A decision was made - based on some posts published in Steam Forums, which mentioned that people wants to be informed better about development process. The decision is to make a regular blog about what was and is happening in the development and we hope it can offer you some insight into what the team is currently working on and what are the challenges it needs to face. There are other developers doings similar stuff out there and we draw our inspiration from there.
In this first post we want to introduce you the team which can be described in two parts which are internal members and external members.
Internal Team:
Peter (Peter Adamčík)
He is the one who came with idea of this interesting Tycoon based game which is also kind of city or republic builder. He created the core of the game and knows its code the best. Besides the coding he is searching for people who could help the development team to finish the game and he is the leader.
Zeus (Vladimír Baloga)
Graphic designer who is with the project from the start. He is creating buildings mainly, but he is capable of doing anything animations and vehicles included.
Vyvo (Martin Konečný)
Skillful guy, first coder who joined the team in May 2019. He created the new robust pathfinding, ships, planes, cable cars, trolley buses and lines. He has done a lot and Peter is glad that he has more time to do other stuff.
TauFrost (Michal Kuchárik)
The other skilled coder who joined the team in October 2019. He created winter and he is currently working on building editor of which first version will be released soon. Besides that, he is working on some rendering related things, improvements and workshop support stuff.
External Team:
TGR Studio
Today we are not cooperating with them as much as in the past, but we are thankful to them for most of the vehicles in the game. It is a group of modders who started creating Russian mods for different games and they became an outsourcing Studio thanks to their skills.
Forzion
Guy who you can meet mainly on Steam Forums. He is reading through all posts, discussing with others as a player who plays the game a lot and is regularly summarizing and forwarding all suggestions which are worth mentioning. He is focusing mainly on game related content and community engagement.
LovelyPL
Guy from who helps with many things from community management through Polish translation and testing but also Discord channel management. He was intensively testing the last pre-release version of the game during weekend.
DevilHunter
Guy from Ukraine who helps with testing and Russian or Ukrainian translations and community management.
Simon
A past internal member of 3DIVISION , Soviet Republic uses many models from previous projects of the studio and he is an author of many buildings or other graphics in the game. Currently he creating the new models of the citizens for the game.
Grand Beats
Slovak company working on sounds for the game.
Lukas
An talented graphics artist who can turn raw render into rich artwork, he made the artworks game using at the storepage.
Jan
External programmer who time to time create something for us, his work is for example the Blender importer/exporter.
Currently we started to cooperate with few other external graphic designers, and we will inform you about that soon.
Special thanks to all internal testers, who helping with testing of the game before we release it to public testing. And also, we need to say thank you to all players who actively engage in solving issues during public testing.
Past week
Sadly, one of our members recently left our external team . Ryantheskinny announced he cannot continue to cooperate with us. He was a precious member of the team who was helping with testing and supporting modders. We wish him success in life.
In summer we acquired an office but due to current Covid-19 outbreak we decided to work from home office. The situation in Slovakia can be described as critical and the government restricted people’s movement to certain extent and is preparing to test all the citizens next weekends. This limits the coordination a bit but it should be not too much an issue.
We are working on release of the Airplane update for internal tester. Some people started testing the pre-release version of the game and we found some issues which caused the release to be postponed. For example, Planes were not choosing the optimal runways and often chose the runway which was already busy. Then there was a need to make the landing gear animation for them. Also, construction office pathfinding for airport had some issues. Also we added a markings for runways according the orientation/azimuth.
From experimental features we were trying to find a way how to develop and test off-road driving. It would be useful for army vehicles but there are also other possibilities for that mechanic if we can create it. For example, construction offices would could maybe use this feature. We have an off-road mechanic for the woodcutting post but it is quite primitive because we want the vehicles to be able to move on roads, use bridges and also take an off road trip if necessary.
We were also working on some improvements. With some DirectX 11.1 optimization the game now runs 20-30% faster on Win8.1/10. You will be able to set priorities for conveyor belts. There is more tolerance for electric wiring angles. We worked on camera rotations too. Peter was also working on railway gates to allow them keep open while the train is in the station or waiting at signals if there is no collision. Another improvement for railways are mixed signals (one way standards other way chain).
We are up to the challenges we need to face, and we want to improve communication with you - players. There are several options how to do that so keep tuned and we will inform you in time. From now we would like to release similar post each week.
Thank you for your support
3Division Team