I think that this update contains some changes that will have a significant impact on the gameplay, so I am simultaneously very excited and nervous. Please let me know what you think about the changes on Steam forums or Discord.
Staff salary payment
Paying the salary for all employees at the end of the month often caused players to go into debt, even when they had a well performing restaurant. This meant that you would often spend a lot of time waiting to get out of debt, which is quite boring. I made a change that should prevent this issue.
The payment of your employee’s salary now gets spread throughout the month instead of paying it all at once at the end of the month. This is implemented by dividing the salary by the amount of days in the month, and paying this amount on a daily basis.
Menu system rework
A few months back, I released an update that structured the menu as a tech tree. However, I felt that the way you unlock dishes was a bit uninteresting. Dishes are now unlocked by paying to research them. Each research has a duration and monthly cost. Like employee salaries, the research payments are spread throughout the month. When you go into debt and fail to pay for the research for 5 days in a row, research gets paused automatically. This is mainly to prevent players from going deep into debt by doing too much research.
Another change is that some dishes now have a bigger positive impact on your overall menu rating than others. The stars underneath the dish name reflect the size of this impact.
Reviews
Customer satisfaction used to be communicated by 2 metrics: guest happiness, and reviews. After a lot of testing and thinking, I came to the conclusion that reviews are a more clear and effective way to communicate this. I think that going from 3 stars to 4 feels more impactful than a happiness bar that goes up slightly.
I replaced the individual happiness stats with individual review stats, and in the top left of the screen you can now see your average review score instead of your average happiness. I also added half stars to reflect customer satisfaction a bit more accurately.
Staff zoning changes
When I added the staff zoning option, I was not quite sure how well employees should adhere to their zones. I eventually decided to make them adhere very strictly because I felt that player control was the most important thing. However, I now feel that this was not entirely the right decision.
When employees are prevented from doing their work, because certain items they need ( usually ingredients or tableware ) are not available inside their zone, they will now try to get those items outside of their zones. You can recognize employees that are outside of their zone by the red footstep icon above their head. When they are inside their zone this icon is blue.
Small changes
- Fixed wall decoration moving bug.
- Changed neutral priority with empty box instead of -
- Renamed “Storage rack” to “Shelf”
- Load button grayed out when there are no saves.