Regularly wash your hands and try to stay inside as much as possible to stop the spread of the disease. Our statistics show you are all kindly doing this. Downloads went up by 20% since Europe went in quarantine. Stay strong!

First Artwork

This month we implemented the first art in the game. We couldn't comply with the terms and conditions to use actual satellite imagery and we wanted to give the world our own personal touch. We spent the month discussing how the map should look and feel. We set our artist to work on numerous iterations and finally ended up with a design we all liked. I present you our new map:

I know this is the third time we show off Europe in the game, while not showing any other continent. This is mainly due to the fact that we test everything out on Europe first as this is where we live and we know this continent best. It shouldn't take too long before we can start showing other continents.

As you can see we chose a realistic art style for the map. The map looks quite good when zoomed out, but it's also highly detailed when you zoom in:

To make you really feel like you are there when you are fully zoomed in we decided to exaggerate certain features like mountain ranges and terrain surfaces. At the same time we did try our best to keep the shapes of the landscape in sync with their true shapes. This further enhances the player's experience and in my opinion gives you a higher degree of immersion than actual satellite imagery!

Other Development

Development on in game functionality has been slow this month. For most things we need some UI. If we continue our work now with some dummy UI it would mean we need to design the front end twice and we'd like to avoid that.

So instead I'm working on some tools that we can use in a later phase in development. I'm currently working on a tool that will spit out country relations for all countries from 1920 - now and the near future based on data and variables we feed it. This means we will vastly increase the speed with which we can set up the country relations and likely have for every country for every era at the first release.

Along with this we started working on a new airliner database with many new features for the airliners. But we will talk more about that in our next devlog!

Stay Tuned

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See you soon!

The Devteam