Cities in Motion - Developer Diary #1 - A Prelude

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co_martsu

Colossal Order CEO
Colossal Order Dev
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Aug 25, 2010
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  • Colossal Order Staff
Hi to everyone from a cold place called Finland! I’m Karoliina, and I work as a game designer at Colossal Order, a game studio. We have been working on a PC title, Cities in Motion, for some time now. Cities in Motion is a public transportation tycoon game inspired by the great classics Traffic Giant and Transport Tycoon. The development has been super exciting and we want to share the experience with you. You can expect a bi-weekly article posted on the Paradox Forums about the game and the team working on it.

So, let me tell you more about the game. Cities in Motion is a nice mix of management and construction. You can build a transportation network of stops, stations, and rails for many different vehicle types, and then adjust ticket prices, maintenance costs, and wages to achieve the perfect balance. The game begins in 1920 with a timeline of 100 years, and during the different eras, the cities’ economies will fluctuate according to global economical changes. So as the leader of the fleet, it’s important for you to check the budget often and learn to anticipate how the prices will develop to make the most of your business.

Why did we want to make Cities in Motion, you might ask? One of the main inspirations was our team's passion for transportation games. We love management simulations and are fond of watching a living, breathing city with numerous citizens going about their daily lives. Our main goal in Cities in Motion has been to give you this feeling of a bustling city, ever changing and growing, with lots of people living and working in it. Every person living in a city is unique: they have a name, a home, and a workplace. Citizens have their own cars but would prefer reasonably priced, fast public transportation to get to their destinations. Can you offer it to them?

We feel that putting an emphasis on the citizens brings much to the game, that transporting people might be the most exciting. We also wanted to focus on the architecture and on how to present the feel of real cities. We chose four European cities to be the canvas for your transportation network. Since each city has its own special atmosphere, we had team members visit Vienna, Berlin, and Amsterdam to get the proper feel and bring back pictures of the beautiful places and architecture that we could use in the game.

Besides the uniqueness of the citizens, another reason for choosing to limit the cargo to passengers was that we wanted a well-scaled game that focuses on those beautiful European cities. With a small team, we couldn't make a huge, epic game, so our focus was on well-designed maps as well as interesting transportation methods. The stunning graphics that show the beauty of the cities are the great work of our talented artists.

View attachment 30464
A screenshot of the Vienna map.

We at Colossal Order want to offer you the challenge of building and managing your own transportation system for 100 years in the life of a growing city and a fluctuating economy. Can you do it better than they do it in the real world?


Kind regards,

Karoliina Korppoo
Cities in Motion’s lead designer
Colossal Order Ltd

[video=youtube;FemH4GhEqEs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FemH4GhEqEs[/video]​
View attachment 30460
 
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Awesome developer diary, very interesting read.

Can't wait for the next one!

Thanks for the fantastic updates! :D

P.S. If possible, include cheats for those not to good with handling the economy, but do indeed enjoy transportation games. :D
 
Guess its time to go bug Mattias so I can play the latest version.. I look forward to this game ALOT!
 
When you say the economic situation will fluctuate, do you mean it changes according to how it happened in history, or is it procedurally generated? So can I expect a crash in 1929, or just recessions of varying intensity every decade or so?
 
I still love TTD, I hope I will love this game too.

I have a question, that probably many other TTD fans have too:
How easily modable will the game be?
-EU III modable (easy)
-OpenTTD modable (medium)
-Sim City modable (hard)

For example could I add new maps, vehicles, etc. with ease (like EUIII) or do I have to be a programmer (like with SimCity)?
 
Inb4 Belegs32
Now, let's read.

Edit:
Your goals are promising. Looking forward what's actually realized in the coming DD's. :)
 
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Hi! Thanks for your questions. Here's a couple of answers:

The game has a map editor, so you can build your own maps. Otherwise the game is hard to modify.
The economic fluctuation is generated, so the recessions and booms are not tied to historical events.

And surely we are very much looking forward for you to try Cities in Motion ;)
 
Will the dev team add new maps and vehicles themselves as free or playable DLC later after the game is released?
 
Looking good, I am hoping next dev diaries will focus on the gameplay!

Nice work by Paradox to get involved with this game and having them on the forum as well :D
 
It will be quite hard to add your own assets, like vehicles, besides the maps to game. But we will offer DLC for Cities in Motion to some extent.
 
Great, thanks. I'm glad we will have a map editor. That was one of the main things missing from Traffic Giant. I still hope will will get additional vehicles and cities in the form of DLCs
 
This game looks very interesting, will be cool to see the final product :)
 
Slightly offtopic but I did not know where to post else, I cannot access this DD from the main paradox page. It gives me an access denied. No problem opening this post on the cities in motion forum though.

Ontopic: Looking very nice cant wait till release!