I'm not sure if we can call this weekly since the last one was almost a month ago, haha! But we're going to try to keep this weekly (or biweekly) again. Anyway, Hello everyone!

A Successful Crowdfunding

We're very glad to be out of this one. Crowdfunding campaigns are super stressful. Ours concluded with a success but a mere hours before the end! It was to be expected, especially with a small platform like Ulule. Even with our half way start due to our Game Cup prize, it was tough.
But it's very nice that we got not just our 5000 prize but double that! A massive thank you to all our supporters, we won't thank you enough. This money will surely help us get through the year! Also... It's still active! We left it open until the end of the year so people can still pledge. If you want to name a street of the game, there's still time! :)
Since the campaign ended, Daniel took a much needed week off while Thomas went on to pitch the game at the Game Camp in Lille. For us, the goal in going to this event was double. Find partners to help us finish financing the game and see if we could help other developers in their developments.

Design changes

While showing the game to professional game developers or editors and mixing it with the feedback we got on our demo from players and streamers, we got nice ideas that we are currently implementing. Some of it already is programmed but none of it already got an updated interface so it's going to be hard to show you the changes, ahah! You'll play them with the next demo update anyway so just be patient ;)

Caring

Like many of the changes we are doing, this one is very small with big consequences. No more surprises, you are now going to be able to trigger the caring mini-games yourselves and actively treat your patient on the road! If you stop, pressing the A button will trigger the full screen game. If you dare press the A button while driving, you'll play the mini version above the ambulance. In both cases, there will be a cooldown period between each use.

Equipments

The way equipments break was not very clear so we are going to make it simpler. Instead of each equipment having its own health status, there is going to be a general ambulance integrity bar above them with various sections. The more equipment you have, the more sections it has. When the integrity falls into a new section, one of your equipment breaks. It's not purely random, the ones on the left break later than the one on the right. You can build a strategy to protect the ones you care for the most! Oh, also, all equipments will be fixed at the garage now. The drugstore will be there only to change and upgrade caring tools.

Holowatch

We noticed something odd about the watch. At this point, its whole inner workings where you use it to select missions, check the minimap and change the radio, is just a side effect of an old design of the game that you never saw which enabled much more. Most of it was scrapped so... let's scrap it completely! To start a mission, you'll just have to go to the patient now. The radio? There will be a dedicated button to tune to the next. And the map? It will just look like your current experience: always there! The only controls you'll now have on the watch will be to change the current objective, so you can still easily go to the nearest garage or drugstore.

Third Person View?!!

On this, we would really love to hear you so read me out. It's really the biggest of all the changes. The games feels really different if we go this route and you can really help us by weighing in. While we really love our top-down old school driving gameplay, it has some issues. The glaring one is that not everyone is confortable with the inputs associated with it. That's why early on, we decided to add an alternative control scheme that lets you just push into the direction that you want. It's very tricky to get right and we're not happy with it yet, especially with a keyboard. I noticed Deliver at All Costs also as it but completely removes the feature if you're playing with a keyboard, I understand why... Another issue is that top down games are actually really hard to market! "Who cares?" you might say. Well, we put more than 200 000 in this game already and we're not even halfway through. So you might understand why we would really love for it to be successful, you know... Our lives literally depend on it. There are other minor reasons, but I wanted to try something... I did a very quick hack of a third person view of our game. It's probably quite different that what it would be if done properly, but it already gives an idea. It's still pretty much top-down so you can see our beautiful rooftops, but it's much closer to what a regular driving game looks like.
I was not expecting much of it. We were surprised. We put the videos here and there, on discords, slacks, subreddits... Comments seem to lean towards the 3rd person view but both sides have very good arguments!
Advantages are: it's easier to pick up as left and right are never reversed. It's probably easier to market (we are going to make some tests, don't act surprised if you come across those on socials :D) Disadvantages: it's much harder to see cars coming from adjacent roads! It's also less cute... What do you think? This is not a drill, we really want your opinion on this.

For Next Time

There's a lot more that I wanted to say but I'm going to keep this for next time! Want a tease? We are also making big changes to the pacing of the game! Did you think we were sleeping for a month? Not at all! Well, except Daniel, a bit... Please come tell us what you think of these upcoming changes in the comments, on discord, on socials, wherever!

[ 2025-07-04 16:47:42 CET ] [ Original post ]