Dev Update 6 - What Are Those Flashing Lights? 🚨

For the past month, as usual, we've been hard at work on City Rhapsody! And we've added some exciting gameplay 🤩 that we can't wait to share with you.

To achieve our goal of bringing a sophisticated city-builder to life, one of the concepts we showcased is special city vehicle control. Remember the fire trucks in the trailer? We've been expanding those mechanics quite a lot.

In City Rhapsody!, instead of just automated city service vehicles; you are "really" in control of all the city's fire trucks, police cars, etc. (If anyone played the Emergency franchise, it's a lot like that.) You'll be able to use them creatively to solve your city's problems.

Before we get started on the unit controls though, we would like to introduce the latest addition to City Rhapsody! - The police station and police cars 🚓, see them in action below!

Units and Navigation

Special buildings like police stations and fire stations now have the ability to spawn special units in the city, like a police car.

You, as the player, will be able to drive them to wherever you want. But it must be near a road that the unit can navigate to. It's, after all, a city-building game 😉.

Traffic Interaction

Most of the time, the special units are vehicles that have emergency lights. When they are off, they behave like regular cars on the road that respect all traffic rules.

But in emergency mode, they command everyone's attention with bright flashing lights and loud sirens. And all other traffic will yield to avoid blocking them, similar to how it would be in the real-life.

Special Vehicle Action

Different special vehicles can perform different special actions. For example, the fire truck has a big hose that can spray water at any designated position.

Auto Pilot v.s. Manual Control

You can place the special unit in "auto-pilot" mode where it'll perform basic automation so you won't get overwhelmed with controlling too many units. When in auto-pilot, for example, the fire truck automatically put out fires.

But when there's a lot of fires, you may want to take over and put them in "manual mode" so you can choose which fires to put out first.

And that's just a brief introduction of the unit control mechanics.

Stay tuned for our next update where we'll be going over the details of problems and disasters in the city so you can put those fire trucks and police cars to good use.

Until next time, cheers!

Michael