I have just submitted my game, since my 7 days were nearing their end. Play it here, and vote for it here.

I have done pretty much everything I wanted to do in my list from the last post:

- The economy is now a bit smarter in general. For example, if a station has 8 connections, Fluid prices will be a round value between 10 and 20 chosen at random, but if such a station only has two connection, the random range becomes 12-20. In this way, there is a slightly higher chance that interesting places to sell stuff are near the edge of the map, without completely excluding the possibility that a high-ranking station pops up in the middle of the city.

- If you hold the right mouse button on top of the project title in the bottom left corner, you'll be presented with a list of all shortcuts you can use. I also added some extra cheats to increase the time limit, or get one of each item. I even added one where you can replace the "YOU" text on the map with an @.

- I really liked the solution I used for last year's entry, where if the player gets a game over, the game takes a snapshot of the current game screen, and use that in a new room using the screenshot as the background.

- The net value chart appears both in the net value tooltip, as well as in this really huge variant in the end of game screen:

But that's not all!

- I've added that you can place up to 20 pins with the right mouse button. I really wanted players to be able to mark interesting locations on the map, and this was the thing I could quickly implement to allow that. So far it's been pretty useful!

- I have added the little pie charts that show how high the relative price of an item is to the shop UI as well. I hope it's not too confusing for new players, but once you know what you're doing, these are the easiest way to check if buying that item is worth it or not.

- I added a mode where you can see what the net value for your all stations. Meaning that, if you would travel to that station with your current inventory, you would get that amount of money if you sell everything you have there. This is the easiest way to see where you can make a huge profit, provided you've already explored most of the network. Simillarilty, there's a mode that shows the total item stock for all stations as well.

- I ended up balancing quite a bit, and ended up decreasing the amount of money you need to make to 3499, and increase the frequency of trains so they ride more often. Stations also kept generating outside of the screen and under the UI, so I reduced the maximum grid side, and ended up decreasing the amount of stations to still make the map feel like a metro line. I feel the current balance does put you under pressure, while it does feel very fair to play, although the random generation of the economy still has a tiny bit too much influence on the difficulty of the game.

If you happen to own Game Maker Studio 2 and want to dive into the source code, then be my guest, as well! (I especially recommend looking at the Dutch Sci-fi town name generator.)

Conclusion

Overall I think this is a good step up from my last entry Hexagone, and both games really compliment each other.

In Hexagone, I didn't want to use words and keep the gameplay simple, to make it easy to learn how to play. For Suburbion, I really liked having to design the UI in such a way that it helps players make their tactical decisions as frictionlessly as possible, and I think I've succeeded doing that in almost every area. But it doesn't explain itself as well as Hexagone does for first-time players, except for the blinking "Buy something!" text so players won't go in completely clueless. That places these games at opposite sides of the spectrum, and I'm really curious what effect this distinction will have on my game's ranking this year.

While I have a bit more thoughts on this, I've already written too much this week, so I'm going to wrap it up here. Please, don't forget that you can play the game now. Thank you for reading, and enjoy the rest of 7DRL 2020!