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Liikennematto alpha 2, the "cars update", out now!

Liikennematto is a tiny town building game for children and grown-ups alike. The gameplay is simple: you only build the roads! Lots, buildings and their residents pop up after. You can play Liikennematto in the browser, and it works great on mobile too.

Liikennematto was released on itch in November 2022. Since then, it has made it's way to several collections and has been played more than 500 times. The feedback's been very supportive, thank you!

The first update to the game focuses on things which really should have been in the initial release, but didn't make it due to time constraints.

I've been rather busy with work and family, but managed to squeeze a couple of hours of development here and there. The nature of this update, which we can call "the cars update", is incremental. It makes Liikennematto better in simple and rather subtle ways. Let's dig in!

Car variety

Liikennematto shipped with one car model, which came in one color. The model was based on a Kenney asset. For this update, I've created a total of four models from scratch, and they appear in several colors! The colors are based on the color scheme of the lots the cars originate from.

Three of the models cover common car styles - sedan, hatchback and van. There's a fourth bonus model, but I'm not gonna tell you what it is because I've added a...

New mystery lot

Play Liikennematto to find out what the lot and the mystery car model are!

Aside: many of you discovered the car spawn tool under the debug menu. Still there! The spawned cars have a random style and distinct gray color.

Refreshed UI

I wasn't exactly delighted about the emoji-driven UI Liikennematto used to have. The icons were obviously placeholders, and the theme was a bit boring.

I'm happy to tell you that the UI now matches the colorful style of the game proper, and I've drawn custom icons for every button! The icons should clearly state what the buttons do.

The "dynamite" button was a common source of confusion. It cleared away the town without a warning — not a nice reward for the curious. In it's place you'll find the new game button, which also starts over, but comes with undo! There's also an obvious transition to the new game with the splash screen reappearing. Look for the yellow arrow on the upper left part of the UI - it takes you back to the previous game (and then back to the newer one, until you create another game).

Spawn/despawn overhaul

When new lots appear they spawn residents (that is, parked cars). The residents then look for a route to their destination. Both of these events are now delayed by a random amount of seconds. This gives a nice rhythm to the game with a dash of realism.

Despawn is affected, too. Cars may now gracefully stop their journey before vanishing. I've generally made some changes to avoid despawning unless absolutely necessary. Previously changes to the road network and some parking conditions quite eagerly triggered the despawn event.

All of these changes are powered by a new subsystem, the event queue. Another motivation for adding the system was to enable easy retries. For instance, when a car is looking for a free parking spot, there might be none. With the retry mechanism the car may just wait at the lot entrance until a spot becomes available. Lastly, the event queue helps to spread the load of costly operations such as rerouting over several frames, which may speed up Liikennematto on modest devices.

Multiple residents per lot

Some lots now spawn multiple residents. This feature was easy to add using the event queue! Liikennematto will never have tons of traffic*, yet adding a little just makes it more lively.

*unless you go wild with the debug tools

Improved parking

I redesigned the parking lots to accommodate more parking spots, and to make the lot entrance a little bigger. These changes both smooth out the traffic and improve the parking paths. Parking now simply has a better flow to it.

Parking debug tool

To make sure that the changes above work, I added a new debug tool for parking. You can find it in the debug menu. The tool visualizes the state of parking spots (free/reserved/resident parking only) and the so-called "parking lock" which prevents deadlocks in the parking system (in less technical terms, only one car may park or unpark at a time).


Bugfixes

  • the tilemap sometimes appeared with vertical lines between tiles due to a sub-pixel offset, which was unsurprisingly fixed by rounding up pixels!
  • bunch of fixes to routing inside lots
  • yield only for moving traffic (less chance of a traffic gridlock)
  • some paths inside road tiles were off, no more!

What's next

In the next major update you can expect more content (lots, possibly car models) and improvements to the procedural generation system. I have no timeline to announce, yet.

Lastly, Liikennematto recently had it's third birthday. I made a little montage of different stages of Liikennematto's life to celebrate it.

🕹️ Play Liikennematto!

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Build the roads and the town comes to life
Simulation
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