14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive are delivering the first diary for their new Cities: Skylines, which focuses on roads and the huge role that they are playing in the coming city builder.
Henkka, an artist and designer at the studio, writes on the official forum that the road network is designed to be as flexible as in the previous Cities in Motion 2 while introducing more accuracy.
The team states, “When building the roads, the tool also creates the zoning grid on both sides of the road which indicates the area where zoneable buildings are built when the player uses the zoning tool. The grid is visible while building the roads which gives the player the ability to create optimal city blocks if they so choose.”
Cities: Skylines will allow gamers to create straight, curved and freeform roads and there are options to upgrade or downgrade them, with a range of extra options, including sound barriers, which can be used to decrease the noise pollution that all roads generate and increase land value around them.
Bus stops and bridges in Cities: Skylines
The team at Colossal Order will also make public transportation important, but the citizens will also have personal cars, which means parking space is automatically created, except on highways.
The studio adds, “In Cities: Skylines bridges are automatically build when the conditions are met such as water or steep cliffs. The type of the bridge is related to the type of the road. We wanted to give variety to the bridge designs through the road sizes. Small road creates a simple bridge with bridge railings to keep citizens from plummeting to their deaths. Large road and highway on the other hand create large suspension bridges and so on.”
Gamers also have the option to create elevated roads in order to make sure that massive cities allow citizens to move from one place to another pretty quickly.
Cities: Skylines and the rules of traffic
Gamers will also get the option to choose whether the roads included in Cities: Skylines will feature right or left handed traffic, made possible by the fact that vehicle animations are generated by code rather than created directly by the development team.
Cities: Skylines is designed to offer a hardcore city building experience which will deliver all the elements that were missing in Maxis’ SimCity, and it is expected to launch on the PC in 2015.
