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Hey everyone,
it’s hard to believe, but it has been full five years since global release of Airport City on Facebook in September 2011. Mobile versions came along a bit later: first Android in February 2012, then iOS in August 2012, and last but not least Windows in March 2014. I know, there were many ups and downs, and I can only hope that Airport City has provided you some fun time along the way. Thank you for your support! I can’t stress this enough.
Without further ado let me answer those questions that Dave passed through last year (yeah, finally) and share some of our plans for future updates.
We’re longtime fans of city building genre and planes in general, but there was no game back then that would combine both in an accessible way. There’re plenty of complex city builders, and there’re quite a few hardcore plane simulators almost suitable for getting a pilot license, but nothing in-between that would both allow you to exercise management skils and capture this amazing feeling of an adventure coming your way when you get to the airport and wait for you flight, and it seems the whole world is within your reach.
Before Airport City was released, Road 404 had a couple of relatively small titles for local social networking sites; one was a cooking game, and another one was about home gardening. Neither had the potential to be a breakthrough on a global scale, though, and we definitely had high hopes for Airport City in that regard. But you can never be sure if any given game would become a hit or not.
A couple of team members including myself play occasionally in their free time with a profile that doesn’t get reset. Most of the time there’s a need to do a QA of some sort, and you have to skip significant parts of the game in order to do it quickly, so most of our profiles don’t live long enough to be proud of. We’ve got an alliance, but it’s mostly for checking that everything works as intended, we don’t want to compete for your prizes.
It’s good old coffee, tea and some fresh fruit primarily. And we joke a lot about what could happen to characters of Airport City, and why their endeavors almost always fail so miserably. Some of the bugs that happen are amusing, like once a forest has grown all over the city, and it looked so good in a weird way that I immediately suggested to have a special event about angry trees hoping to take over the world for everything humankind has done to them. We also strive for perfection in terms of buildings, planes, and collection designs. The creative part is really taking maybe 10% of a work time at most, the rest is solving tech issues and making it all work together, but delivering something that’s cool is making it all worthwile.
It’s relatively easy with special events: if you are going to tell a story about building a university, it’s logical to have world-known locations that have universities like Oxford. For new regular flights that appear with new levels it takes a lot longer. We usually have of pool of several dozen locations that fit one of the following criteria: being world-known, being a big city or a capital, being a tourist magnet, being strongly associated with some kind of activity, being in a region that’s under-represented in the game by number of locations — that’s why, for example, we’ve focused on Africa and Middle East for Thunderbird flights. Airport City is about discovery and diversity and to some extent it’s about going to places you never expected to go to.
When we have a list of possible locations for next expansion, we try to find what kind of cool things you could’ve brought from there. It goes the same way for collections like it does for flights: from a long list to a short one, then from a general idea of a collection to specific items. When collections are finalized, we think what kind of building would be relevant to completing this collection and that would complement all your existing buildings.
Last but not least we try to write a story that would be fun by itself while motivating you to go forward. Very few people read side quests, but I think they’re important part of what makes Airport City different from many other city building games. When you start with your city, you don’t really know or care about any of the characters: one random guy asks you to build a hangar, another one asks you to collect income from eateries, you’ve seen it and you’ve done it numerous times in other games. But it gets complicated later, and it’s good, because life is complicated, and our characters often fail both in business and personal relations, because that’s how things are in real world. They have the courage to get back at their feet and move on — that’s what matters.
As for the travels of team members, well, with each new expansion that percentage gets lower! Luckily we all go to different places on our vacations, and that’s good for broadening the horizons. One of our team members has been to Iceland and Machu Picchu, another one had a road trip through rural India and Vietnam.
Right from the start space missions were intended to provide means of more cooperative gameplay that we hoped would be both engaging and in line with real life space missions that are huge multinational projects that usually require combined efforts of several countries. Airline alliances were a next step in that direction. We didn’t exactly get to Mars Mission yet, but both space exploration and alliance competition are integral to Airport City experience by now, and we will certainly keep on expanding those areas.
The number one tech hurdle and priority at this moment is making sure your progress is continuously saved, and it has a back-up, and a back-up of a back-up. Another thing we’re working at the moment is optimizing game perfomance, and initial loading time on older devices in particular.
I can only hope your experience with GI Support has improved over the last year, as we worked extensively with them to reduce time of responding and solving any issues that come up. One of our team members works full-time now to ensure two things: we as developers immediately know if any new problem appears that affects lots of players, and that players get help fast in case anything goes wrong.
We review all suggestions, and many of them are indeed very reasonable. We try to use them whenever it’s possible.
We’ve calibrated the anti-cheat system over the last year, so it’s a lot less punishing. You shouldn’t be affected unless your job is to travel across the world for a living. Set your time to auto-synchronize over Internet, and it should be okay. Contact a support team in case it’s not okay.
I can’t reveal future offers or special deals ahead of time. It works the same way as special events: some of them happen many times, and some never repeat. For example, if there’s just one chance to get a Christmas Tree, and you’ve got one, that makes it all the more valuable, an achievement in itself.
Now, on to the plans for coming months:
- Back to School event for mobile versions. A rare opportunity to get an awesome Collider if you haven’t back in 2012
- A special event to celebrate 5 years of Airport City. One of the biggest challenges you’ve ever faced, and the rewards that are worth your time and persistence. The trailer for this event is coming in a few weeks.
- Oil Refinery as planned previously will come from Facebook to Mobile
- New levels
- New Condor plane, largest yet in your fleet
- New flights, among them: Macau, New Orleans, Kuala Lumpur, Kansas City, Budapest
- New Duke Crooker’s adventure with flight maps, now it’s time to come to Ancient China and hunt for a Forbidden Palace
- The Kremlin for those of you who’re really into Crooker’s adventures and completed all previous ones
- New collections & buildings
- More alliance-related activity to make life a little easier for smaller alliances
And thanks again for playing Airport City from our team!
It’s a pleasure to develop it for you, and we intend to keep on doing it.
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