medium + games, and will show you who is in charge of that section. This will help you know when XXXX is in charge and should make use of skills such as Crunch or Pacify or Overrides, as well as others may use Take Charge etc.

-Added a short text line to worker skills page in character stats. This line simply just says this is a drag drop operation to clear up some confusion people had. I may re work this system to a click to choose system at a later time, but this at least makes it obvious to new players for now.

-Fixed an annoying issue where when you drag drop a worker, if you missed a slider, you could not then select / move that slider until you re drag dropped a worker properly. This is no longer the case, I have covered the screen in a transparent image that receives drop events if you miss the sliders, and will ensure they are not blocked by the slider blocks that receive the drops when done correctly. They now go away if you miss if that makes sense to you, if not just know this bug is dead now and you won't ever see it again.

-As we as ending last season's boards, we have fully moved into steam boards. With this we get more control of the data, but also, we have added more boards. There is now a small/med/large/aaa board for your best games, and you each get 1 top game per board. So, there is now a board that players in office 1 can aim to win which extends to our DEMO players as well. This just adds more areas that you can dominate.

That is the end of this week's patch. One final note is that in-game leader boards are currently disabled. Unfortunately, I cannot fake entries to the steam boards for testing purposes. Because of this I cannot test and be sure I have setup the in-game version of the boards correctly. It could give bad data or even worse a game crash. For this reason, the in-game boards are disabled for now. You can view your scores in your global stats / community pages for GDM (where you find your achievement progress). Once we gather a few entries I will be able to test my code, and when confirmed working I will hot fix the boards into the game. This will depend on the number of entries we receive, but I would expect it not to take more than a day or 2 before we can test and implement the boards reference in game as well as in steam where it is already available.

Thank you So much for your continued support. There were almost 2500 games made from the top 50 players a lone with a combined global total over 30k, from the over 2k players (including demo), that is just amazing. Please continue to enjoy the game, and give feedback / suggestions on the discord. With any new big patch there may be issues, please bring these to me ASAP and we will clear them up. Ideally if there any obvious issues we will have them hot fixed as we turn the in-game steam boards on. So, get in there and make some games so I can have your leader board entries. Next big patch will focus on engines / convention / awards (tentative plan).

Jul 1, 2021

May-June Updates

Pigeon Simulator - HakJak

Buff Pigeon

Here’s a very early work-in-progress tease of Buff Pigeon. LOTS more to come here, but we couldn’t resist showing y’all a preview now, even in this raw stage. Punching stuff as this swole bird is just too much fun!

Jeremy has been hard at work, giving Buff Pigeon a final art pass. He’s updated the sculpt to make it more refined and “rage roidy”—bulging veins and everything! He’s also updated the rig and is currently working on all the unique animations required for Buff Pigeon’s sweet skill set. More to come on that next month!

Environment VFX

It’s time to start replacing our prototyping assets with final art, and what better place to start than with characters and the environment! We did a huge update on all of the main environment visuals this month, keeping an eye on optimization and scalability as we went.

Ocean

We implemented an ocean shader system that allows us to scale performance vs quality quite nicely to support low-end machines while also allowing high-end rigs to crank things to an 11. Lots of cool features here, but I won’t bore you with the details—it just looks really pretty!

Later we’ll add some buoyancy effects to this so stuff can float on the waves and bob around.

Sky and Clouds

As you can see in the GIF above, we also have volumetric clouds with realtime changes. Since the main character is a bird, we felt that having a sky with depth, color and movement was important. Clouds like these are more performance-intensive though, so we’re going to have have a fallback system for lower end machines and some way to scale between them as needed.

Below you can see a lower-end version of these as low-hanging clouds you can fly though! More work to be done here, but it’s off to a nice start.

Vegetation

Although the initial focus was on urban environments, we realized that vegetation will play an important role as well. Not only for creating beautiful backdrops, but lush environments you can explore and discover secrets. Since you’re a bird, moving about the level is a breeze and we wanted to make sure everything is interesting and interactive, no matter where you go in the scene.

However, having a main character that can fly creates a set of serious performance challenges we had to overcome. We wanted dense vegetation, with adjustable wind, realtime weather changes (snow coverage, etc) and some level of interactivity (collisions, ripping trees out of the ground, etc). Annnnd we had to pull all this off with long distance views, and look good when viewed from any angle, including high in the sky—all while being perfromant, of course!

After a bunch of hard work, trial and error, we managed to make great progress here! We’re able to render thousands of trees in a scene, viewable from any angle, and keep things running smoothly. So far things are looking great.

Next on the list is to add some interactivity, grass and flowers.

<h3 style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Weather</h3>
We also tied in some basic weather effects with the vegetation, to make things appear wet, sandy, or covered in snow. Lots more work to do, but here’s a preview.

Terrain Tiles and Procedural Texturing

We want each level the player enters to feel unique, and that starts from the ground up—literally! To keep things lightweight and fast, we decided to use a tile-based approach. This allows us to assemble terrain much faster than using a more traditional heightmap and mesh generation approach, is easier to optimize, and performs more reliably with physics.

We prototyped a starter set of tiles this month for “Alpha Island”, our early development level. These are manually placed right now, and then procedurally textured based on their slopes. Later we will use this for procedural generation of terrains and large environment geometry. So far it looks like this approach will work quite well for our goals.

And yes… that’s a volcano you see in the background.

ProcGen and Destruction Updates

Each building in Pigeon Simulator is procedurally generated from the ground up and fully destructible. Handling all this madness requires an extensive amount of optimization and performance management. Over the past couple of months, we’ve given this system several important technical updates that made substantial improvements to both generation and performance. This is important so we can ensure things run well on lower-end machines, and provides some extra performance budget for cool VFX and AI.

For instance, now we can allow for a lot more destruction debris to remain in a scene before we begin any cleanup. It’s really satisfying to see all your handy-work stick around.

Road and Traffic Updates

Continuing our process of swapping out placeholder assets, all of the road tiles got a nice model and material update, including: wider roads, full sidewalks, crosswalks, and even nice little corner ramps. We also setup a whole bunch of new street props that get spawned about randomly, like street lamps, alley dumpsters, intersection lights, benches, etc.

These roads are built with splines, which the traffic and pedestrian system uses to assist their navigation, keeping things running faster and smoother than a full AI approach.

We finally have more than 1 car model driving around the city now too, haha. Dakota spent a lot of time optimizing the vehicle models and getting them setup to spawn in the city.

Having more traffic driving around is nice and all, but it doesn’t matter much if you can’t blow ‘em up! Scott gave all the vehicles an update that lets us do just that—with spectacular results!

City Park and New Props

We added a central park to “Alpha Island”. This is where our feathered hero will spawn during these early stages of development. It’s a semi-safe space where we can also do a light tutorial and let the player experiment a bit before explore the rest of the city.

Additionally, we built a ton of new city props which will be spawned around the scene according to the procgen rule sets. Including some cool watch towers the Pigeon Patrol may use, playground equipment, outhouses, and a mysterious vending machine.

Music

Music production is fully underway now! Pigeon Simulator will feature an original soundtrack, with layered music that adapts to the player’s actions and scenarios. We’ve got a beautiful main theme song, with many other music states to match. We’re not ready to share that quite yet, so here’s a sample to hold ya over—the default Boss Fight music!

We’ve also been hard at work with a local Sound Designer to begin implementing a bunch of sound effects in the game (finally!), including ambient city sounds, wind, swooshes, explosions and more. Hoping to showcase some of that next month.

Morrrre Pigeon Updates

We’ve continued to update the main pigeon controller, improving the overall feel and adding new features, such as:

Completely physics-based movement, even while doing complex actions like grabbing and carrying objects.
Inverse Kinematics setup. Now the pigeon can aim his/her head—or butt— in any direction while firing off projectiles! IK also allows us to hint to the player nearby points of interest, or look at the NPC you’re talking to.
Grounded poop attacks. Aim your butt like a mortar cannon and fire off powerful charge shots!
Eating animations, expelling items, stomach inventory management, sound effect implementation, hooking things up to the new HUD, and more!

We’re continuing to work out bugs in the DNA System, but so far it’s proven to be a lot of fun to create weird new abilities and use them on unsuspecting humans. Like this instance, where we combined the DNA of Watermelon and Spicy Burritos for rapid-fire explosive results!

Community Updates and Concept Art

One of our big goals here at HakJak Studios is to foster a close relationship with players and actually listen to and implement a ton of community-driven features requests!

Although the project is still in its early days and no public build is yet available, we’ve been listening to all the crazy ideas pitched so far and started implementing the ones that made sense during this stage, such as this Statue of Li-bird-y, a concept pitched by a fan.

For others, we had fun sketching out some sweet concept art, below. These help us plan out the work involved in actually producing them, to see which are worth pursuing first. These are a mix of fan and team concepts.

Here we have a “ChocoBob Rider”… we fully intend to make this one a real ability with some special perks.

And we received many pitches for a dinosaur-like pigeon power, so we present to you: Pigeosaurous!

Or there’s this one, perhaps inspired by D&D’s "OwlBear” monster… the PigeBear.

We’re also concepting out variations to the base Pigeon Patrol unit, and player’s hub location known simply as The Nest.

What Else?

New Hires!
We’ve been busy recruiting new folks to join our team and grow the studio size. We just hired two new people and we’re excited to introduce you to them soon!

Cloud Builds
After a bit of toil and trouble, we managed to get a Cloud Build system up and running. This let’s us automatically create builds after every new commit, enabling us to catch game-breaking issues right away and do internal testing much quicker.

In the future, this could mean a faster process for pushing out public game updates as well.

Business-y Business Meetings of Important Business Stuff
We want to bring Pigeon Simulator to as many platforms as possible and give everyone the opportunity to experience life as a feathered god/goddess, and we want to continue ramping up the team, so we’ve been putting on our business hats and doing the work to make that happen.

Those are the highlights for this update!

Join us next month as we begin building a bunch of new pigeon abilities in earnest and paint the town red—err white. Gross.