Interview with SuperCity Game Designer, Yana – The full transcription of the interview is as follows:
1. Where do you draw inspiration? How can you describe the creative process?
There are always some holidays we celebrate every year (Christmas, Halloween, etc) and prepare for in good time. We watch films, read some articles about celebration traditions all over the world and search for different kind of “holiday-based” art. So then, as a result of this inspiration search, we come up with a main idea which a quest storyline and new buildings/decorations are based on.
If there’s no holiday coming, anything else could be an inspiration source for a quest: a beautiful house we saw somewhere, a city sight or any popular event. For example, one time ago our producer (btw, all the team members can suggest any idea!) asked us: ”Hey, do you know UEFA Championship is coming in 3 weeks? Any ideas?” And that’s how we decided to upgrade the Stadium
Also, we get a lot from our players, so thank you all for sharing your ideas ^_^
2. How did you get started in game design?
I was always curious how games are made. And then I got an opportunity to be involved in this process myself: I was a QA engineer at first, but after a while I found that it’s really interesting to create the game, to decide what the game is gonna be like. And btw I’m really happy I work on a game I enjoy to play
3. How do you decide what buildings and items are required in the quest? Some quests are so long, why so?
First of all, long quests let us tell detailed stories with an interesting plot and show the characters’ personalities. Have you noticed all of them have their own identity?
Second, a long quest keeps players busy and doesn’t let them get bored (and btw, it gives us more time to work on the next update ).
Speaking of items required, they always depend on a quest plot.
4. Why did you make expansions so expensive?
“SuperCity” is a game about big industrial city development. And the more advanced the city, the higher the prices for land, just as in a real city.
5. When will we have community neighbors just as SuperCity Mobile has?
There are some technical difficulties with implementing, but if we solve them, we’ll add the community neighbors feature.
6. Can we place business buildings close to each other, like in SuperCity Mobile? Perhaps you can add a Mall to store them together?
Here’s a thing with game balance: if we allow to place these buildings next to each other, we’ll have to add a limit for their numbers. Btw, if you have played SuperCity Mobile, you know that there is such a limit.
So, the limits implementation means that lots of players won’t be able to use some of the buildings they built
We don’t have a smooth solution for this issue now unfortunately, so it’s most likely there won’t be any changes in the near future.
7. Can we get a search tool and a counter for the buildings we have in the city and in the storage?
Yep, we have such a feature on our developers to-do list, but unfortunately we don’t have the exact release date.
8. Can we get a search tool for the friends’ list?
Yes, we’re gonna implement it too!
9. Is it possible to make night mode in the game?
This issue is quite difficult to implement, and we don’t have enough people to do that to be honest. Also, there’s a risk the game may run slower due to extra graphics data.
Nevertheless, in case we get an idea how to add night mode the right way, including what storyline can be told, we may start developing the night mode.
10. Is it possible to have a 360° view in the city?
Unfortunately, it’s not possible. Our game is 2D game, so all the buildings have only two view angles. If we want to rotate the buildings in any way, that would mean we need to create almost a new game actually.
11. When will the Harbour open?
We reaaally want to make the Harbour unique, cause all of us (both players and developers team) want it open so bad! At this moment we’re discussing the main concept of this location: you know, it’s tough work! Many ideas are filtered out, cause we’re looking for the best But as soon as we find it, we’ll start the deep development!
Hello. I love the game $uperCity. I was wondering if you were gonna make a ? box where we could type in the name of the item we were looking for in the menu… the new menu is cute, but you have to scroll down to find what you are looking for, so time-consuming. Also, I was wondering if you could possibly make it easier to highlight the buildings that need to be clicked like a star or some small symbol that would hover over the buildings. Click on the features wheel, click on symbol (*) to put them on and take them off. My city is so crowded, I’m really not into the decorations thing… some people have very elaborate cities… I don’t really like decorations, and it would make visitors easier to find those buildings you need clicked. I’m just saying If you could find your way to make it a little easier… I feel bad when I can’t find the people’s buildings because they have those Lover’s Hearts all over the place and stop signs… YIKES!