Airport CEO: Pre-Alpha Gameplay Video (Part 1)

Very nice work devs! I totally love it. There are some amazing details out there and the graphics are looking amazing (especially by night). I really loved the part where you needed to call the contractors, it’s such a small detail, but it adds so much more realism to the game. It really makes this game stand out to other games!

I’m looking forward to the next video! :slight_smile:

BTW: I almost missed my train because of this video… :stuck_out_tongue:

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Critical for me is

  • Some kind of fencing. Closing off air side from land side.
  • External lighting
  • We haven’t seen service vehicles in operation yet
  • We haven’t seen aircraft in operation yet
    Not so critical, but still important:
  • The vehicles should be prohibited to do a U turn if there is a ‘normal’ route to their destination, that would solve most of the glaring movement issues.
  • I don’t believe the boxes that are generated have a relation to what they are building. I see workers moving to construction that was queued up, where it was not possible yet to have received goods for that job.

But i do agree with you that this game is already looking better than many a game on early access or even release.

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@Olof and @Fredrik, curious question. How do the vehicles move around the map? Do they follow an unseen line?

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I asked Frederik on Discord about the fence:

We have a sprite for the fence, just have not added it as an object. Simply because lack of time. But you are of course right, the road checkpoint would not make any sense otherwise.

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I think this game looks amazing, I have played 10 hours of Simairport which came out at the beginning of the week and this compared to that (Well there is no comparison) !!

The only judgmental thing I would have to say is the security area looks like it needs more to it. It feels like it is missing the metal detectors or body scanners and missing passport id station ETC. But that being said this looks like the game to watch out for and I think these guys are going to be rolling in cash from sales!

Well Done @Olof @Fredrik Amazing Work Guys!

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Based on what I saw, your pre-alpha is far and away a better looking more polished game than I expected! Admittedly, I was skeptical about the contract construction worker portion given how well PA’s system with employee construction worked, but it seems to be working pretty well. The only question I have about it is is there an impact other than financial that choosing the construction company will have? In other words, might I get more bang for my buck if I spend more?

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That gameplay video just blew me away. This looks as good as Prison Architect did, if not better. Charming graphics, detailed characters and great little detailed features that are always missing from large projects. I’m properly psyched about this, and if you’re planning on a crowdfunding campaign anytime soon, then count me in! :smile:.

Det gör mig dessutom väldigt glad att ni, iaf just nu, är baserade i Lund och att jag kanske någon gång har sprungit in i någon av er på stan! :wink:

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Really nice video, the only thing that I can criticize is the lack of fence and the starting money. That seems way to high. Maybe cut it to 1/8 or maybe even 1/10. Right now loans dosn’t make seem to make any sense.

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@fluppblubb: The fence is still going to be implemented and the starting money is that high because of the difficulty level that is chosen at the beginning (very easy)! :slight_smile: It is however maybe indeed quite high…

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Lol the starting money is only so high because it’s on demo mode. Allows devs or anyone to play around with the money and do what they like without being prevented by a money issue.

Majority of these games will have unlimited funds at this stage in development and I expect in early access it could be the same.

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I’m not sure if it’s because it’s demo mode. Here’s an overview of the different difficulty options that you can choose from at this point (click to expand):

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Looking at that again, it might be nice to set a variable difficulty level as well. Maybe I want lots of money to make a big airport, but also want the challenge of unfriendly pax, demanding airlines and daily incidents? Something to consider down the line, perhaps?

I’m assuming that the $1bn starting fund is in essence a sandbox mode for the game.

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First of all, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for all the warm comments and feedback. I will now repay you by addressing your questions:

You are absolutely right and we already have a system in place for this for the aircrafts and will migrate the same principle to the vehicles. We’re also going to enhance the traffic rules so that vehicles can’t drive through each other if, for example a bus is waiting to enter a bus stop, they do however wait and avoid each other when out on the road. It works, but it’ll be something we polish up before release.

This is an interesting idea, as of now check-in and security is built and all other desks will have dynamic queues. Here we have the option to either write code so that they queue, as I said in the trailer, like people do in real life or we could make it so that you build those queues as well but that we change the sprites to something else. But perhaps it could be a modular system, so that you can select if you want a static or dynamic queue for each desk. Sounds pretty interesting and the code is already modular enough to make it work. I’ll look into it!

Very true, not really sure how to style this from an artistic perspective so that you know what it is. I once had an idea that we could simulate windows by simulating light into a dark terminal but that’s pretty difficult I’d assume… I know at some point we’ll implement electricity and then we’d might look into indoor light simulation… maybe… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

As it’s been mentioned, yes, there will be. The sprite is completed, we just need to implement a fence building system (basically copy-paste the wall building system) so that’s probably something like a few hours work. Definitely something to be implemented soon!

True, not yet. As the building system currently only supports 90-degree building it’s not feasible as a dragging structure but perhaps you could place single pieces at a 45-degree angle and they would have that function. Will require some work though I presume.

At that size, and at roughly 100 active persons, an average path finding calculations takes roughly 0 milliseconds. The delay is an internal mechanism in place for us to detect certain behavior, so the time they are standing still is not related to calculating the path. Although we do have two pretty major improvements still to make, and the pathfinding algorithm is something we’ll continue to develop over time.

You are correct that there currently is no direct correlation between a certain box and a certain object to be built. However, every object needs at least on box per contractor in order to be built. This system is pretty modular so we could quite easily assign different boxes to different objects and so forth, if we’d be interested in going into such detail.

They have two methods of travel, either by nodes and a node system or directly through vector paths. Some objects interact with the nodes and some have predesigned paths.

I was looking through the modular security thread, something like that would be pretty cool to implement but is most likely a lot of job. Alternatively we could more easily implement various sizes of security stations and then include stuff like body scanners and such.

Yes, there are three types of contract sizes. The one we took was a small one, as you progress you are offered bigger contracts which cost more but also deliver more contractors.

No shit! What do you study? Great to hear! :smiley:

You are correct, the prices and economy aspects are yet to be adjusted. Probably a night’s worth of job and something that is included in the “we need to polish some stuff”-category before release.

Yeah, that system is not really set in stone. Does it make sense? What kind of settings would you like to have here?

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You are correct that there currently is no direct correlation between a certain box and a certain object to be built. However, every object needs at least on box per contractor in order to be built. This system is pretty modular so we could quite easily assign different boxes to different objects and so forth, if we’d be interested in going into such detail.

It isnt so mich the level of detail per se. Its that they took on jobs ‘too soon’

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Yeah, that system is not really set in stone. Does it make sense? What kind of settings would you like to have here?

I like really like the idea, but as @me123 said, it’s maybe a good idea to keep the money and the difficulty level separate.

Maybe I want lots of money to make a big airport, but also want the challenge of unfriendly pax, demanding airlines and daily incidents?

On the other side, it maybe doesn’t make that much sense to play in ‘extreme’ mode with $1bn starting fund, because then you can just build an airport that completely meets all the complex demands of the extreme mode… So I’m really not sure about this one…

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After trying the other two new airport tycoon games, I am most confident of ACEO to pull of the best. Just praying that the Devs will go all the way to building a stable, refined system to support a mega airport

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I hope they start working full time/hire someone after the first release… If the game is well received.

Development is too slow currently, But I also understand the Devs’ problem.

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I’d say it’s going fast enough. Getting more people involved could very well be detrimental to this project.

  • he/she has to fit personality wise
  • he/she has to be brought up to speed with the current code base
  • he/she has to be brought up to speed with the current ideas / direction
  • he/she wants money, which means it has to be a real company

This all costs a lot of time and/or money that would be well spent otherwise.
Even after the game released, it would have to do pretty well for them to consider hiring extra people because of the same reasons

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Actually development is on high speed and considering they’re not able to do it actually fulltime the speed is surprising…

Just look at EA and their unlimited ressources producing every year a new FIFA which has every year unstandable bugs and quirky mechanics which don’t really work and that on a game which is graphicwise mediocre and not much a development from their (successors) predecessors… yet, they charge you 50-60$/€ for that… No insider on that… but 90% must be license payment because otherwise this price is a rip off… :smiley:

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Ok… this is the first time I am seeing a game development so close, so I don’t know what’s fast and what’s slow. Probably you both are correct.

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