Hey there!

Wow, what a crazy week I had! The announcement of Big Ambitions was way bigger than I ever expected. I’m a dev, so I like to compare numbers. Let’s compare the amount of email replies I received after both releasing Startup Company and announcing Big Ambitions:

I literally spent a whole day (8 hours) replying and responding to all of your emails.

Thank you to all of you who took your time to let me know how excited you are about the game. You have no idea how much motivation it gives me! 🔥

Progress this week

Even though I ended up spending a lot of time on the announcement, I was able to get some work done. Let’s look into it:

City Areas

Right now I’m busy building the foundation of the game. This includes stuff like business types, citizen/population grouping and market demands. All of these properties fit into one very important entity of the game: City Areas. The first playable build (Beta 1) will contain the following areas:

• Garment District
• Hell’s Kitchen
• Murrary Hill
• Midtown

Citizens in these areas will vary a lot, having different social classes, age groups and business demands. The reason all of this matters to you, is that you need this insight in order to start the correct types of business.

I’ve updated the city map to better visualize the areas:

Interview Lite and Citizen Interviews

In order to determine what kind of business you want to start, you’ll have to start interviewing the citizens on the streets of the different areas. You simply click a citizen to start the interview. The data will be stored on the app called “Interview Lite” on your smartphone. Each interview will contain:

• Name
• Age
• Social class
• What kind of businesses they want the most

The app will show you a summary of your interviews in order to give you a better understanding of what type of business would be lucrative to invest in.

Interviews become outdated/irrelevant after 3 months in-game. Later in the game you’ll be able to buy completed area reports, to avoid spending time interviewing yourself.

Pedestrians

In order to code the functionality of the “citizen interviews”, I had to make a first version of the pedestrian AI. It’s a very basic implementation, but it gets the job done:

Updates from the 3D artist

Today I received access to new assets from the 3D artist: road blocks and building blocks all in modular pieces. This week I’ll do the first test in order to slowly move away from the placeholder graphics I’ve been using so far.

Here’s a quick preview of the completed assets:

That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading!

All the best,
Jonas