Hey hey hey, airport CEO! Airport CEO has now graduated from its early access state to a full blown 1.0 released game. We are not really sure how to go about summarizing the journey we have been on together with the community since that September Thursday back in 2017, especially since humans are specifically poor in appreciating the concept of time over an extended period, but just as Fredrik said when he opened Unity for the first time, "How hard can it be?", we will give it a shot.

Release notes - 1.0-0

New feature

• [ACEO-42115] - Aircraft pack DLC support: Airport CEO Supersonic

Improvement

• [ACEO-32803] - Final QA pass: Aircraft prefabs
  
• [ACEO-32804] - Final QA pass: UI

Bug

• [ACEO-41821] - All contractors are not correctly accounted for in extremely rare instances and thus cannot always be fully be dismissed
  
• [ACEO-42007] - Percent signs are for some system cultures shown as squares
  
• [ACEO-42011] - Opened flight planner does not refresh offered flights
  
• [ACEO-42043] - Boarding card is not always hidden for visiting persons
  
• [ACEO-42067] - Toggle overlay buttons invert functionality if object is already selected
  
• [ACEO-42070] - Quick firing employee can cause duplicate person removal and objects to render strangely
  
• [ACEO-42079] - Passengers can in certain transit structure setups arrive very late causing other passengers to arrive late and a check-in fail loop
  
• [ACEO-42082] - Queues that end toward an unwalkable position cause agents to fail finding the queue entry point
  
• [ACEO-42085] - ATC connections not refreshed when game is paused causing them to appear as not connected
  
• [ACEO-42092] - Extremely rare displacement of passport checkpoints can cause deserailization to stall
  
• [ACEO-42093] - Fire trucks can in extremely rare instances after extinguishing a GA aircraft not clear the runway
  
• [ACEO-42104] - Security checkpoints can in rare instances show faulty stand connections (visual only)
  
• [ACEO-42112] - Pushbacks can in extremely rare instances not be invoked due to vehicle job task execution failure
  
• [ACEO-42114] - Faulty pax despawn fetch check can cause very few passengers to spawn for each transportation vehicle
  
• [ACEO-42123] - If passengers begin check-in via a self check-in desk they cannot prefer regular check-in desks when attempting to switch, causing a significant self check-in bias
  
• [ACEO-42127] - Very rare index out of bounds exception when demolishing ATC related objects during threaded connection test can cause update system to stall
  
• [ACEO-42131] - Improved error message when not enough runway ramps are attached to a runway
  
• [ACEO-42138] - Airports can be created without airport name input field content

The Airport CEO early access flight

Airport CEO 1.0 was released today, Thursday March 4th 2021 at 19:00 CET (10 AM PT), and consequently transitioned out of its early access period. The idea was formed in the summer of 2015 and development started in the beginning of autumn that same year. The first year of development however can hardly be accounted to any actual progress of the finished product, especially not in its current form, as that year was all about learning how Unity works and how to write code for a game. In the second year, development slowly started picking up and we were able to put together something that was actually working, including the various core systems such as building, ATC and passenger AI. On September 28th in 2017, Airport CEO released as an early access title to a small but very eager group of people who had been following the Airport CEO progression since the founding of the Airport CEO twitter account back in October of 2015. Around 8000 people bought the game in its first early access released hour which resulted in an immediate placement on the Steam global top selling list which in turn had a cascading effect on sales as a placement on that list is hands down the best type of advertisement any game can get. That weekend was probably one of the best and worst of our lives as the success we had, while putting in exhausting 16 hour shifts every day deploying several updates per day fixing critical issues that arose due to the highly unexpected number of new players, enabled us to quit or jobs the next week and start Apoapsis Studios. The release weekend gave us the means to realize our vision for Airport CEO but it also showed us that this vision was far away and that we were about to embark on an early access marathon.



A screenshot overlooking an extremely early build of Airport CEO from 2017.



The old UI prior to the UI overhaul update.



A screen overlooking the old graphics in greater detail. Almost looks like a different game?


The first pre-alpha gameplay trailer, released May 31st 2016. Same same but different?

Airport CEO has since then been fully redeveloped and essentially nothing from that first early access version still remains in the game today, apart from some extremely core and fundamental systems. We have overhauled just about everything in the game ranging from how agents are moved to the graphics, the UI, fundamental performance overhauls and… well, just about everything else. When Alexander joined the team back in January of 2019 we had just about completed the first overhaul of the game in its current early access state and we were ready to move forward with major feature implementation. Alexander’s added abilities kickstarted this phase of development and we quickly added new tooling, localization and much more but specifically new features resulting in major feature updates.



The Airport CEO 1.0 we are launching today looks nothing like the thing we launched in 2017 and it is all thanks to a somewhat established idea of what the final product would look like, in combination with an absurd amount of input from an incredibly passionate and active community.




... and how it looks today!

Flight data!

Airport CEO has during its early access period sold about 180000 copies and is at the point of its 1.0 release rated as “very positive” on Steam with an average score of 84% positive across 4145 reviews. Airport CEO has had 91 major releases (i.e., releases on the default branch) and well over 1250 minor releases pushed to the experimental branch. We have deployed over 3500(!) builds in total (including both Windows and macOS) and have averaged around three experimental releases per week across the entire early access period, but almost a new release every single working day of the week during the beta period.

On average, 25000 unique CEOs launch Airport CEO every month; currently about 2300 daily and in the past 90 days a total of 53000 CEOs took to the skies. Together they have a combined daily playtime of around 270 days(!) (or 16200 hours), which is an average of almost three hours per day per CEO. When they have been playing, they have together over these past years sent us over 42000(!!!) bug reports containing mostly qualitative issue descriptions, suggestions, or thoughts on the development of the game. Out of all those issue reports of which we have been scrolling through every single day, a total of 16213 have been manually processed meaning that either Alexander, Fredrik or Olof has given a particular issue a specific resolution such as for example “fix deployed”, “deployed to default”, “duplicate” or “cannot reproduce” – the remaining, about 26000, are in fact duplicate reports.

These numbers are staggering to look at from a developer’s perspective and nothing we could really have hoped for, being the first ever real thing we have developed not to say the first and only game we have ever built. Saying that “we are extremely grateful” for how this journey turned out is not really doing it... let’s each try and have a separate go of it:

Alexander’s take

"The time I’ve been working on Airport CEO has been the most rewarding “professional” experience of my life. To be developing a product you actually take pride in, with the absolute best customer base and community any product can wish for, working in a thriving and (more importantly) creative industry confidently surviving the worst pandemic in modern history, and with amazing coworkers, there simply isn’t much else to ask for. There are too many things I’ve learned to be listed here, but the accumulated knowledge at Apoapsis Studios gained from the development promises great times ahead. Because, with our game finally ready to be released into the wild, we are of course looking ahead. I know, however, that I will forever be looking back at our time with Airport CEO with nothing but warm memories."

Fredrik’s take

"Wow! What fantastic years we have had together in the Apoapsis team and the whole community while working on this amazing project. When I started up Unity game engine for over 5 years ago, I could never in my wildest dream imagine where we are today with Airport CEO. It has been by far the most challenging thing I have ever done in my life, but at the same time the most rewarding. We are extremely proud of Airport CEO and grateful to have the opportunity to make this our living. I hope our journey can inspire others to do the same with their dreams. Finally, I just want to give a big thanks to everyone who have been part of Airport CEO and I hope that you will follow us in future projects!"

Olof’s take

"Turns out it's really, really, really difficult to develop an airport tycoon game that in at least the bigger scheme of things is trying to emulate aspects of reality as accurately as possible (while still being playable). The initial early access version was really just an attempt at that and what we're releasing now can in many ways also be interpreted as "Airport CEO 2". The engagement from the community powered by an extremely agile release pipeline, daily updates, coupled with a very accessible bug reporting system which prioritizes quantity over quality is what has made this project possible. It's been the biggest privilege of my life working on this game together with the community, Fredrik and Alexander and with this project being our first attempt at a game one can only dream of what we'll build next."

Airport CEO: Supersonic

There are a lot of great and beautiful aircraft out there, in the real world as well as in Airport CEO, taking passengers to and from their destination as quick as their engines propel them. But there is a special breed of aircraft that no longer traffics the skies in real life… but as of today, if you want to, now can traffic your airport in Airport CEO. Celebrating today’s 1.0 release of Airport CEO, we’re also releasing a free micro DLC called “Airport CEO: Supersonic”.



That’s right, the Concorde and Tu-144 can now be downloaded via the free DLC and will consequently be flying for Olympus Organization and Zoom! (Concorde) as well as Stripe Air and Crown Airlines (Tu-144).

You can read more and download the DLC now on Steam!

We try to stay as accurate as possible with the aircraft in Airport CEO and most of them do still fly in real life, perhaps though not in the configuration or frequency as they do in Airport CEO. Supersonics, however, are not part of the current aviation industry, and that is why it made sense to add them as downloadable content enabling players to decide for themselves if they want them in the game or not.

Airport CEO 1.0 and beyond

In the previous dev blog we took a deep dive into the future of Airport CEO beyond its 1.0 release but we are in fact at as of this point… tracking into uncharted territory. Depending on (but also regardless of) the reception of the 1.0 release we will be keeping a close eye on the developments around the game for the coming weeks and months, responding with patch updates accordingly to the perhaps continued supply of community feedback. You can read more about the future of Airport CEO beyond the 1.0 release in Dev Blog 159: Airport CEO 1.0?

Thank you!

Last but the opposite of least, we would like to thank a few people who have been extremely important to us during these past years. To Steve, Mitchell, Lucas, Kim, Elin, Lewis, Clara, Ellen and Maria who have been helping us with the core aspects of the game in terms of aircraft design, graphics, community, audio and emotional support: Thank you. To the many community managers of the various Airport CEO platforms around Discord, Reddit and the Forum: Thank you. To Sinephony (Daniel and Anton) for a brilliant soundtrack: Thank you. To the members of the focus group on the Airport CEO forum who have been helping us test out features very early: Thank you. To those who have sent in a bug report: Thank you. To those who have participated in the various design contests: Thank you. To everyone at Game Habitat in Malmö and the Malmö game developer community: Thank you. To our friends and family: Thank you. And last but certainly not least… to YOU who have have been playing the game, following along on the flight: Thank you!!!

We will leave it there for now. Once we have had some time to reflect on the development of Airport CEO we will be back with a proper postmortem and in the meantime you will always find us around the Airport CEO communities. Fly safe!

// Alexander, Fredrik & Olof - Apoapsis Studios