It’s Monday the 19th of September 2016 and it’s time for the 39th edition of the Airport CEO development blog! Before we get into it we’d like to thank all of our followers over at Reddit, the subreddit has now made it past 1000 future CEO’s which is just incredible! Incredible since more people means more perspectives and more perspective means more innovation. Now, here we go…

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Improved Taxiway System

Working agile is one of our core principles and that means iteration upon iteration upon iteration. During the implementation of the updating system we discovered a number of design flaws within the taxiway building system which prompted a ticket and an iteration. It was possible for the user to construct taxiways in a way that disrupted the pathfinding system of the aircraft, causing a lot of trouble for the ATC. Even though this situation was extremely rare and caused by abnormal layout of the taxiways, Murphy’s law still applies. On top of that, we also felt that the intuitiveness of the building procedure was not what we strived for. We modified it to the better and and in the process also made it much more dynamic and scalable. The new taxiway build system can now be used for all kinds of taxiway widths and as well as different foundations. It also featured a snapping function making it a lot easier to build. In the meantime, we’ve refined the the system for generating correct sprites on turns and connections. Here’s an image showing the current foundations for the small taxiway type:

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The Economy Panel

The great thing about these devlogs is that we really can take you in and show you what’s going on behind the scenes. While great progress was made last week on the e-mail panel and system, equal amount of progress had been made on the economy panel. However, as you can understand, the overall economy system of the game is a quite more complex history than sending messages and so for that reason focus this week has been on the design of the panels and the way that the CEO will be able to interact and affect the airport’s financial operations.

As you know, ACEO is all about making deals and signing contracts. In order to become cost effective, one must review the contracts in detail and weigh the proposed values agains each other. For example, different aviation fuel suppliers will offer you different rates on fuel. While this is realistic, a system that only relies on static variables over the contracted time would encapsulate the player in tedious waiting and would limit the player to have a direct input. For this reason, we’ve made it so that while all contracts have different standard rates (for example, one airline might pay you X in landing fees and one might pay you Y) you will have the option to globally affect these prices using a generic fee percentage slider. This way, you still have to review and sign good contracts but if you’re not profitable or “too profitable” you can adjust a fee where you see that there’s money to spare.

However, drastically overcharging a certain fee, like the cost of aviation fuel, will have a negative impact on the relationship with the airlines and could result in a termination of the contract. On the other hand, lowering the price of aviation fuel will have a positive impact on the standing, and could result in positive rumors and in return attracting more business.

Here’s two images of the budget and the fees panel. Please note that we are not looking for feedback on details like phrasing of the fees, what kind of fee we have or stuff like that, but more so on the system itself. Do you think it would be fun? Is it too complicated? Is it not complicated enough? What we are trying to achieve is a good balance between realism, micro management and good ol’ fashioned gameplay fun.

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Similar to variables in contracts, employees also have individual salary rates (as seen in the gameplay trailer). In the salaries panel you can globally adjust the salary for a certain group of employees. An increase in salaries will result in an overall happier and better performing employees, a decrease will of course have the opposite result. The christmas bonus thing is probably just for testing but could eventually be used as a modifier for long term goals or stuff like that.

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Bank loans are pretty straight forward. There’s three different types of loans with different characteristics, the image probably explains itself. Please not that the “Generic Business” image is a placeholder for the bank’s logo.

Next week we’ll get into contracts and show you how they current look and work, they need another week of tuning and testing!

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Voting on the Next Aircraft Type

If you have not already seen it, we initiated a voting on our forum for the next aircraft type to be implemented. It was thrilling to see that so many CEOs voted and commented. It was a very close race the first few days between the BAe 146 and Boeing 737-600, but in the last days, the 737 took the lead by owning up to 50 % of the almost 150 votes casted. Yesterday we declared the Boeing 737-600 the winner and would like to give a big thanks to everyone who voted! This will definitely be the way we introduce new aircrafts to the game from now on.

So within the next days we will start sketching on a brand new Boeing 737-600 and we are going to invite you guys into our process by sharing the different steps. The first thing on the agenda is to do some research on dimensions, weight, propulsion, light placement and stuff like that and then collect pictures and drawings from the web. The next step will be to outline the aircraft using Adobe Illustrator, so that each part can be individually painted in Photoshop. More on this soon…

So that’s it for this week. Thanks for reading and thanks for following the progress. As a result of the voting the forum now has over 200 users and the number of views of the voting thread has crossed 1k! Amazing, we’ll keep repaying you by pouring hours into the development. See you later!