What is the Community Gazette?
Originally, I intended to use Steam’s news feed only for major updates, when things were polished and closer to a commercially playable state. For those who wanted to be more involved in the development journey, we had our Discord as a place to dive into the "behind-the-scenes" work, gather feedback, and have discussions with the community. I’m also always available in the Steam community hub to answer questions and consider suggestions.
This approach seemed like a good balance, keeping Steam's news feed focused on major, ready-to-play updates for those who preferred final highlights without frequent updates on the ongoing development process. However, after an objection from a community member, I realized there are many of you who are interested in the development progress but may not wish to use platforms like Discord.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to start a regular news post: Community Gazette. Each weekend, I'll share a snapshot of what's happening behind the scenes, discuss future plans, and provide a closer look at our journey toward release. This way, those who prefer not to join Discord can still stay in the loop.
Alongside these posts, I’ll continue to post separate update/change logs whenever there are significant updates to the main game.
How is the Public Test Branch Going? A Recap
Since this is the first issue of Weekly Community Gazette, let’s do a quick recap!
For those following along on Discord or in the community hub, you might know we kicked off a significant refactoring and rewriting phase a few months back. Given the scope of the project and our ambitious roadmap, there are some exciting content-focused updates in the pipeline. To support large-scale simulations running smoothly over time, we chose to invest this time in overhauling the core systems.
After completing the refactoring phase, I’ve implemented nearly all the features and changes we discussed together on the community hub and Discord. I’ll be posting a comprehensive changelog with the upcoming default branch update, but you can already check them by switching to the public test branch right now. Here’s a quick look at some of the most-requested features that have been implemented following the backend work:
- Rating System Refactoring: I've overhauled the hotel rating system, changing how ratings are sampled and adjusting level thresholds. Basically, daily ratings will now vary between -100/+100, making it clearer for you to make informed decisions about your casino hotel and giving me clearer numbers to work with while balancing the game.
- End-Day Report: There's now a single end-day report that includes multiple reports about transportation capacity, service capacity, daily guest traffic report, links to the data info graphics, guest appeal, rating, and some administrative windows like tax and salary payment.
- New Transportation System: I’ve removed all transportation-related stuff from the research tree. Going forward, to meet your casino hotel’s transportation capacity needs, you’ll focus on regularly upgrading/constructing walkways and managing your garage. This includes buying, selling, and repairing public transport vehicles as needed, rather than simply scheduling them. Additionally, instead of unlocking features through research, you’ll now acquire licenses to build bus stops, parking lots, taxi ranks, etc.
- Daily Attracted Customers: The new mechanics now include a finite number of daily customers, based on both service capacity and hotel rating, rather than just an instant number of attracted customers, with the help of new walkways and transportation stuff. This makes each customer more valuable to manage and send off happy.
- Item Usage Queue: In the old system, folks would wander around items they wanted to use, and whoever checked back first got to use it when it was free. Now, items have a queue capacity. People will form clear lines to use them if they're queueable. They'll enter the line, start a timer, and if they wait too long, they'll get angry and leave the casino hotel. You can see how many people are in line, the order of people, how long they've waited, and if they're happy by hovering over the queue or using the item's info menu. If the usage position of the item is on the left side, they'll start the line on the right side and vice versa. The line will always stay in the room and curve to the other side if necessary. This system also talks with the new room capacity and renewed hotel rating system.
- Asynchronous AI Item and Room Searching: Every time an entity with decision-making abilities takes action, it usually searches for a specific item or room from a huge list of objects. As you can imagine, this happens a lot in CRT and can cause frame drops if too many searches occur at once. To tackle this, I've created a new search engine-like system that's asynchronous and CPU multi-threaded. It collects all search requests, prioritizes them, checks the CPU load, and decides how many to execute per frame, making others wait for the next frame. This spreads the workload over time, boosting FPS, especially for massive casinos with thousands of entities.
- Escalators: Escalators have been added as a more guest-friendly alternative to stairs, especially in places where you don't want to place elevators. Customers will now leave if they have to climb more than 5 stairs to reach their destination, but this limit is extended to 15 for escalators. If an escalator isn’t powered, guests will treat it as regular stairs. Additionally, I’ve increased the movement speed penalty for stairs. The image shows the current state from the public test, but we've decided to make escalators 2 tiles long instead of one. More varieties, like stairs, will also be added.
- Executives System: You can now hire executives such as an HR Manager, Finance Manager, Research Manager, and Marketing Manager. Each of these roles has an attention value of 100, which can be assigned to different tasks to automate processes like hiring/firing employees, auto-paying taxes and salaries, or boosting various parts of your business.
- Room Capacity System: I've added a room capacity value to the public service rooms. It's calculated by room size and available items related to the room type. Now customers don't enter full capacity rooms even for waiting for a service. Room capacity value also determines the overall service capacity of your casino hotel. Factors like transportation capacity and hotel rating influence how much of this capacity is utilized.
- Separate Room Policies: You can now set the work hours and pricing of the rooms separately using the policy menu or the room's own information menu even if they have the same room type.
- Data Recording and Info Graphs: I’ve added a system that tracks almost every bit of transactional or situational data in your casino hotel. This includes Financial Data, Rating Data, Office and Archive Data, Happiness Data, Security and Crime Data, Utility Data, Transportation Data, Inventory and Storage Data, Environment Data, Cuisine Services Data, Entertainment Services Data, Hospitality Services Data, and Leisure Services Data. You'll be able to visualize these datas with new infographics and charts, as well as interact with them throughout the UI such as item-based menus.
- Contractors System: You can now select the number of outsourced workers such as builders, waste collectors, and delivery persons you want to hire using the contractor's menu. However, these workers also have an hourly rate calculated based on the number of people you call.
- Specialized Parking Spaces: You can now place designated parking spaces for police, builders, delivery persons, and waste collectors to increase efficiency.
- People Inventory System: You will now be able to clearly see what people are carrying on them from their menu, such as trash bags for janitors, menu items for customers, tools for maintenance officers, and so on.
- Employee Quitting: Employees experiencing extended periods of unhappiness are now more likely to quit. You can check their quit probability directly in their UI window.
- Employee Break Room Item Need: Employees now look for their favorite break room item and throw a tantrum if it's not available. They end up spending more time in a tantrum than they would if the item were available.
- UI Improvements: Many UI improvements have been made, both in terms of design and performance. This includes a service-type-based reports menu, adding every room type to smoking policies menu, changes to item types in the item selection menu, a rehaul of the research menu, and many other updates. I’ll share more details once the update is released to the default branch.
We’ve also added some content-based features that aren’t directly related to the upcoming Nightlife Update but were requested frequently. These include specialized cuisine services like an Asian Fusion Restaurant, Italian Ristorante, Mexican Cantina, Seafood Restaurant, French Bistro, Smoothie Bar, and Steakhouse. Additionally, we’ve added leisure and amenities options such as a Cigar Lounge, Cyber Cafe, Hair Salon, and Yoga Studio.
As I mentioned, you can get a sneak peak to all of these changes by switching to the public test branch. Feel free to share your feedback on the Community Hub, Discord, or Reddit if you do!
So, What’s Coming Next?
After working through and testing all these updates with the help of the community, we were about to start testing some of the remaining core features for the "Nightlife" update, such as the new calendar and events system, nightclubs, and more. However, there's been a shift in our plans. With so many tweaks to the core mechanics, the current public test version of the game has evolved quite a bit compared to the older version on the default branch. To make this transition smoother, I’ve decided to split the update into two parts.
The first part, titled “Echoes of the Community” (since it covers most of the feedback and suggestions from Discord and the community hub), will be a mid-major update released just before the “Nightlife” update. This update will include what’s currently on the test branch, along with the final adjustments to the transportation and hotel systems, and some last requested features from the feedback channel. I’ll also focus on completing data graphs, polishing AI behaviors, balancing, and audio improvements to prepare for the release. As part of this, I’ve temporarily removed the remaining unreleased content from the front-end (though it’s still functioning in the background) and will hold that back for a later release to the default branch. This way, we can polish the features we have now and deliver them to the default branch much sooner, like very soon!
I think that covers everything for this first Weekly Community Gazette. Thanks again for all your support! I really appreciate your patience and your feedback, it’s been invaluable in shaping the game. As always, feel free to reach out on the Community Hub, Discord, or Reddit if you have any questions or thoughts.
I'll see you in the next one!