Hello mayors!

There’s a new update for Silicon City! Here’s a brief list of the new features it includes:

• Steam achievements
• Bank loan and budget details
• Game performances

Achievements

We’re going to start with 20 achievements! They are unlockable if you play connected to Steam, and not in sandbox mode. I’ve added the basic achievements with the city ranks to reach. Also some classic counters on the amount of houses / shops / offices you can have in your city. For exemple, you’ll receive the first achivement with 100 houses in your city, the second at 500 and the last one at 1000.

Also are some unique achievements for special buildings you can have in a city, or some related to your soccer team. A secret one is already in the list, but not likely to be found yet. I’ll place some hints here and there about hidden objectives during the development of the game in the blog.

Bank loan and budget panel

Suggested by a member of the community, there is a new option for the mayors having trouble with their finances.

As soon as you finances go below 0$, the banker will give you the opportunity to build a bank to take out a loan. This will go into your gifts and you’ll be able to place the building for free in your city. Then select the bank and you’ll see the loan panel in the building overview:

Now you’re able to take out a loan. You can decide how much money you wan to borrow, up to a certain limit, based on your city rank. At Rank 1, it is only 10,000 $ but can go up to 200,000 $ at Rank 5. You’ll be able to track the loan cost in the budget panel. The design here has been reviewed for more clarity and to use less space in the interface. The city expenses have been broken down into three categories: Roads, Parks and Public services. Some red and green arrows at the very right of the panel gives you indications on the evolution of your budget compared to the previous month. The chart is now interactive as the population one, and you can show or hide some parts of the cart to focus on a specific data.

Game performances

A big work has been done to make the game faster. The time the main screen takes to load has been drasticly reduced. I found more opportunities to improve the game in general so more updates on this topic will follow in the upcoming releases

Linux and MacOS support

The game is now compatible for Linux, but some issues are still here. I had to delay the release for Ubuntu 12.04 (and more) for the next version.

The support for MacOS is pending because it requires Apple’s notarization and might take a day or two. I don’t have any Apple computer to build the game and have to use somone else’s to do the tests, this is why it will take a bit of time. If the results are positive, this version (0.24) will be published for MacOS during the next week. Otherwise, it may come with the Linux version, for the end of the month. If you have an old spare macbook, you can donate it to Silicon City 🙂

Bug fixes

• The leaderboard screen has been updated
• The electricity propagation has been fixed. It now navigates better through the city
• The pedestrian paths were improved for buildings with entrances, such as the police station or the soccer field.
• French translations are now complete and include the tweets of the silizens