Hi everyone, Two months ago we released the demo of our upcoming game, Highway to Heal. It's a solarpunk adventure game where you drive an ambulance to reach out to patients and provide them first care in the beautiful city of Le Mascaret, a utopian city thriving in the middle of the difficulties of a very unstable climate.
Feedback so far is pretty good! We already updated it twice to add show new features, improve the game, the interface, fix bugs, etc. We plan on regularly updating it as a our development goes so that you're always able to play the best version of it. We think it's also interesting as a speedrunning challenge!
As you might know, we then started a crowdfunding campaign on Ulule and it's doing quite well! It ends in just two days and we're missing barely 6% of our 10000 goal. A few days from the end, we would like to thank everyone who supported us so far in the campaign! We really hope we can reach our 10000 goal. It would really help us in pursuing the development of the game.
If you did not try the demo yet, please take a moment to go play it. If it convinces you, please consider contributing to our campaign on Ulule. Not only you'll be pre-ordering the game, you will also get to name a street of Le Mascaret!
Please share this message to help us reach our goal and finish the development!

[ 2025-06-13 13:05:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello to our wanabee paramedics! A weekly devlog on a monday?! Yes, we worked a lot to deliver the update of the demo and it delayed the news a bit... As promised last week, we updated the demo of Highway to Heal! This update takes into account some of your feedback (others need more time) and let's you discover new areas of the game.
It might(?) not seem much, but a lot of work went into this update. There is a lot of things that happens behind the curtains and doesn't necessarily show explicitly, but it's necessary work for the development of a video game. We tried a lot of things to improve the minimap and it's still not perfect yet. We do believe it's better though and we have a few things up our sleeves that might finally make it just right. If you need a copilot to read it, bring in a friend, it's fun! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo/

Changelog

Mission replay (from the ambulance center) Added two new missions in the evening (removed Basile's mission) Minimap interface update AI vehicles now avoid colliding with trashcans and lamp posts when the siren is active... Cars and lamp posts more visible in bad weather conditions Rebalanced difficulty Feedback survey accessible from pause menu Various bugfixes and minor improvements Fixed missing credits And a few surprises!

Crowdfunding

We are seeing the finish line! The campaign ends this sunday so there's barely seven days left and we need all your help to ensure we complete those last 14%! We know a few of you are waiting for the last minute to pledge, but we really need your help sooner than later! We would very much love adding a few stretch goals. [img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/44751614/57ce38b99131383ba24ce4ab8b051dcaa0a36c8a.png"][/img] If you already contributed, please share the campaign with your friends, family... Ask your favorite streamers to play the demo, that could help a lot too! [img src="https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images/44751614/ba26cdb0732fbeeef481ff67aa28274935ed3405.png"][/img] While this campaign is ending, work on funding and developing the game continues. We will be at Game Invest in Bordeaux and Game Camp in Lille to find partners to help us bring the complete game to you. In the next update, you should finally be able to go to the City Hall and get the list of ongoing works added to your minimap, amongst other things. Take care!

[ 2025-06-09 10:26:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey you! Fancy some adrenaline? I got a few things that might be to your taste.

New missions!

As I've hinted last week, you won't be able to help Basile after the next update of the demo... Because you'll meet two new characters with quite a few surprises! First you'll help Celeste, firefighter, who is feeling really well. Nothing to do then? Except distributing oxygen bottles over town while a sandstorm is ongoing! After that, you'll meet Jawara, a meteorologist, and... a surprise passenger!

Speedrunning!

It was grayed out, it will be available in the upcoming update: from the ambulance center, you'll now be able to open the list of past missions to check out how you did exactly in each of them. Unsatisfied of your care? You'll be able to immediately replay any mission and try to do better! We can't wait to check out your speedruns! With patients at maximum health, obviously!

Minimap

We have heard your feedback and are going to do some changes to the minimap. This was is a tricky one to get right as a lot of the game revolves around it! In an earlier version of the game, that never saw that light of Steam, the minimap could either display your position or your target, at various zoom levels. When the distance between the two was too great, people were often confused and that's how we got to this situation that shows both.
But now the streets are very small when the distance is too great! So we are going to try a solution in between. We also made a few minor adjustments that should make how it works clearer from the start.

Crowdfunding Status

Like all crowdfunding campaigns, in the middle, it starts to stagnate as people just wait for the end to see if their help is "needed". But little know that the help is needed right now! Not only it is a very stressful time for us, the more we wait, the less chance for stretch goals there is! As you might probably have guessed, the game doesn't just cost 10 000 to finish (that's about 11,300$US for you on the far away coast). We are raising more money through other means. But the more money we can get with the crowdfunding, the more confident investors are in us! But even more important, if we reach the main goal before the end, we will unveil a "stretch goal" which will help us make a better game. ALL of our planned stretch goals are about making MORE GAME, so you can have more and for the same price, of course!
We are only 16% off the goal! To help us, please continue sharing the link to the campaign and remind people that with more money, we do more! https://ulule.com/highwaytoheal

[ 2025-05-29 15:40:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

HHHHHHEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOO! It's THIS LOUD that MisterMV introduced Highway to Heal on stream last Sunday. No-one was ready! That surprise was amazing. As was the rest of the stream! If you speak french and want to go watch it now, go ahead, I'll be here waiting for you to come back and tell you more! [url=https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2461946772?t=07h07m35s]Games Made in France Day 4 on MisterMV's Twitch

Games Made in France

The team of Games Made in France was super nice, as were MisterMV and Trinity who did an amazing job presenting the game and interviewing us for about 50 minutes - 10 more than planned, ahah. Special mention to the copiloting session at the end, it was very fun. It was hard for us to read the chat on stage... But friends gave us some amazing quotes which made us re-watch the stream to read the chat. People were suuuuuuper nice there too! It looks like everyone enjoyed the game and we had quite a laugh reading them. Here are my favorite quotes:

• Baapppptiste: The name of the game is a banger
• Youri8888: Can we play this game without a license? (much funnier when you know the main devs don't have any)
• pwynzy: I am a paramedic and I can confirm that this game is a simulation (it's not, definitely not, omg)
• Racingbob: Bordoulme (should have we named the city this way?)

Ulule Update

Thanks to our amazing new backers we are now at 84%! Keep pushing! https://ulule.com/highwaytoheal Please share the link to the campaign with your friends, family, Discords, Whatsapp groups, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, you name it! It's with everyone's help that we will reach 100%. You can tell people that they'll be able to a name a street of Le Mascaret too, that's a pretty unique feat!

Development Progress

We never stop. Ok sometimes, but not now! We are already planning and working on the next demo update! We already decided on removing a mission... but to add TWO new missions! Both will happen at end of day so you'll be able to see the game under a new light (pun intended) Also, you'll know be able to restart missions so that you can try to make a better score! I can't wait to see superplays of saving Jackie, hehe!
See you next week for more news! PS: Yup, we're moving the weekly devlog to Thurdays.

[ 2025-05-22 14:38:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heallo! (bit of a stretch on that one, right?) It's time for the weekly devlog again!

Demo Update

Today, we are releasing a small update to our demo. While the last two weeks were very small to us, as France as many days off in May, and even if we were super busy with the crowdfunding campaign, we managed to squeeze in quite a few improvements! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo/ Most notable is a big audio improvement pass on the Super Stretcher, the caring games (almost playable just by ear!), etc. We also added audio to the main menu and it made a bit more playful in the process. I won't say more, I'll just let you discover that in our free demo. Also, it looks like I lied last week. While the vehicle AI is still needs a lot of work, we managed to make a small bugfix that should help a lot!

Overall list of updates

Sound Design upgrade Lit windows while raining, Interface upgrades to the minimap and the mission icon, Small vehicle AI bugfix, Some small changes in the level design, Various minor bugfixes and typos.

Crowdfunding

Our crowdfunding campaign went live last tuesday and it started off very well!
Thanks to everyone who supported us already, it is already 70% funded in just three days! If you did not pitch in already, know that not only supporting us helps us finish the creation of the game, it also enables you to participate in its development! The reward tiers allow you to: Name a street of Le Mascaret, (included at every level!) Access the beta version of the game and provide feedback, And even contribute to the design of a character or a mission! We started asking the current backers what ideas they had for street names in the game. Here's a few:

• Rue Hamtaro (that will probably end up being spelled Amtaraud or something, for legal reasons),
• Rue de la Procrastination (street of procrastinating, in which you probably never start a mission),
• Boulevard Andrew Hozier Byrne, (we will probably ask him if he's okay with that!)
• Rue Alain Proviste, (a classic and very nice french pun, it had to be there!)

Join our club and pitch in the crowdfunding campaign so you can also include your favorite pet's name in the game!
If you can't participate, that's fine, please just help us share the news around with your friends, your family and anyone you think could be interested!

Games Made in France

Games Made in France has started yesterday and we're already seeing many great games! Come see us with MisterMV and Trinity this Sunday at 8pm! We will tell all the nice things about the game and answer your questions in the Twitch Chat! (in french)
To conclude: drive fast... but carefully! PS: join on our Discord server. There, we unveiled a special link allowing you to support the project with a 20% discount!

[ 2025-05-16 16:17:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oh, hey you! Want to read good news about Highway to Heal? You came to the right place!

Demo feedback

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo/ Many of you have played the demo already and we've heard mostly good things! It's so nice to have so many people freely playing the game now, instead of just waiting for events where we manually show it. Feedback is much more genuine this way! Thanks to everyone who answered our demo survey. It's pretty clear that everyone loves the music of the game! That's one thing we couldn't know if you'd like it from showing you screenshots, haha! But your feedbacks already started shifting our priorities in the development of the game. For example, we noticed many of you thought the game was quite hard and the problem seems to often come from the AI of the vehicles.
We released the demo thinking the vehicle AI was "good enough" for now. And while this extreme case may look like just another day in Paris, we never planned for this kind of situation to show up. We did not realize the vehicle AI would pose such a threat to many of you, as most of the time it does good enough. So this is a task that clearly moved up the chain! Thanks for your honest feedback, keep it coming!

Ulule

We worked a lot on our Ulule crowdfunding campaign page and we hope it will show! We are now ready and it we can safely say that the campaign will start on May 13th! Subscribe now so you don't forget! [url=https://ulule.com/highwaytoheal]
By supporting us on Ulule, as you would expect, you will be able to preorder the game. But that's not all, you will also be able to participate in the development of the game! That's right, not only we have added two reward levels that let you participate in the design of a character or a mission, but we have added something that will probably surprise you: ALL backers will be able to name a street of Le Mascaret!
Also, come to our Discord, it's there only that we will share a special link that will let you preorder with a 20% discount!

Coming up

We are working on a minor update that should improve a few things: improved minimap, better sounds for the care mini-games, a few bugfixes, etc. No vehicle AI improvement yet, sorry, that's a not a couple of days work ;) Also, as we teased before, Daniel & Thomas will be on MisterMV's twitch on Sunday to tell you - in french - everything you'd like to know about the game. Indeed, we will be part of Games Made in France festival!
Tune in to watch amazing french indie games!

[ 2025-05-09 15:44:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

HEY! Finally! After intense months of work, the demo as landed! Stop reading this and just go play it! Also, fill in the feedback form as there's a chance to win a free copy of the game https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo/ Still reading? M'okay, you're a curious one. Or maybe you played the demo already? In both cases, nice! Because I can tell you a few things you might find interesting or funny.

Last minute tweaks and fixes

Of course it didn't take us a full week to just a press a green "release" button. We were busy fixing bugs and improving things. A good one that made the cut was a blue silhouette that shows up whenever there is something in front of the ambulance, like the corner of a building or a tree, so that you never lose its sight. This one was in the works for a while but we needed to find a workaround of a bug in Unity to pull it out.
We also added a proper english translation which we hope you'll find as funny as reading the french version of the game. Thomas also improved a bit the minimap so that icons are easier to spot.

Demo Release Day

Who is this? Just a Daniel going berserk on bugs. This was just a couple hours before the release! You might have noticed people in the background. There usually isn't that many people at the office. But this was the evening of the local gamedev gathering. Since people were coming in, Daniel just gave them the controller instead of testing himself the demo. Obviously people quite easily found a few bugs and Daniel just doesn't like those. So, the demo could have released a few hours earlier with a few not so important bugs, but no, Daniel had to fix them! And so he did. At about 10pm, he proudly took a beer, went into the middle of the room and used its beer as a bell to get people's attention. You know how loud a beer sounds? Actually, not loud at all. It does do a good splash show though, so people's attention was gathered indeed. After a nice laugh and half a beer expressly drank, Daniel could finally tell everyone : DEMO IS RELEASED! That was fun.

Upcoming Event

As much as the team would love to continue working on the game, adding new missions, implementing new features like the City Hall or just improving things overall, the attention is somewhere else. Indeed, finances are tight and solutions need to be found to finish development in fine conditions. That's why our attention is instead going to one of our options: our crowdfunding campaign on Ulule! There's still a lot of work to set it up but it should start very soon. Subscribe so that you don't miss the start!
Also, you'll be able to see Thomas and Daniel on a big french game event on Twitch very soon. We can't wait to tell you more about it.

[ 2025-05-02 09:54:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's hard to say hello in a different way every single time... But then again, I'm a programmer. So if 10 is an overflow of 9, this means I can restart. Right? Hello! As in many parts of Europe, last Monday was a holiday. I tried to work but I'm so tired that I quickly stopped because of how many silly mistakes I was doing. So, in short, this was a smaller week for us. Not to say that it wasn't busy though. Our Demo Steam Page was validated! You can even wishlist our demo now, haha. I didn't even know such a thing was possible. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2899360/Highway_to_Heal_Demo The build of the game is still in Steam's review queue. Hopefully we will release the demo next week. If you want to play early, come ask us a steam key on Discord! (Yes, there are steam keys for demos too. I had no clue either)

New team member as entered the ring!

With great joy, moving on, we will have the help of Ophlie, who is doing an internship at our friends Nova-box. She will help us on everything marketing and communication related. You can already notice some of our work on our Discord. It was a bit of a mess and we wanted to updated it for ages. Now we have nice categories so that you can receive messages relevant to you! She is also helping us, with The Crowdfunding Agency, in setting up our Ulule Campaign. More about that in the coming weeks.

Feedback form

We also finally finished our magnificent feedback form. It will be accessible from the demo so you can quickly tell us what you thought of your enjoyable - or not! - experience. It will take about five minutes of your time and is completely anonymous.

About the Game itself!

It's polish time! Not the country, the shiny stuff. We are busy playing the game, discovering things to tweak and make your experience even better. Like adding a small shadow below the icons in the minimap so that they're easier to read or fixing bugs like huhhh... the mouse not working... It's better played with a gamepad anyway! It was also about cleaning up all the texts of the game so that our translator, Rachel, can do a great job of making an amazing american english version of the texts written by Actezro.
Nicolas also put the last touches to the characters. It's small details here and there that make the difference between "okay" and "WOW".

Next Week!

If all goes well, next week is yours! You'll finally be able to play our little ambulance game. Hopefully, it will surprise you in a few ways. And we're not even finished. We'd like to update that demo from time to time, to show you the other features of the game that are not there yet. If you're nice, maybe you'll get to save other patients too!

[ 2025-04-25 15:47:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bien le bonjour tous ! Which is french to say "hi everyone" in a quite fine manner. Yes, we're french, if you didn't notice already. Things are FINALLY shaping up for a release of the demo! The list of small things to fix or tweak before the release is finally slimming down to the point it's acceptable. We can't wait to have you all playing the game and telling us everything you hate or love about it. We know already that we have much work to do on the minimap, you can skip that one, haha. Because, yes, if you think you've found a bug in a game that a developer doesn't know about, they probably know about it. Why didn't they fix it then? Because they were busy fixing all the other bugs that were WAY worse.
(That's not a bug btw, that's just an ambulance needing a few repairs) Anyway, let's talk about Highway to Heal!

The list!

As I said, there's tons of small fixes that we have to do for the release. To give you a glimpse of all these many small things that together take a ton of time, I'm going to cook you a list of what has been recently done:

• Showing left/right/up/down on the joystick icons for playstation controllers
• Showing left/right/up/down on the joystick icons for nintendo switch controllers
• Ensuring UI fits in a 16/10 screen (steam deck)
• Cropping characters to see them better when they're in small dialogs while driving
• Updating old UI elements to fit the latest style
• Ensuring we did not forget anyone in the credits screen
• Ensuring we can actually finish the demo and just don't end up with nothing to do
• Making the pause menu actually decent to look at
  
• Loading the proper language on game's startup
• Adding Discord & Steam Rich Presence
• Updating the design of the end of mission screen and animating it
  
• Checking all the texts before sending them for final translation
• Integrating the high quality versions of the songs
• Adding all the cover art for each radio track
• Updating the Steam pages
• Ensuring the Steam client properly starts the game
• Small bugfix
• Small bugfixes
• More small bugfixes
• ...

And I skipped many things that are actually hard to explain, ahah! None of that is actually super exciting to do... And all of it is important! We're now waiting on Steam's validation of demo page, then validation of the demo build. Until then, we will integrate the final translation once it's ready, do a final check and probably fix a few things. And then... Then... YOU PLAY!

[ 2025-04-18 13:48:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! It has been a busy week! ... Wait, wrong show. Hello everyone, so much happened since last friday. I don't know where to start!

Spawn Festival

As stated in the previous devlog, we had a table at the Spawn Festival in Angoulme, France. Thank you if you joined us, we had a blast! With two computers on premises, people didn't have to wait much to play. From what we could gather, players greatly enjoyed the driving, the funny vehicles, caring for their patients. Overall, they were pretty impressed by the refreshing proposition that is Highway to Heal.

Demo Progress

When you think of making a video game, you think of game feel, level design, visual effects, great music... What you don't necessarily think of, while being very important, is... menus! Well, unless your making a management game of course. Which we don't, by the way.
Look at this ambulance. It can't wait to have you play it! So yes, one of the reasons people can already play the game at public events and you can't, is because we are there to guide them between the unfinished bits. We now have a working and not too ugly pause menu too. We are also putting the final touches to the progression system so that you can replay missions and try to score them better. We also spent quite some time fixing bugs here and there, improving the user experience in some parts of the game that still don't work exactly we would like them to. Especially, we noticed people having trouble using our mini-map so we are working on that too.

Key Art

Finally, our new key art , with the new name, as landed! And it's amazing, right? It will be up on Steam very soon.

Surprises

This wasn't laid out in the order of events of the week. There is one I skipped. A big one. But one I can't talk about yet. Soon! I can say that you can expect to see us in a very very cool setting. Guess in the comments! Also, we spent some time chatting with some new partners that will help us on our... crowdfunding campaign! Last october, as you might recall, we won the silver prize of La Game Cup. The prize was composed of several parts including a participation in a crowdfunding campaign. This will happen on a french and super cute platform called Ulule! Who doesn't love owls? [url=https://fr.ulule.com/city-ambulance--rescue-express/]
Sign up if you'd like to join in

Next Week

We still have a ton of work, very minor stuff but so many of them... We can't wait to have you playing the game! See you then and take good care!

[ 2025-04-11 13:10:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there! As you might have noticed, our weekly devlog skipped a beat! Indeed, last week, as announced on our social networks, there was no news because we were too tired from a very busy week. What happened? Well, mostly we got on TURBO mode to ship a playable build with everything we really wanted people to try at a "playtest" evening gathering at our coworking space. A beautiful space shared with our friends from Nova-box, Ctrl Freak and Zaka Services.
After having a couple of friends try the game the day before, we already had plenty of notes on our whiteboards. We fixed and tweaked the game to almost all of their feedback, before the evening. But we were sure people will bring up a lot of stuff to our attention. Playtesting is a very important part of game development as development is often a big tunnel that you enter with great ideas and get out with no idea if they actually work or not. The biggest problem being that you know way too much about how all of it works and you really can't be sure if people will "get it" right away.
The evening went great! People could play the first three missions of the game and they liked it a lot! Especially the multi-tasking situations, the drive feeling, the visuals, etc. Of course we can and will continue to improve things. We already addressed most of what tricked people a few times. We also have a couple features that are not implemented yet, like the City Town Hall, that will help people get around easier and faster. If you want to play the game and are in Angoulme, see you tomorrow at Spawn Festival!
Otherwise, just wait a couple of weeks - probably - for us to finish a few things and you'll be able to play at home the demo of Highway to Heal! See you next week!

[ 2025-04-04 14:32:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

How do you do? The demo is nearing completion! There's still a few things to do and a lot of polish before releasing it, but you can expect to play the game in the coming weeks!

Disinfection mini-game

The third mini-game of the demo has been implemented and is now just waiting for the final visual touches. The story of this one is a bit weird as we ended up mixing two games that were previously designed on paper.
This was supposed to be an evaluation game, to assess the situation of the patient. But we want our games to be more involved in the patient's health. And while taking the vitals of someone might be nice on their mood (or not!) it was not active enough in our taste. So we took the idea of a disinfection game and applied it over the existing gameplay and graphics and it works quite nicely! We will probably rethink the visuals though, by changing the tools to be more representative. But that will probably wait an update after the demo is released.

Visuals

Visuals have vastly improved in the last few weeks. As previously stated, particle effects from ApologueFX have been integrated, but the main interface got a bit of an overhaul too. We feel the design is much easier to read while maintaining its distinctive "holographic" characteristics and makes you feel a lot more about the importance of the patient you're in charge of.


The injection game is a lot less spiky too! Thanks to new technologies, injections don't use needles in our future, but high pressure injection systems which are a lot less scary.

Next Week

As I stated earlier, the demo is approaching. We need tu update the tutorial to highlight all the new gameplay and make sure you start off in the best of conditions. You wouldn't want to harm those delightful characters, would you? After that, is just quality of life features up to the release! Integration of the latest music tracks, debugging, a proper pause menu, more debugging, performance improvements, even more debugging, gameplay balancing - it's wayyyy too hard right now! - and then... you guessed it, debugging. We can't wait to have all of you playing our game and telling us how you feel about it. See you then!

[ 2025-03-21 15:43:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bom dia! Yes I speak portuguese too and this game does support a vast diversity of characters so why not. "This game" and not "City Ambulance: Rescue Express", weird right? Maybe because we finally settled on a new name for the game? OMG! YES! It will be called... *drumroll* Highway to Heal. The new logo and key art are being worked out, so the change will be visible here and everywhere in the coming weeks.

Ambulance Damage Management

Taking care of your patients is important, but let's not forget to take of our ambulance! Without it, our patients wouldn't get very far. In Highway to Heal (sounds nice, right?), your equipment is your health bar. You have to drive fast, but safe! Avoiding traffic, obstacles, dodging lamp posts, etc.
When you hit stuff, your ambulance starts to break appart. No worries though, a slight detour through the garage or the pharmacy will fix all that! The garage will fix all your vehicle related equipment while the pharmacy will handle all the paramedic equipment. Both have hardware to fix your most important piece of gear: the siren! Here's a quick video of what all that looks like. Don't mind the visuals of the interface, they are being done as [strike]we speak[/strike]I write! [previewyoutube=T1b9xyc8rLc;full][/previewyoutube] I had to drive so badly to show this. I'm deeply sorry to all the vehicles, trash cans, lamp posts, trees and walls I hit along the way. Good thing no-one got hurt, not even a bird!

Illustrason

Let's put some faces on who's behind this game. Illustrason is a team of two talented sound designers who did all the audio effects and mixing you've heard in that video. Camille and Julien are still hard at work to improve the sound's audio. It's already great and we didn't even integrate their ambiance system yet! We can't wait to get to it but there's so much to do!
Check out the games they've previously worked on, they are great. They even got Best Audio prize for their work on Seers Isle at the Indie Prize 2019 event in London!

Next Week

There was some rethinking into what patient treatment mini-game should be done as third for the demo. But that thinking is over and implementation might be done next week. Hopefully, we will get to show you all the gameplay with a much improved interface too. See you next week! Take care!

[ 2025-03-14 18:09:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey! It's time for another update of this game. Although we redesigned some key parts of the game, progress is going well on our public demo. Hopefully, it will be released by the end of the month. Fingers crossed!

New immobilisation mini-game

To care for your patient, we plan on having eight mini-games in the final game. All will be playable in full-screen, while your picking them up, so that they're easier to do the first time. But all will also be doable while you're driving so that you can raise back the health of your patient if you drove badly! This week, I'd like to focus on the immobilisation mini-game. When you're given care of a patient that received an injury to a limb, it's often important to prevent that limb from doing any movement. This eases the pain and ensures the situation doesn't deteriorate more.
To that end, this mini-game has you use a pump to inflate a vacuum splint. You must inflate it enough for the limb to be secured but not too much as to not cause too much discomfort.

Radio

There's been quite some progress on the audio front, with new engine sounds and more general mixing. That's hard to show on an image, obviously! But we can talk about one important aspect of the audio of game. Paramedics spending most of their days driving, not necessarily in urgence, they listen to a lot of music. Some even do work playlists! Our approach here will be to give you six radios to listen to. Using the holowatch, you'll be able to easily change which one you'd like to ear. All will feature varied styles, from punk rock to latin music, probably some electronic music too.
In between the tracks, radio jingles and news will pop up. These will be designed to immerse you even more in our beautiful city of Le Mascaret. By the way, do you know what Mascaret means? It's french for a tidal bore, a wave that goes backwards: from the sea, up the river! I must tell you something: listening to hours of music for work is a lot less fun than it sounds! (pun intended) It's about finding which tunes suit best, writing them down, grouping them together, trimming the list again and again... It's a lot of spreadsheets! DJ'ing isn't just about showing off on stage, it would seem. Let us know which styles you think would be best to drive to!

Next Week

By the end of next week, all three mini-games planned for the demo should be working. Maybe we will show you the other two. There will probably be many surprises for us by then. Maybe the new name of the game? We'll see! See you next time and remember to take good care of yourself!

[ 2025-03-07 13:28:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bonjour ! as we say over here. We're still looking for the new name of the game. We tried a few things on Steam. Sorry if you were wondering where did we go, ahah! The contenders are:

• Safe and Sound
• Highway to Heal
• Pulse Fiction
• Rushing Siren
• CARE!

Let us know what you think of those! We're open to suggestions too. Come chat on our discord server.

Visual Effects

Our partner Apologue FX is currently shipping their first batch of visual effects for the game. It's going to rock a lot more! Here's a few work in progress animations to give you a taste. Here's what happens if you brake your siren. Go to the nearest garage or pharmacy to fix it!
I bet only the garage can you help you on this one.

Game Design

As stated last week, we are putting the patient forward in the hope that you take good care of them. But that can't be at the expense of your dear ambulance! Not only you will be able to upgrade it, but the more upgrades you have, the more resilient it is! That's because your upgrades will always brake before your wheels or your siren. To that end, we are re-designing the interface of the game and it will look more or less like this:

Next Week

We can hope that we will finally have the new name of the game. This is one of the hardest things to do while making a game. It's the toughest of all the decisions we have to make because it's not something you can change easily when the game starts to be noticed all over. What we are more sure of is that progress will have been done in implementing the new game design so expect to see versions of what you just read here but more polished and all actually working in-game! Reach out if you'd like to play our demo before everyone. We'd happily take your feedback! You can also follow us on social networks to get early glimpses of our progress. See you next week!

[ 2025-02-28 16:02:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello! This week shook a bit the development team. We started rethinking a few things including... the name of the game! With "City Ambulance: Rescue Express", we noticed people often thought our game was a simulation or a cheap mobile game port. For the moment we just renamed it to "CARE!", its initials, but we will probably change it again. Stay tuned!

Hologram Effect

As eco-friendly as we want our game to be, we still want it to be set in the future and that must show somehow. So, in the world we are designing, engineers have figured out how to make small starwars-like holographic projectors that work quite well and don't consume a tremendous amount of energy to operate. This was not very visible in the game yet, only a few touches here and there. We finally gave the characters a bit of treatment so that they convey that concept too.

Patient's Care

Thinking about marketing and the title of the game made us change a few things in how the game plays too. We're going to have the player focus more on the patient by constantly showing its health bar. In CARE! the health your patient depends on their state when you pick them up. While you're driving, it's health can worsen unexpectedly due to their condition or... when you drive bad! Driving properly is key to help your patient the best, but you can do more. If you drive perfectly, an aura charges around your ambulance and stays as long as you don't hit anything. As long as your aura is maximized, your patient health increases, like they obviously would if they were in an insane level of coziness.
But this process is quite slow and hard to maintain, so the game offers you an alternative: from time to time, a health mini-game will pop-up above the ambulance. The better you handle it - remember, while driving! - the more your patient's health will increase in an instant.

Next week

You might have noticed that I lied last week, as I did not talk about those health care mini-games that we have. Indeed, development of indie game by a very small team makes for unexpected changes. Maybe next week I will get to show you those, maybe I will have more to tell about the new gameplay, maybe we'll talk music... Surprise! Let us know in the comments if you're interested in participating in a private play-test! The game is quite light to download (only 250MB right now, we're targeting a maximum of 1GB for the final game) and has about an hour of gameplay available.

[ 2025-02-21 15:09:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone! We have started a weekly development log. Every week, we will post on our progress on making City Ambulance: Rescue Express, focusing on specific subjects of the game that have noticeably progressed. The first post is on the game's hub, follow it to not miss any! Weekly DevLog #1 - Vehicle AI & Environment Graphics
Have a nice week-end!

[ 2025-02-14 17:55:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone! We are starting a weekly development log so you can all follow our progress on the game. Well, we'll try to this weekly. Let us know if you like it, if you want it more often, less often, we'll happily ear your feedback on this! This week, there has been quite some progression on the artificial intelligence of vehicles and the graphics of the residential area, so we'll focus on that.

A Ballet of Vehicles

Vehicle artificial intelligence is the work of having cars automatically moving around in the city nicely, kind of a ballet! It's actually a pretty hard job. It's the kind of thing that when done right, no-one notices it's in there. So far, ours cars where super dumb, they would cut across intersections, they would drive at their maximum speed all the time... It meant for quite funny interactions but it was also super frustrating at times.
Daniel spent the whole week on this and now they know how to stop before obstacles presenting in front of them and how to turn in a nice arc to go from one street to another, without cutting across. It's not perfect yet, sometimes they can block themselves together, but it's already a whole lot better. You'll be a lot less surprised by their silliness! This is something we're definitely going to spend more time on in the future.

Environment's visuals

Tom spent a good deal of his weak working on the level design of the residential area. This is an area of the game where streets are quite narrow and cars drive slowly in. Even more than the rest of the city, it's super green thanks to thousands of trees planted by their citizens.
Le Mascaret being inspired by french towns, it's not just straight streets crossing each other nicely. It's all messy and fun to drive in. It's also many streets which are just for people to walk in, no cars, not even ambulances in there!

Coming up next

Right now the game features only one caring mini-game, a spiky injection. We plan on adding two more and re-working the one we have to use a more futuristic pressure injection system. No more being afraid of needles in Le Mascaret! Stay tuned for more and remember to take care of people around you!

[ 2025-02-14 15:05:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Dear Steam Players, It's with great joy that I'm writing to you. Something we truly didn't expect actually happened! Last week, Thomas and I, Daniel, went to Angoulme to defend our game amongst great other indie games in La Game Cup, the French Indie Game Competition. You might have voted for us online back in July, but the competition didn't end there.
It was a tense but still fun afternoon of preparation, making videos for social networks, getting interviewed by major french streamers before the event, etc. A bit before 7pm, we went on stage to talk about our game for the only four minutes we were allowed to. That's not much to defend a project! The whole thing was streamed on Twitch and Facebook. People could then vote by text message. It's with great surprise that an hour later, we got a silver trophy in our hands!
First Places were awared to Lost In Cairo and Versus in the Dark. Check them out, they're very cool! And the other finalists of the newbie and boss categories too!

What does that mean for us now?

This prize awards us several things. First, courtesy of La Banque Postale, we will be able to start a crowdfunding campaign on KissKissBankBank with a 5000 start! If you'd like to support our project before its release, stay tuned as this campaign will probably start in a few months. Second, we will have a 30 day access to labs at CNAM-ENJMIN. We will make sure to use the QA room to give you a nice bug free and completely enjoyable experience!
Lastly, and I think the most important : we will have an ad campaign in french paper magazine "Jeux Vido Magazine". Communication around a video game is hard, very hard. It totally makes the difference between a video game studio working hard for years and getting nothing upon release versus one surviving to make another contribution to the indie game monument. You can understand that free advertising is always nice to have! Not only that, but we also made nice contacts with the streamers there and, hopefully, you'll see more of our game with them in the coming months!
To conclude: Thanks for your support! And stay tuned to discover more about City Ambulance: Rescue Express!

[ 2024-10-08 13:57:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone, We are so happy to announce that City Ambulance: Rescue Express has been selected by the jury of french contest "La Game Cup" to be amongst the 3 finalists in the BOSS category.
This contest is held by KissKissBankBank, a french crowdfunding platform, and La Banque Postale, the banking service of the french postal service. The winner will get a headstart of 20 000 (21,699$US) in its KissKissBankBank crowdfunding campaign, an assured win! >>> VOTE FOR US <<< Winning this contest would tremendously help Manufacture 43 in making City Ambulance: Rescue Express a reality. The economic situation has been difficult for everyone and that includes us too.
Winning the contest is done by public vote on the website of La Game Cup. It is done by a simple click of "Je vote pour ce jeu" (french for "I vote for this game") under the name of the game, on the website. Voting will happen in three phases. The first phase is happening right now! The second phase will be in September, we will notice you again. The last step will happen in public in Angoulme, France, where the team will be. Drop by if you want to meet us :) You can also help us by sharing the link to your friends and family and ask them to vote for us too. Thanks for reading us! Daniel & Thomas

[ 2024-07-11 11:17:36 CET ] [ Original post ]