Development Update 7

While outside the snow is still falling, inside the work on Festivals - Headliners is progressing steadily, continue reading to find out what’s happening behind the scenes and what to expect for the rest of the year!

Next Fest Participation

We’re very happy to announce that we’ll be participating in the next edition of Steam Next Fest, taking place June 19th to 26th, 2023 @10:00AM Pacific. We’ve been preparing for this for a long time, and are very excited to bring you all sorts of livestreams and in-game events, next to a new demo, available to anyone for the duration of Next Fest. Right now we’re planning and preparing everything, make sure to keep an eye on the discord [] for updates!

Updated Roadmap

With this, we also had to update the roadmap a bit. As we can’t participate in Next Fest once we release into early access, the early access release date is now set for mid-summer. The first months of 2023 have been spent making some major changes to how the game stores event saves and how new features are added in general. During the coming months we’ll focus on the final game mechanics, improving visitor simulation, and adding performances.

As you can see, some items have been reordered and overall most items have been pushed back some time, to accommodate our next fest participation, and allow more time during early access so we don’t have to rush the full release at the last moment.

But even though we need a little more time, we’re still very productive and adding lots and lots of new features and other improvements. Many have been bundled in the v0.4.0 release, which is set to come out this weekend!

Playtest Release v0.4.0

Experimental Features in Settings

As mentioned before, some major changes have been made to how new (experimental) features are added to the (playtest) game. Most of the new features to be added during both playtest and early access can first be enabled optionally, from the game’s settings, before they are turned on by default for everyone. This way, we hope to avoid the risk of making the game unplayable under certain circumstances, when new features are added.

Networks

Ever since work started on Festivals - Headliners, a key game mechanic we wanted to add was network-based functionality, in our case that means things like Fences, to guide visitors around your event site, and Powerlines, to distribute power between the various stages, stalls and other objects you’ve placed.

An initial version of this mechanic has been added some time ago, and while it still is pretty buggy, we’d like players feedback on how the mechanic is to play with and how we should improve it. We’ve only added fences to get started for now, but placing some around your event site already improves the quality of the simulation quite a bit.

Operationality

As announced in the previous update, we’ve been working on adding operationality to objects like stages and vending stalls, which requires an object to be fully operational before characters are able to use it.

What conditions need to be met before something is marked as “Operational” differ for each object, and will continue to evolve as more game mechanics are added, like power consumption for instance. Again, this will be used to integrate into other game mechanics, like crew and inventory management.

You can see what things an object requires and whether those have been provided from the Object Info Layer overview:

The State of Saving Event Progress

Something which was long overdue is the ability to save your progress during an event while playing the game. Players have been able to store the design and setup of their event for quite some time already, but the progress during an event has been left out.

Until now! While still very experimental, you can now enable storing the progress of your current event, along with all the visitors, crew, objects and scheduled performances, from the experimental features in the settings menu. Please note you will need to enable this every time you start the game, if you save your event without the feature enabled, the progress for your event will be lost.

You could also use this feature to “reset” an event you want to produce again, but we’re also working on adding yearly editions to events, to allow for more progressive gameplay. More on that in a future development update!

Focus on Smaller Events

We’ve noticed many playtesters, eager to get into real large-scale festival production, immediately use our biggest development site, the City Park, to setup a large event with a massive production.

These kinds of events are why we started this game, and something we’re confident to achieve, given the possibilities provided through the Unity Engine, and the capabilities of modern-day high-end gaming PCs.

That said, at this moment, performance of the game is still not where it should be to run events of such scale smoothly. And while we try to keep the games performance up while adding new features, we’ll also need to come back at a later stage and make many improvements. Until we’re at a point in the game’s development where we can invest in those optimizations, we’d like players and testers to focus on smaller events and gather feedback on the actual gameplay and features we’re adding, also for players with a more basic PC.

Because of this we won’t be shipping the “Large Dev Site” and “City Park Site” with the game for now, and events created on these maps won’t be able to load from version v0.4.0 onwards. We hope to be able to work on optimisation soon, but we first need to make the game feature-complete, before we can start this.