Patch 1.4 is now online. All ladders have been reset, and we have now transitioned to "Steam Boards" instead of the epic boards. This gives new power over your data allowing things like total games from all savs to add to your max games made score board, and more.
This new patch should not break old saves. However, if you wish to post to the new leader boards you need to create a save after this patch. Some of the new changes might have weird results in older saves, but the core gameplay should be fine. If you wish to continue a previous save you may, but I encourage you to make new games, and post to the leader boards.
As always you can get the short bullet style patch changes in the GDM discord: https://discord.gg/WfbXE4cDVA
We are also starting a new give away (for a different game) you can enter in the discord.
Now for the main patch notes, let's get into it.
-Added the ability to change the name for acquired subsidiary companies. Once you control a company you can change its name from the manage acquisitions menu. Name changes take immediate effect; however, the change will not be reflected in the Top 10 Companies until the following month, this is when the top companies are measured and changed.
-Added more functionality to the camera button of the review page. This now on top of taking a nice shot and putting it in the buggit directory on your PC, calls for a steam screen shot to be taken. This should make it easy to take review screen shots to share on the discord to earn roles, or add them to the community pages.
-The top scores from the current boards were added to the Hall Of Fame for the June Masters league. If you were among them, you can now find your score in the hall of fame. If I made any typos on your names, my bad. Please contact me on and well get this fixed up quickly.
-Added the ability to reset all room colors back to a nice clean white. Some people were making some bad decisions, and having an issue finding white out of the current palate (its grey with brightness = white). So, we now have a reset color button you can use to fix any ugly mistakes.
-Changed the email message you get after completing a game that lets you know if you made any mistakes or were perfect (not topic / genre / target matches that's what game reports and research are for). This message now has every mistake you make added to the list. It used to just show you 3 regardless of how many mistakes you made.
-Added a short popup tutorial on your first medium game. This short tutorial explains how you need to drag and drop workers on to sliders for medium + sized games. Some people who haven't player other games such as GDT were confused by this change, and the drag drop was not obvious. This should help clear that up for new players.
-I have changed the default color values for the rooms from all white to some random colors I picked. I got tired of seeing players with white rooms. I knew they either didn't care to change color, or they didn't know you could. This way for those players they are at least not working in a fully white room. If you wish to set your room to full white you can, but that's on you.
-Made several text / language improvements. Thank you so much to everyone who keeps bringing these to my attention, especially Dycart gaming and his Grammar Masters streams. Working solo is tough, and I move fast. Some things get missed, or spell check flags them as correctly spelt words that are the wrong word. This really does help make the game a lot more professional looking, and I am very grateful to everyone on discord helping clean up the game's mistakes. As we add more stuff, there will be more mistakes to come, I am sure.
-Added a gameplay option to choose to have convention warning notifications come as a popup message. It is easy to miss a convention message, especially late game when more and more things begin to trend the news can be backed up. This popup can be used to ensure you never miss another convention.
-Added a gameplay option to auto skip the awards show. All of the game has been streamlined to feed into emails (if you chose), the only game stopping popup that was left was the yearly game awards. You can now have these also automatically run, you skip going but of course if you release the best / worst games you still receive rewards / penalties. This will allow late game players to go fully afk and let stocks / investments and what not roll in.
-Added the ability to hide the tip popup for view stats / train worker pages if you do a second click on the Info button. This is a very minor thing that some specific players have been requesting. I got you guys.
-Removed the penalty for using the same topic + genre back-to-back. With the new incentives for using fresh topics and genres, I feel most players will already want to do this. However, if you just want to make Fantasy RPGs over and over like some real companies, I think that is fine as well. The game promotes sequels / remakes / new topics and what not with other metrics I don't feel we need to punish anyone for just wanting to make the same game over and over anymore.
-Fixed an issue with workloads when using slider locks. There was a bit of weird math in the slider locks when applying workloads, this has been fixed and will no longer have any difference on workloads moving forward.
-Added the slider rule cheat sheet to every small game stage HUD. After players saw the cheat sheet I added to the new guided stage HUD tutorial, they were like "We want this all the time". I have made sure the math is very easy to remember 20/30/free/20/30. However, I hear you. I don't want to clutter the HUD and I don't want to shrink the cheat sheet down to fit neatly. Especially when it comes to medium + with the addition of workers / features. What I have decided to do as a compromise is include this cheat sheet for every small game you create. Once you reach medium it goes away. I think this is the best of both worlds, it helps you understand the rules but then it gets out of the way when needed.
-I have recolored a few things in the Stage HUD to make it pop a bit more. Such as making the words design / tech match the color for design / tech in the game. This helps keep things more obvious, and looks sharp.
-Added hyperlinks to the training menu for each stat. You can now use the drop down to pick training programs to jump to, or you can click on the stat of your choice to jump to that training program.
-Added a mail for trend changes for topics / genre. Now when something begins a trend (goes over 50%) as well as when a trend is over saturated and heading down (hit 100% and on way down to 0% to cool off) you receive a mail that you can reference later when making your next game. You no longer need to just rely on memory if a new trend comes up while you are already making a game, you can just save that mail for later.
-Added worker name plates for your workers in office 2/3 (not your manager you should know your name). This is an easy way to spot who is who when you want to decide to use skills. There is an option in the gameplay options to turn this feature on and off. I have it defaulting too ON. However, when you manually name your workers, it's easier to know who is who and you may wish to remove these labels.
-Added a new text below the hype bar (goes where the delay tech / design goal goes). This text will update as you change stages in medium + games, and will show you who is in charge of that section. This will help you know when XXXX is in charge and should make use of skills such as Crunch or Pacify or Overrides, as well as others may use Take Charge etc.
-Added a short text line to worker skills page in character stats. This line simply just says this is a drag drop operation to clear up some confusion people had. I may re work this system to a click to choose system at a later time, but this at least makes it obvious to new players for now.
-Fixed an annoying issue where when you drag drop a worker, if you missed a slider, you could not then select / move that slider until you re drag dropped a worker properly. This is no longer the case, I have covered the screen in a transparent image that receives drop events if you miss the sliders, and will ensure they are not blocked by the slider blocks that receive the drops when done correctly. They now go away if you miss if that makes sense to you, if not just know this bug is dead now and you won't ever see it again.
-As we as ending last season's boards, we have fully moved into steam boards. With this we get more control of the data, but also, we have added more boards. There is now a small/med/large/aaa board for your best games, and you each get 1 top game per board. So, there is now a board that players in office 1 can aim to win which extends to our DEMO players as well. This just adds more areas that you can dominate.
That is the end of this week's patch. One final note is that in-game leader boards are currently disabled. Unfortunately, I cannot fake entries to the steam boards for testing purposes. Because of this I cannot test and be sure I have setup the in-game version of the boards correctly. It could give bad data or even worse a game crash. For this reason, the in-game boards are disabled for now. You can view your scores in your global stats / community pages for GDM (where you find your achievement progress). Once we gather a few entries I will be able to test my code, and when confirmed working I will hot fix the boards into the game. This will depend on the number of entries we receive, but I would expect it not to take more than a day or 2 before we can test and implement the boards reference in game as well as in steam where it is already available.
Thank you So much for your continued support. There were almost 2500 games made from the top 50 players a lone with a combined global total over 30k, from the over 2k players (including demo), that is just amazing. Please continue to enjoy the game, and give feedback / suggestions on the discord. With any new big patch there may be issues, please bring these to me ASAP and we will clear them up. Ideally if there any obvious issues we will have them hot fixed as we turn the in-game steam boards on. So, get in there and make some games so I can have your leader board entries. Next big patch will focus on engines / convention / awards (tentative plan).