Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Production Line DLC#2 COMING SOON

So we now have an official coming soon page for the new Production Line expansion pack (Design variety pack). Here it is in all its amazing html glory:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1174730/Production_Line__Design_Variety_Pack/

Obviously the most exciting part of the page is the ‘add to wish-list’ button, which i thoroughly encourage people to do, as gossip among indie devs is that having high wish-list numbers converts into valve sending you nicer chocolate at Christmas, or something like that (I forget the details). Actually the best thing for me to do is probably embed the steam widget thingy:

I have no idea why there is a scrollbar on that widget. I think its safe to blame the mess that is wordpress…

Anyway at the moment the store page is not translated into each language but I’m getting that done now. All the actual content is done, and tested in game, and the new cars look lovely. Its purely cosmetic, so don’t yell at me if you can’t afford it for ruining game balance or whatever. I read that epics cosmetic DLC earns them a bazillion dollars and I’d like to retire eventually (ha!.. will never happen), so somewhere in that paragraph is my reasoning for adding content to the game…

On less business-y levels… I’m tracking down some ultra-rare but annoying Production Line bugs right now. One is a thing where very, very rarely, sounds stop streaming, or the music stops (after a good number of hours). I am digging into this, but its super hard to pin down.

Another bug is related to an error message in logs (which is now harmless…but bugs me) relating to shaders, and some visual artifacting. I discovered that the two different systems I was using to set and unset shaders may potentially have come into conflict, so I fixed that abominable code architecture by ensuring the game only has one possible system for turning shaders on and off, and hopefully now there can never be a conflict or a shader ‘stuck’ on. This will all be in the next patch, just before the DLC release.

Oh…and expect more Democracy 4 update goodness soon