Development Update - Day/Night Cycle

Hi Everyone!

We’ve put a full day/night cycle in Nova Roma, and it has an important gameplay effect on your citizens' lives. All buildings begin and end work at different times: workers at shops and theaters sleep in a bit but work later, while bakers will have to get up very early.

When work ends, citizens need to walk home each night and get some sleep. Your city's design affects the length of their trip to and from work. If they can’t make it home in time they’ll get tired. Below, these workers have a job at a fishing hut very far from their home so they're not able to get enough rest:

If they spend too long walking to work, the productivity at that building will suffer. You can see this split on the 'Time Working' vs 'Time Commuting' bar in the UI. Here we can see workers are spending the great majority of their time walking to work instead of actually fishing. This is an important tool to diagnose production issues in your city, and of course the building itself will notify you of an issue using the thought bubble system:

To fix this commute issue, you’ll need to either improve your road networks so they can get to work faster by building better roads or you can build closer housing. Workers with bad commutes will automatically try to move closer to their work if there is available housing, so in this case it’s as simple as building some housing closer to the fishing huts.

The day night cycle is also a fun way to simulate patterns of daily life and add more liveliness to your city. When folks are done with work they’ll visit a theater or shop in their idle time, before going to bed.

We didn’t want just a cosmetic change for day and night - we’re hoping these commute time mechanics add a little extra depth to your city’s layout and design.

Until next time!