Hey, heroes! 👋
This month was "event revamp" month, as we took time to redesign the game's Events system...again. For a quick refresher on how the system worked before, read this. 👈
Done reading? Okay, let's get into the changes.
Why the Redesign? 🤔
The addition of the research system, which drives the progressive unlocking of various aspects of your business, introduced a crucial mismatch with the existing Events logic.
Suddenly, we had events triggering changes to areas of the business that had not been researched yet, causing significant confusion (to put it mildly). 😮
Clearly, we had to fix that. 😂
Redesign Goals 🎯
Our goal was twofold:
- Ensure that events only impact researched aspects of the company.
- Do the above while avoiding monotony and maintaining a fun/rewarding challenge.
Easy-peasy…or maybe not. We are still trying to solve the second part. 🤣
Anyways, the following is how the new events system currently works. It’s still in development and will be finalized after some rigorous testing.
New Design ⚒️
For the new design, we’ve:
- Expanded the levels of events.
- Eliminated the news selection option.
- Introduced a more structured approach to how events unfold.
Here’s how.
Stage-Based Dynamics
The events are now divided into different stages based on in-game days. This makes more sense since the research is equally tied to game days.
Event Levels & Types 👍👎
The system now features six levels of positive and negative events. Each level unlocks as you progress through the milestones. The event level indicates the severity of the in-game impact, both positively and negatively.
For instance, a level 2 positive event will be less impactful in terms of effect and/or duration than a level 5 or 6 positive event.
This is the current event level distribution across the event stages:
As you progress through the game-day milestones, you’ll face an increasing mix of event severity, challenging you with more complex scenarios.
Event Probabilities⚖️
We have also modified the probabilities of positive, negative, and no events occurring at each game stage.
The graph below shows the current probability distribution for each type of event.
Stage 1 starts with a higher probability of positive and no events occurring. Over time, negative events increase to push out no-event instances until a balance is reached at stage 6.
We will keep you posted on any improvements and changes as we roll the system into testing.
New Improvements 🪴
Research Unlock Voiceovers: We've added voiceovers to many research items to provide essential context and guidance upon unlocking them. The system also includes playback controls and scrolling text for improved accessibility.
And for those who absolutely can't stand voiceovers interrupting their flow, we added a mute button for you.
Self-managed Stands: You now manage your first stand personally from day one. This means early savings on worker salaries and bonuses until you unlock management capabilities.
There might be a few limitations to managing your stand personally as your company grows. But the jury's still out on what those might be.
Fingers crossed.😉
Balance Sheet and Cashflow: In keeping with the rest of the UI, we've split the balance sheet and cashflow statement into separate tabs.
We also tweaked the presentation a bit to give it that extra accounting flair. Hopefully, all ye number crunchers would love the new look. 😄
Bug Fixes 🐞
- Fixed an issue where the CEO's 🧑💼 name would cause an error when the game tried to access unavailable company information.
- Stopped the game from incorrectly trying to get multiplayer data for workers while in single-player mode. 🎮
- Fixed an error that occurred when the game tried to create the end-of-day report 📄 while research for tier 2 items was still ongoing.
- Fixed several variables 🔢 in the customer feedback tooltips.
- Resolved a problem affecting uninitialized research elements when the player doesn't open the research tab after starting the game. 🧩
- Stopped all non-interactable buttons from being highlighted. 🚫
- Fixed an accounting error affecting burger ingredient 🍅 🥬 purchase after buying a stand.
- Stopped research connection lines from being redrawn at runtime.
- Fixed an issue where translated monologue text defaulted back to the local database, resulting in English monologues. 💬
- Expired stock 🧀 is now correctly accounted for in cash flow accounting.
- Resolved game-breaking bugs related to the events system. 🗞️
- Stopped the music player 🎼 from crashing the game when switching back to the main menu.
- Resolved an override affecting random stands when worker-related events are generated.
- Fixed a bug causing a switch to the recipe view when the player has yet to select a stand.
That's it for June! 🥂
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Live Long and Prosper 👋,
Team Visionaries