Cities in Motion is finally out. We at Colossal Order have been working on the project for over a year and a half, and we are ecstatic to see our game finally reach the players. Since Cities in Motion is our team’s first PC title, we are really thrilled with the warm welcome it has received.
Cities in Motion has gone through many phases, but its core has remained the same. One of the biggest endeavors we undertook was the single-player campaign. Only after the gameplay was solid and sandbox mode working well did we start on the campaign. The biggest challenge we then faced was to offer continuity without having overly long scenarios while still jumping along on the timeline to keep things interesting. We contemplated having the player create a character that would be present in the campaign, but the extensive timeline wouldn’t allow for there to be only one person, as the game spans a hundred years. Still, it was important to have major characters the player could relate to and remember, so we opted to have the player run a company that is hired by different people who speak directly to the player, even though there’s no avatar to be seen. This was actually a pretty natural approach after we figured it out; it just looks complicated on paper. And once in the game, the player easily slips into a non-existent character that is being talked to. This way, we also didn’t have to come up with an explanation as to why the player’s character would either change or just live for over a hundred years.
This screenshot was taken early on in the project…
…and this is a screenshot of the finished game.
The part we really enjoyed and are sure to repeat with future projects was concentrated testing on closed and open betas. We want to make games that please the community, so we decided to let the community participate at an early stage. The beta tests provided us with valuable information regarding players’ wishes, and we did our best to make those wishes come true. We were happy to note that many of the solutions we had implemented prior to testing were well received by players, and we mainly had to do balancing and smaller tweaks to make the game better. The core game logic was based on research we did on the genre’s older classics as well as our own innovations and approaches. Still, the community feedback was priceless, and without it, Cities in Motion wouldn’t be half the game it is now.
Naturally, there were some suggestions that we couldn’t include in the game, but we have documented everything and will surely use them later on. We are planning more content, and the main guideline for us in deciding what to produce is to listen to the community. The players know best what they want, and our job is to work out how it can be done and what ideas work best with others.
While I’m writing this, we are still working on a patch to help with traffic jams on easier difficulty levels and to fix a couple more things that have come up. We are following the Paradox forum very closely, and are prepared to quickly respond to any issues that might arise. We are also planning on new content and hope to keep Cities in Motion fresh with new stuff!
On behalf of the whole Colossal Order team,
Karoliina Korppoo
Lead Designer on Cities in Motion
