I've had a bit of a breakthrough today, and judging by the reaction from everyone testing HAND IN HAND with me, I'm not the only one who's excited about it.
We have working fire trucks!
Now, that might not sound like a particularly big achievement for a city-building game, but watching one of these little red trucks leave the firehall, drive across town, put out a fire, and head back home has been surprisingly satisfying.
And it's reminded me of something I've been discovering throughout development.
It's not always the big features that make a game feel alive.
Sometimes it's the little things.
Fire Protection Was Just a Number
When I first added fire stations to HAND IN HAND, the system was pretty basic.
Build a firehall, and it provides fire protection within a 20-tile radius.
Any building inside that coverage area receives fire protection, which contributes to its happiness and helps it meet the requirements for further development.
That's it.
No fire trucks. No emergency calls. No actual fires to put out.
Just a calculation happening behind the scenes.
And as far as the simulation was concerned, it worked perfectly well.
But there was something missing.
All my buddies who've been helping test the game kept coming back to the same thing.
They wanted to actually see something happen.
If we're building fire stations, shouldn't there be fire trucks?
And if there are fire trucks, shouldn't they occasionally have something to do?
Fair enough!
Building Our First Firetruck
So I went into Blender and put together a simple little firetruck model.
Nothing particularly elaborate. A big red truck, a ladder on top, and enough detail that you can recognize what it is when it's driving down the street.
I've also been working on the firehall itself, giving it a proper building model with garage doors and a tower.
The models are fairly simple, but that's fine for now.
What I really wanted to do was get the truck out of the station and onto the roads.
And that turned out to be the interesting part.
Somebody Call the Fire Department!
I've now added random building fires to the game.
Every so often, a building can catch fire.
When that happens, the game checks whether the building falls within the coverage radius of a firehall.
If it does, a firetruck is dispatched.
But I didn't want the truck simply appearing beside the burning building.
It needs to actually travel there.
So the truck leaves the firehall and uses the road network to find the quickest available route to the fire.
Once it reaches the burning building and makes contact, the fire is extinguished.
Then the truck turns around and makes its way back to the station.
It's a fairly simple system, but it connects several parts of the game that I've been developing separately.
We've got the fire coverage system, the road network, vehicle routing, and now random events happening within the city.
And today, we finally got to see it all working together.
The firetruck left the station, drove to the fire, put it out, and returned home.
It worked!
Sometimes It's the Little Things
The funniest part was the reaction from everyone testing the game.
These are the same friends who've been helping me build cities, test multiplayer, experiment with mergers, and find all sorts of things that don't work quite the way they're supposed to.
We've watched entire neighbourhoods grow from little houses into apartment buildings.
We've built towns, connected them with roads, and merged them into larger cities.
But watching that little firetruck head down the road to put out a fire?
Everybody loved it.
There was something about seeing a vehicle actually doing a job that made the whole city feel different.
And I think that's an important lesson for where HAND IN HAND is heading.
Making a City Feel Lived In
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about traffic lately.
Getting vehicles to drive properly, follow roads, find routes, and avoid creating ridiculous traffic jams has been an ongoing challenge.
But the more I work on it, the more convinced I am that traffic and movement are really the lifeblood of a city builder.
Buildings are important, of course.
It's satisfying to watch a residential neighbourhood develop, or see a skyline grow as the population increases.
But if everything just sits there, the city can feel like a model rather than a living place.
Vehicles moving around change that.
And vehicles that actually have a purpose change it even more.
A firetruck responding to an emergency makes the city feel like something is happening beyond the player's immediate actions.
The simulation is doing its own thing.
Life is going on.
That's exactly the kind of feeling I want to develop further.
Where Do We Go From Here?
There's still plenty I can do with the fire system.
Right now, the firetruck travels to the building, touches it, and the fire goes out.
Eventually, I'd like to make the whole response more interesting visually.
And there's one little detail I'm particularly looking forward to adding.
Flashing lights!
Because really, what's a firetruck without flashing emergency lights?
I'm also thinking about how these kinds of events can make the city more interesting as it grows.
The challenge is balancing all that activity without making the simulation unnecessarily complicated.
I want players to enjoy watching their cities operate, not spend every moment fighting emergencies.
For now, though, I'm pretty pleased with what we've accomplished today.
Our first firetruck is officially responding to calls.
And judging by the reaction from my friends, this is exactly the sort of thing HAND IN HAND needs more of.
Now I just need to get those lights flashing!