1000 Vehicles:As some may have noticed in the OP update, I've recently surpassed the 1000 vehicles mark. I think it'd be interesting to tell a bit about how all those vehicles came to be, particularly those drawn in the last batch.
The first 800 was easy:Many months ago, prior to starting code development of Switchcars, I made a list of all unique vehicle types I could think of. It counted ~250, soon all to be drawn in one go (in about two weeks). At the time I had this idea to have 2000 vehicles in the game, so to achieve that I would just make 8 variations of those 250 vehicles.
I added another ~250 a couple of months later, some of which were simply color variations to the first batch. However, as my coding abilities improved, eventually I had a system that would randomly paint vehicles, which added huge variety to already existing ones. The paint job stuff required significantly more work per vehicle, as I would have to draw a couple of additional masks for each (RGB channels represent placement and brightness of three possible paints, and every vehicle has its unique palette of what colors those paints can be). So, I dropped the goal down to 1000, which, now with all the color variations actually represents well over 100000 different looking vehicles.
This is what Hot Air Balloon sprites look like:And how many variations they can produce:Eventually I added the third variation batch, although it only had some 150 vehicles, summing up to ~650. For almost a whole year this number didn't change, but a new wishlist grow bigger and bigger with all the crazy new vehicles I would remember or discover in the meantime. From the start I had this desire to have every possible vehicle type in the game, perhaps being the most detailed list in existence. This resulted in adding a lot of exotic and rare things such as Pushback Tractors, Forwarders, Military Hovercrafts, which didn't need many variations - thus even though I had thought of 100 of them, I still had only ~750 vehicles.
I thought I could add more variations of cars (there's never too many cars, right?), but even after making all I could think of, and not be repetitive, I had just reached the number 800 (btw there are 184 cars in Switchcars right now).
The remaining 200 were treated in a special way:And there I figured, since all of the vehicles had years of manufacture (e.g. 1973-1995), that I could just go from the past into the future, year by year and see what's missing. I knew I was missing a lot of vehicles from the future, but it was difficult to work out which ones to include. At that point the game was based in the present day (-ish), and I didn't know how exactly to make future vehicles not be too prominent in the game, if I were to make plenty of them.
So, finally I built a tool, something that felt very familiar to Vehicle Ordering screen from Transport Tycoon, or Train Fever. It allowed me to select a year and then it would draw all the vehicles that are currently being manufactured in that year. Suddenly, I saw amazing realistic scenes I didn't think of before: I would go to 1940 and there would be only old cars, tanks, steam locomotives. In contrast, the future was filled with hovercars, maglevs and VTOLs. But it didn't have everything - there was this interesting peak at 1970's, where vehicles exploded with specializations (suddenly you have all these Graders, Grapple Trucks, Car Carriers, Combine Harvesters, etc) which didn't continue to exist in the future.
Buses being built in 1957 and 1999:Rail vehicles being built in 1915 and 1960:There I knew exactly what to do next. I went year after year, thinking about what people really needed and had at the time. For example I had no Firetrucks produced before 1965, so I added some. I also didn't have any being made after 2019, and I added those too. How will people transport garbage in the future? Will motorcycles continue to be used, as they are unsafe? It became quite an interesting task of going through people's needs from vehicles, and looking at how they evolved in the past, and extrapolating that into how they might continue evolving in the future (which is something I loved doing as a kid too).
Doing this I discovered that, though this may be not true in real life, even though specialization exploded in the 1970's, it actually no longer grows. In fact, it shrinks. So many vehicles are becoming multipurpose that suddenly number of their types is being reduced. The peak in Switchcars now seems to be at 1998, and already by 2025 the number of different vehicles being produced drops significantly.
Even though a significant factor to that is that future vehicles don't have many variations drawn, as do vehicles produced 1970-2010, still there is no need to have Jet Skis, Quad Bikes and Dirtbikes anymore, if you can just have a single amphibious fast lightweight vehicle that can go on any terrain. People also don't need as many different cars anymore, when everyone can travel in cheap flying glass bubbles going over 100 km/h.
This could very well not be a realistic depiction of what the future will bring, but it was sure fun to explore. In my design, I followed this timeline of (pretty compressed) key technology advancements:
- 2020 - Efficient supersonic airliners become a norm
- 2024 - Most road vehicles invented from this point on are purely electric
- 2024 - Propeller-based, electric flying cars (Flycars) become mass produced, but expensive
- 2040 - Superfast magnet roads appear, zero-emission magnet cars prevail
- 2043 - Expensive force field VTOL technology appears
- 2047 - Cheap force field flying (Plasma) cars become reality
- 2050 - Interplanetary spaceships begin mass production
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Based on some of my original ideas, I decided I would go up to the year 2055. So I simply went from as early as 1527 (that's when the first Galleon appears), and tried to think of ways people would transport themselves, personally or in in bulks, transport their wood, stone, the ways they would fight wars, or transport wounded, over seas or land, or sand etc, all the way to 2055. In the end I came up with a detailed list of what's missing, finally summing up to 1037 vehicles. It took 4 painful (and joyful at the same time) days to draw them, and a few more to get them ingame.
Just to illustrate how many is 1000, here are all of them zoomed out (no spoilers ):By making the last batch of vehicles, I came up with a new mechanic:In the meantime, while working on the list, I had realized how to solve the problem with having too many future vehicles - by introducing a Current Year to Switchcars. This did not only open a new way for unlocking vehicles (as you'd travel from 1970 to 2055), but also the game would increasingly grow faster as the vehicles would, allowing it to be quite easy to pick up but difficult to reach the end.
The way years work right now is still being experimented with, but essentially they define the difficulty of the game. Having once reached year 1988, you will stay in that year until you outreach your previous best distance, meaning that the player will always spontaneously be thrown into the difficulty level that is challenging for them, and never have a game be too easy or too difficult.
Finally, to conclude the story about the vehicles, while I wanted to include every possible kind of vehicle out there, possibly more than any other game in the world, sadly there will be a couple that cannot be included because of technical reasons, such as Funiculars, Tailsitters, long Articulated Buses and Landers. But, perhaps they will be in a sequel
Another milestone reached:On another note, I have just recently added the Alien to the game. I will probably write more about that soon, but for now, here's a teaser gif: