Liikennematto is a tiny town building game for children and grown-ups alike. The gameplay is simple: you only build the roads! Lots, buildings and their residents pop up after. You can play Liikennematto in the browser, and it works great on mobile too.

Alpha 4, the "quality of life" update

This update focuses on improving gameplay based on player feedback from Alpha 3. There's a bunch of new content as well.

More lots appear

I heard your feedback: sometimes the procedural generation of lots (buildings) around the roads you build produced subpar results. Some towns may only receive 3-4 lots when there's plenty of space for them. I've made several improvements to the system that decides what gets generated, and now you should see plenty of lots in all of your towns. They key change is a "buffer trail" that allows re-generation of area you've recently built. This allows small decorative nature tiles to be replaced with lots.

Additionally, there's a new confirmation dialog that prevents you from accidentally building over a lot. That easy mistake  caused a lot of frustration in players (pre-dialog).  

New user interface

The previous user interface (UI) was already quite old and never meant to last this long. I've designed a completely new UI that is familiar but makes more sense. For example, all secondary things are now grouped into a main menu (press the hamburger icon in the top right part of the screen), there's a uniform color scheme that sits well with the game visuals, and you can now open the new info panel ("?" icon) to see how the game is played, based on your input type (mouse/touch).

I've also reworked the panning (scroll) of the game world. Holding down the middle mouse button, or swiping with two fingers, pans the world with a tiny bit of physics so that moving around feels natural. 

New content

This update comes with 5 new lots, a balanced mix of residential and commercial destinations for the townsfolk, and of course new residents!

A more subtle addition is 21(!) new lot entry tiles. They multiply the options for building roads near lots. For example, the lot entry can now be part of an intersection. This prevents lots from being removed when you remove a piece of road near them.

I've also made improvements to nearly all the previous lots and tweaked the color scheme of all visuals.

The feature that almost was: savegames

I prepared a system where when you build anything substantial, the game is automatically saved. The savegame is stored in the web address (URL) of the game, which means that you could just copy the address and save your town (bookmark it) or share the link. Alas, itch.io doesn't support reading URLs in that way and I had to postpone this feature. I'm looking for a way to allow copy/pasting towns so that they can be saved and shared (or continue building what you built the last time).

Bugfixes and other improvements

• zoom is now based on screen size so zoom levels are predictable between mobile phones and devices with larger screens
• improved the performance of road network re-build after new road pieces are built
• sound clipping from building roads very quickly is greatly reduced
• fixed a potential crash when resuming the game after visiting another browser tab
• fixed most instances of disappearing tiles due to conflict between new generated content and the game world
• fixed missing traffic lights in intersections that have lots right next to them
  

Known issues

• parking spaces in lots may get stuck as "reserved"
• panning/gameplay may stutter in Firefox on macOs

For all reported issues, see:
https://github.com/klemola/liikennematto/issues

What’s next

I feel that the game is approaching my goals for it, and therefore the focus is on adding more content. I'm planning to introduce traffic that comes from outside the city via a small highway, or something like that. This would alleviate the need for the "Add traffic" button and keep the focus on building roads. Traffic will be scaled by the town size. I'm also reviewing the need for more control schemes, such as keyboard/gamedpad input and drag-to-build.

Meanwhile, go and Play Liikennematto!