After Ostriv has been greenlit, the workflow became much more balanced. Now I have time to pay more attention to the gameplay inner workings, not being distracted by making pretty pictures for a Greenlight campaign, which by the way performed pretty good.

In the course of all the years of development I made up a huge list of youtubers who make letsplays of building/strategy games, so I could later send them a copy of my game for review. And it was pleasantly surprising to see some of them reaching out for me themselves after my Greenlight campaign started. Also overall positive reaction on my game, even in such a raw state, is very heartwarming. Thanks to everyone for all the kind words! This really inspires. And now I’ll tell you on what exactly.

In April I had a lot of work on a town hall building, which I decided to endow with kind of innovative features. The town hall will not be just a building that collects stats, but a full-scale city governing authority.

There is a department for each branch that is headed by an advisor.

Advisors are being hired from educated citizens or invited from other towns.

Each employee has experience and personal abilities, which influence department’s productivity.

Every department has certain amount of points, which you can distribute for various tasks.

To increase number of points, advisors need assistants.

Every new workplace requires furniture. Also paper is required for the facility to work.

To expand staff, you may need to build a bigger town hall building.

This way I’m trying to solve the late-game problem from which suffer most of city-building games. As the city grows, it requires more staff in town hall, hence more expenses. Besides, player’s personnel management can strongly influence the development of the city, which, on my opinion, could add more strategic possibilities.

Another new concept is a mayor’s time as an additional resource. This resource is spent on construction, trade agreements, new policy issues. Time resource restores as the game time goes on. To speed up restoring you’ll need to hire more assistants.

Also there’s a functioning city guard building now. The guards are keeping order and prevent crime, which may become a problem in bigger towns. The player can assign guards to watch a specific point or patrol arbitrary path.

Of course all of this is a subject to change as I’ll test this all on practice, but the main direction is there. Later I’ll probably tell about new production chains and citizens personal traits. Follow the news on Facebook and Twitter. Share your thoughts in comments below or in official subreddit: /r/OstrivGame/