City Car Driving 2.0 – many new details about the game

Today we talk about cargo transportation. In the original City Car Driving, this mechanic was one of two game activities in the open world.

We recycled cargo transportation, turning them from a side lesson into a full -fledged game mode.
First of all, City Car Driving 2.0 – a game about safe driving in urban conditions in passenger transport. As we said earlier: there will be no freight transport in the game. In contrast, the game will provide various vans that can still be ranked to the category of passenger transport.
In a nutshell, cargo transportation is a mode available in the game at any time. You must transport various goods from point A to point B.

To begin to engage in cargo transportation, just go into the in -game phone and choose a work with a courier of cargo. You will have a list of orders that need to be completed.
Each time you want to get a job, the list of orders is generated by accident again, so the outputs of the delivery of goods are often different.

At the same time, if you have a desire to always travel along the same route when working as a cargo as a goods, the game gives this opportunity.

Each cargo is a unique resource – these are small decorative objects; tools; All that can be transported to the car not intended for transportation of goods. In this mode, you act as a courier, not a trucker.
Each object has its own transportation requirements. For example, decorative wood products can be transported in any transport.

In turn, electricity generators can be transported only in pickups or a van. There is no place for such resources in the sedan, and it is unsafe; (
Each resource for transportation has similar requirements.

In addition to mechanics directly interacting with transport – on the game map there are special buildings that can be designated for convenience as "merchants".

Each similar merchant gives out only its own type of resource. For example, the sawmill provides only wood products
At the same time, to each "merchant", In turn, a certain resource is also required. The same sawmill requires tools for working with wood. Exist and "merchants", providing all types of resources at once.
With the help of this system, you can build a variety of routes by fulfilling orders for the transportation of goods.

Not only resources are in demand in relation to transport. In City Car Driving 2.0 machines differ more from each other than constructive and physical parameters.
Each car in the game will have its own indicator of the capacity of the cargo, which will allow you to adapt to each order for cargo transportation, changing your vehicle.
You can also take an order where you need to deliver more cargo than your car can accommodate. It’s okay – the order can be completed on several trips.
Together, the system provides a huge creative scope in the execution of each order.

All of the mentioned is, for the most part, preparatory events. If you remove them, then in the original CCD, the main game cycle occurred in approximately the same way: you transported a set of goods from point A to point B, as much as you like.
For more interest, now this mode is supplemented by game modifiers. Modifiers themselves are additional complications for the trip designed to provide unique situations when playing.
The first modifier found in the whole game is a timer. We understand that for many it is an irritating mechanics in itself: for this reason, the countdown of time in CCD 2.0. It does not apply to every cargo.
You will always be warned of order requirements. This is followed by the number of destination points – before the trip or during the trip, the order may change, and you will have to transport goods in several places at once.
During the execution of the order, albeit in the game, we still recommend that you be neat – each cargo has its own damage scale, and if nothing threatens the iron product in most cases, then the tools for thin work may be damaged.
The totality of all described mechanics, in our opinion, forms a unique system that is equally trained and allows each motorist to rest.

Developer diaries #9

An integral and important component in any game about the driver is the transportation of passengers, work by a taxi driver.

In the original City Car Driving, passenger transportation is the second most important game activity. As well as cargo transportation – the work of the taxi driver has undergone significant changes.

To start working as a taxi driver, as in the case of cargo transportation, just use the intra -game phone. At this stage, differences in game modes are already noticeable.

You have an application in your phone almost identical to these taxi applications for calling and working as a taxi driver. When choosing this application, an interactive map of the city will appear on your phone, where points with passengers will be indicated.

Each passenger has points from where it needs to be taken and where to deliver. In addition to these points, passengers will have their rating "passenger". The rating is an indicator for you: which passengers should take and which. Which of them will be easier or more difficult.

At each entrance to the taxi application, or the execution of the order, the location of customers will change.

Unlike cargo transportation, you will not have the opportunity to choose your favorite route. For each new transportation of passengers, you will need to optimize and create the route again.

The first part of the City Car Driving, the transportation of passengers was a full -fledged game mode, including due to such a parameter as "The mood of the passenger".

Thanks to your feedback and many guides from the community “How it works”, we were able to take into account errors in the implementation of mechanics "The mood of the passenger" in CCD2.

Now the system is implemented in the following form: each passenger has its own list of desires and requirements. There are customers the least picky for your transport.

They practically do not react in any way if you arrived at them on a damaged or dirty car, they don’t care how much the trip lasted, and how many times have you stopped refueling.

The mood meter is not so sensitive and does not lead, for example, to the fact that, without turning on the turn signal during rebuilding, you lose all your progress for the trip.

Depending on the state of your transport, the style of the trip, as well as on the passenger itself – this parameter becomes more predictable at the beginning of the trip and brightly signals the actions that can be allowed and which is not, when working as a taxi driver.

If I may say so, now now "mood" turned into a predictable, and most importantly, supporting interest – “Crush of Complexity”.

Taking this opportunity, in the topic about working in a taxi, we will show the answer to one of the many comments: the roads in the city are heterogeneous, and include not only narrow spaces.

As in cargo transportation, there are various modifiers in a taxi that affect the trip. And this is not only mood and requirements. Here are a few examples:

• The passenger asks to adhere to the average speed X and go on it until the end of the trip
• The passenger asks to reduce the speed to the X value, and go to it until the end of the trip
• The passenger asks to drive through certain locations
• The passenger asks to call in a certain place, before the final appointment point
• The passenger may ask to call in other passengers

If with all modifiers it is clear how they affect the game, then the latter in the listed list should be considered in more detail.

In CCD 2.0 Work in a taxi is no longer limited to one passenger. Now you have the opportunity to choose transport for several places and choose orders in advance, where there are more customers than one person.

In this embodiment, the mood meter remains alone, but takes into account the desires of each passenger. Often, if you take an order for several people, several points appear at once, where each person should be delivered.

Work on the location has not yet been completely completed. For example, the embankment is not ready with us. The whole street is at the stage of the concept.

All mechanics in conjunction provide a different experience with a courier of cargo transportation. In the operating system for working, your pace of the game is increasing, and the difficulty in completing the task increases.

All this happens gradually, depending on your skills. This system provides a comfortable pace of the game for novice drivers, and an experienced motorists are thrown by a decent challenge.

Each of the previously described game modes serves so that you can get different experience in driving a car.

Developer diaries #10

In the anniversary development diary, we want to share with you how it all started with City Car Driving 2.0.

In the diaries of developers, we rarely describe the work on the project sequentially, from beginning to end. Basically, we demonstrated various project mechanics: how they did them, how they look and how they will play.

Therefore, today’s issue is designed to talk a little about that, How did we start doing CCD 2.0 in chronological order, without screenshots from the project in the current state. All materials used in these diaries are materials accumulated during the development.

Concept

To the idea to create a continuation of CCD, we did not come immediately.

As we have said more than once – the main area of ​​activity of our company – "Forward" – These are simulators and specialized software, and not full -fledged games. Therefore, for the original CCD, we released only patches and visual updates, the main content was updated significantly less often.

By the 2020s, the City Car Driving has already been a complete and full-fledged product for us, so we stopped releasing updates to Steam.

For several years of the existence of the project, we have repeatedly returned to the idea of ​​developing CCD not only as a simulator, but also as a game.

Players who have long been with us know that in the distant 2010s, we wanted to create "Carrier" – Game project, focused more on entertainment than training. Already at the stage of the detailed concept and presentation of Tizer, we realized that we lack certain skills and knowledge. The probability of creating a bad product was very high, so we decided to refuse further work on "Carrier".

First steps

In the early 2020s, when "dawn" In the technology of the gaming industry, we again returned to the idea of ​​the transformation of CCD. Over the past time, a worthy competitor appeared on the market, and the simulator literally required updates.

Therefore, we began to test various game engines, and Unreal Engine 4 was the most suitable for the project. Read more about this, we wrote in the second diaries

We decided on the basic concept, chose the engine. What to do next? For the simulator, a full development cycle is well known to us, but how to create a game correctly? The most obvious was to start with the prototype.

The first task, we can say the main "idea" CCD 2.0, it was to create a game that has minimal system requirements not higher than that of the original City Car Driving on normal graphics settings. We understand that not everyone has powerful computers that many modern games require. Therefore, we set ourselves the goal of creating a modern project in which it is nice to be, and at the same time, it can work on the computers of most people.

It all started with the creation of a prototype of the project graphics on a pilot location. And the first question that we began to work out is vegetation, as the most "loading" graphic component.

Part of the pilot location. As you can see, grass, trees, the road and its transitions are made from scratch, however, they still guess part of the visual style of the original City Car Driving.

After work with vegetation, in order to evaluate performance, we have transferred some of the models from the original CCD. Of course, in the final version of CCD2, all models will be new, but at that time we needed a quick result on the Unreal Engine 4 engine.

We worked on the pilot location for about a year. We tried various options, pretended how the graphics might look, and how quickly the game will work. Gradually mastered Unreal Engine.

Before starting work on CCD2.0. We wanted to solve an important issue with the generation of the landscape and roads. In the pilot location, all roads were made by hand by designers, but for the release project this approach would be too laborious. I needed a landscape generator. Unfortunately, even such a developed engine as Unreal Engine cannot provide tools for generating the type of landscape that we need – combinations of neat geometric shapes of the road network, with hills, fields and rivers of the natural landscape.

However, we already had our own generator, which creates a landscape and roads for CCD. For a few months we were able to adapt the generator to UE, and nothing stopped us from creating large locations of mixed urban/suburban type.

The appearance of CCD 2.0.

After we figured out technologies, we have started developing the concept of the game. As you could understand by past diaries, we do not want to disclose specific mechanics, graphics, transport ahead of time. Therefore, here we denote only the basic ideas:

• Save the main gameplay of the original City Car Driving – safe driving in compliance with traffic rules. Make it interesting both for novice drivers who only master life on the road, and for experienced drivers;
• To focus on immersicity without direct control of the character, because in the car symbolic a character is a player himself;
• Increase the size of the city, make it more like a real place: with its history and architecture tied to it, differing from each other in different areas and unique names;
• Maintain communication with the audience: talk more with you, take note of ideas, honestly answer questions about the project;
• And finally, to create a project, the performance of which we can easily support, update, and realize both our own vision and part of the desires of the audience (yes, multiplayer, we remember about you).

With these ideas we have started developing a project. The work has been going on for a year and a half, and during this time CCD 2.0 has been modified many times already. How the graphics changed, you can see at the end of the diary, where we placed screenshots of comparison of the current level of graphics, and where we started. We really want to create one of the best car systems in the market, which brings real benefits to novice drivers, but at the same time gives the sea of ​​the fan for all.

Comparison of graphics in a state of development and at the moment