Hello everyone!
I've got a new batch of news for you! In this update, it is mainly a summary of what's happened in the last couple of months. But the more exciting part is in my opinion about the future, which I'll cover in the Next Steam Update!
New shop type - Sports shop
Currently, there are only 3 types of shops in the game – Electronics, Clothing and Music. Of course, that's enough for development purposes, but I wanted to expand this small set of 3.
Why Sports shop?
2 main reasons. The first one being - sport shops are fairly numerous and there are always a couple of different brands out there in the mall. And the second one – bikes, skis, rackets, and many others, those products just look so good, and it was a real joy to model them :)
What kind of products will be available in this shop? Take a look:
Currently, there are 17 placable product display tables, and at least 3x as many different unique products.
When I look at all these new products, I notice a slight progress in the artstyle.
The difference is not so much in the artstyle itself, but mainly in the complexity of the model. This is not as huge of a problem, as the old computer product table can be easily updated later on.
But something from the game was getting outdated, and I wanted to do something about it.
New character models
Virtual people in Mall Craze are an integral part of the game, and with that came an important decision. The old character models were getting a bit too blocky in comparison with the rest of the game. Luckily, I was not 100% commited to the old character models yet, so there wasn't any substantial time lost in the process of creating new one. This is actually a 4th version of the character model and here in this picture you can see a nice comparison between all of them.
Not only does the new model (in my humble opinion) look better, but they also allow things that wouldn't be possible before. Thanks to the higher polygon count, I can much more easily create various hairstyles, beards, hand gestures (fingers, yaaay), and animations.
Here's another example of the new characters:
The Next Update
As I said at the beginning of this update, I have another update ready to share with you. One that is more focused towards the future. I'm well aware that a lot of time has passed from the last update in January. I will explain why this happened in more detail in this next update.
Thank you everyone for your support, and take care! :)
- Milan, developer