Hello everyone,
after the surveys I received from a lot of players (thanks a lot!) I've decided with my publisher to do major overhaul on pretty much everything while I'm still in a mid-development stage phase.
Sorry that this will keep you waiting longer time, but sitting at a low rating on Steam doesn't allow me to continue with the current setup of the game.
Most feedback I've received was about the UI and bugs. Later I've realized that even my visual scripting tool is overloaded and going further would bring serious performance issues. So it didn't take long to make a decision to restart it. And I don't regret a thing! Here's why:
1. Engine upgrade
Moving from Unity 2017 to 2020 turned out to be a great idea, even though was skeptical first. It allowed me to upgrade all my tools and also buy some assets that enahnces the look of the game.
BSL was never about fancy graphics, so It's not my main aim, although I want to make it enjoyable as much as possible.
Mainly it's actually the UI that finally gives me a lot more room to do some nice ideas.
Menus will finally be movable and resizable!
2. Crafting
I took some inspiration from Shop Titans, although still shape it in my own vision. Crafting is a complete sandbox now. You start with 1 empty blueprint and will have to set it up. I want to go away from premade recipes. It wasn't bad before, but now I can give more freedom to the players.
Player will be clicking blueprints for crafting and they will automatically be assigned to free workers.
Crafting log will report anything that will happen with the recipe. You can't see much now, since the quality of the recipe is 1%, which is the minimum where, so nothing worse can happen :)
Maximum level per character will be now 100 (up from 10) and each level gives you some stats. So even crafting quality, energy, working speed and so on will be affected by it.
Individual workers have additional crafting settings, but most of it it's as usual automatic. I don't want to overcomplicate it, since there are many other things players will do.
3. Blueprints
I was literally dreaming before of doing something like this in the game but never had knowledge to do that. Well now I can lol!
Each blueprint will be applied to an item that you will be able to craft. They can be changed any time for now and different shapes will provide different outcome. In the beginning you only choose handle and head but later there will be 2 additional configurations, so total of 4 changeable things for each blueprint type...hopefully :)
Item types remained the same, so you will just start from Agriculture and move on to other like before.
Point is to get player close to the blacksmithing itself. Previous model strayed a bit too far from my original idea.
4. Selling
I like the idea of having like 'racks' or 'showcases' for items in your workshop. So items will be assigned to the 'free slots' in the showcases for customers to notice them.
Once it's all set up, you can wait for customer to be roaming in your 'shop' and once they decided option will pop above their heads.
This will basically open up options for selling.
This will be the 'local sales' from original version now. It's more oriented for customers and your products and additional options for negotiation will be present.
I'm not yet sure if I'll keep the good/evil rep system, because my idea would be to have 'fame' with the bar and that will just attract more customers, different customers, quests and so on.
Next update will bring the changes in attracting customers (marketing) and the competition in town, where that you will engage with and then the world map. However, world map will probably stay the same, as I feel it was good the way it was and will only receive some UI boost.
Hopefully you like the changes and I'm very thankful for your patience and support.
VM Machal <3