DevLog 78: Steam Direct Update, Early Access Trailer, Condition and Skills and Stress

https://www.airportceo.com/devlog-78-steam-direct-update-early-access-trailer-condition-skills-stress/

schwoooooop - the sound I imagine when I press “publish”. There you go! Enjoy! :slight_smile:

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Nice work as always.
Also you guys should try using gocd or similiar distrubution systems, that have everything setup automaticly, so as soon as you make commit in lets say github/perfoce or similiar versioning systems it starts building and automaticly pushes it to one of the branches you set it up with.

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Wow, the site feels really different with the different color scheme. I am still not sure if I like it or not.

Either way, thank you for the DevLog!

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I am not the biggest fan of the background of the new website. My eyes certainly feel it if I look at it for too long. Maybe they will get used to it.

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Great work can’t wait to get my hands on the precious

But other than that I love the new colors of the website

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I like the new website colors.

Great devlog today. Looks like testing is highly productive.

Question, have all the issues been addressed from the video buglist spreadsheet yet? Noticed a few new entries last week but wasn’t sure if you guys still checked it, or already finished the remaining orange colored ones and just didn’t update it to green. Thanks again for your hard work and dedication. Can’t wait to pay you for your efforts!

I love the inclusion of the personality traits and in particular, skilling up and stress. I think the only thing to make sure of is that there is some way for you (the CEO/employer) to assist with mitigating the stress?

So I’m hoping that if you make the shift times more reasonable etc. or give them reasonable breaks etc. this serves to create less stressed employees or something similar?

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Looking good :slight_smile: what i didn’t see from the devlog though is wether you can do preventive maintenance, so things won’t actually break?

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Good point. It’d be interesting to see if hiring better technicians and setting more regular maintenance rounds decreases such a likelihood. But I’m not sure if that is too micromanage-y or not.

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I like what you did with the staff skills and stress. It makes it more of a challenge to make them all happy and they still work their asses of. :smiling_imp:

I`m also on this with @pderuiter, things need maintenance to prevent breakdowns(AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE), nevertheless, items will still break down even if they are maintained well. I don’t really know if you implemented this or not, as it says: "They will roam the airport and repair anything that breaks down as long as its an item…" . So reading this line, I would say no. I think you can use the same sort of system on things as on staff, more maintenance on, let’s say an x-ray, the higher ist quality, therefore it lowers the breakdown chance.

Therefore items should be qualified in categories as its is more likely for a conveyor belt to breakdown then a service road, using a multiplier.
Then the maintenance on these items lower the chance of breakdown(never putting it 0), again a conveyor belt is easier to maintain then a service road (as new deploying new asphalt will take more time then cleaning a conveyor belt engine)

At the result you maintain your airport well, you shouldn’t have that much trouble with breakdowns, on the other hand, being cheap will result in more breakdowns, which will result in more delay and less pleased passengers, dropping your airport rate really fast.

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First of all, awesome features. They really bring a lot of depth to the game. I agree with @pderuiter and @Patje89 on the preventive maintenance.
We already know you have implemented a damage/wear model into objects and this should tie into that. The less the wear, the less chance of a breakdown and vice versa.
Any time an object crosses a certain %, a technician should come to carry out maintenance. This will ensure that on a well maintained airport, the technicians are able to maintain all the equipment before a breakdown occurs.
On an airport where there are (a) too few technicians or (b)technicians with lower skill, there will be (a) longer time between maintenance or (b) each maintenance carried out will reduce the wear by a small % (a good technician maybe able to bring the wear from 80% down to 10%, but a poor technician may only bring it from 80% down to 40%)
Both of these will mean that there would be a large number of objects reaching high wear levels, hence the airport will have high chance of equipment breakdowns.
Also important should be that however good or frequent the maintenance, the wear should not come to 0. Just like real life, everything eventually reaches the end of its useful life and needs to be replaced. You should be able to extend the life, but not make it infinite.

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I partially disagree on that last part. I agree that it would make it realistic. I’m not sure however it would be fun :slight_smile:

I guess the true test is when we play the game. I would not be surprised if some of my ‘best ideas’ actually make the game worse rather than better like i thought.

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Just to make a quick topic change to staff and stress, it is good to see that staff personalities now have a direct impact on airport operation. I have 2 questions:
Based on this from the DevLog:
When an employee are performing a job, say when a janitor is cleaning up some mess, they are doing so by increasing a cleanliness value over time with a standard value added for each time they perform the cleaning motion…For each little work stuff they do, they increasingly also become more stressed
Would it also be possible that for each time a staff performs an operation, their logic/technicality value also increase?(upto the individuals person’s max limit). That is to say, through repeated working at your airport, can your staff get better over time?

My second question is more of a wish, and may actually make the game worse, but here goes:
Since we get to set shift and break lengths, is it possible that you have staff members leaving the airport and going home at the end of their shift and then return in time for their next shift?
I dont know any other game in this genre that does this, but that could make this game unique. It will have positive and negative impacts:
-ve: Having to hire twice or thrice as many staff members for the same amount of work, depending on shift length.
Having many posts unmanned during the shift changeover time (solution: shift overlap)
+ve: Being able to save some money by only having staff for 1~2 shifts if your airport is closed during the night. Similarly, having the bulk of the technicians on the night shift to maintain equipment when the airport operations are closed.
Having to manage pick up and drop off zones as now you have staff and passengers going through them.
“Realism”

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Your suggestions are good.
To answer your questions, as per the 2nd gameplay video, when you hire the staff, they arrive at your airport by bus or car drop, and then make their way to their post. Not instant, and yet minimal delay.
If shift times are implemented, then this may change and they may only arrive the next day or at the start of the next shift.

Good post. I know there has been a lot of talk about training staff and what traits/ skills that would entail. I’m convinced this will be easy to expand on later :slight_smile:

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Another Brick in the Mall has employee shifts, and they get in their car and leave at the end, and drive back when their next starts. It is a really neat feature, and when car lots make the game, having employee lots would be a sweet addon to it, and having employees leave by their car (or other means) and then returning the next day would be awesome.

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Is airline Swiftly already implemented ? This just came on my mind since we havent seen it in new trailer.

Nice devlog, as usual! I would however suggest to tone down on the yellow a bit. I really liked the old, clean white!

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I forgot to mention that and I’m removing those spread sheets now as well as the form to that link. We have transitioned to a new platform for tracking bugs, one that can be viewed publicly (it’s not public yet) and because of that those spread sheets are outdated. Almost everything on them were solved before we forgot them though, and those who weren’t followed over to the new platform. We’re gonna launch a new bug reporting form as soon as the game is released and those bugs will then be transferred over to the new platform so that everyone can see their solving stages.

Yes! We’ll eventually implement training programs but now it all depends on how long shifts your employee has, these shift lengths can be set in the employee shifts panel. When employees rest or don’t have anything to do, their stress goes down.

That’s a good idea. I will look into it.

Maybe for a later stage, definitely adds to the overall complexity which means it needs some extra thought.

Haha, I’ve had maaaaaaany such ideas. Things often sound very good in your mind but then turn out to work like shit in reality, or to be very complex to implement.

That’s a good idea which I didn’t think of. Of course, the more they do something the better they should get at it, it would also reward players to keep employees hired a long time. And to counter that reward perhaps you could also have some “mess up” variable which occasionally causes an employee to completely fail at their task and break down. There’s so much you could implement…

That was the initial idea but it definitely adds a lot to overall complexity. We’d need to think a lot of how to implement such a feature so that the player would have easy control over how much work force that is on site at a given hour whilst not making it too complicated to operate.

No, they arrive by bus or car.

Thankfully, yes, structured code means easy maintenance! :sunglasses:

It’s on its way I think… this is on @Fredrik table so we’ll have to wait for some confirmation on this.

Yeah, it’s a bit heavy when reading stuff through so maybe we’ll change it on the article pages. It’s always important to work agile and test stuff out, fail as fast as possible and then iterate. @Fredrik hasn’t even seen the changes, so it’s going to be interesting to see what he thinks haha…

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