Good day, Newsbearers!
Welcome to your newest Dev Diary series!
With this format we'll give you an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the team crafting News Tower! We’ll explore various aspects of the game's development—art, design, gameplay mechanics, and more. We'll mainly focus on giving you snippets of future content, buuut because we're a little late in publishing this first one, we'll have a focus on the previous update instead... Just this one time!
We're all news reporters here, we all know it's not good to let a great story go to waste! ;)
So whether you've already played the update and you want a deeper understanding OR you're new to the game and want to see what the game features are all about, we welcome you to dive into this inside scoop!
Can you give us an overview of the new “employee traits” system introduced in the latest update?
In this update we wanted to bring some personality to your employees and at the same time bring a skillful twist to existing pillar mechanics of News Tower.
Traits come in two types: Personality traits and Trainable traits.
- Personality traits finally make the hiring process more interesting. From now on employees personality traits really can bring a boost to your tower and at the same time have funny flavorful quirks. Example: Highlander – +3% workspeed for every floor below their workplace.
- Trainable traits are more rare and overall better traits that players can assign to employees in the training menu, so they learn/gain that trait. These traits can bring real game changers. Example: Coordinator – Allows opening the next story-file within a news item immediately after assignment.
Some personality traits combo perfectly with trainable traits, allowing you to create the ultimate employee!
Beyond traits, we've also added the 'Monthly calendar' for unlocking rewards in a cool new interactive way and activated the 'Prestige system'.
Employees who now reach the max base level of 5 become senior and require Prestige to gain an extra bonus boost. Prestige works almost like comfort but requires different objects that make these employees' surroundings more prestigious. For example, some basic comfort items from early game are unprestigious and will need to be replaced with more prestigious ones!
What inspired the addition of this new system to News Tower?
We always wanted you to treasure your employees more and really bond with your reporter team! Traits help achieve this and add a layer of strategic choice to the reporting phase, without complicating the basics.
For the Monthly calendar, our goal has long been to introduce something more connected to the yearly cycle, complementing the existing weekly gameplay. This Calendar is part of the perception bar system and adds this extra layer to it that it really missed.
How do you envision these changes enhancing the gameplay experience?
Employee Traits hopefully bring personality and strategic choices to the news item reporting.
The Monthly Calendar provides long-term goals to work towards and increase the interest of the perception system.
The Prestige System incentivizes you to decorate your tower and make it your own. Unlike Comfort, which only negatively affects employees, Prestige only acts as a bonus buff coming form a positive angle!
Can you share any insights into the development process for this new feature?
One of the trickiest parts of News Tower development is working with so many connected elements/mechanics. So even little changes have big effects and need extra checking and testing. This update for example, we introduced Traits, which are active in the game almost from the start. It was an opportunity for us to take a look, with a fresh perspective, at most of the existing mechanics, because a change like this one affects the balancing greatly, and potentially introduces weird bugs!
How do you plan to further develop these systems based on player feedback and data?
We choose for fun and maybe have some traits on the overpowered side a little!
Having the community help find trait combinations that might be a little too good and adjust accordingly if needed. We really think this can be a fun new phase for the game, where the community feedback will have a great impact. The community might come up with trait ideas we didn’t even think of. We are always open to new funky ideas and the traits system is ideal for that.
Besides, we want the new features and the tutorials to remain clear enough for everyone to understand. We don’t want to lose the casual side of our game. With tycoons, It’s easy to overload the player with Tutorials, menus and Ui. So we'll closely monitor this side as well.
You can already see the impact of the community's feedback on the game: We added Prestige for the Utility employees in the patch 0.18.126r, based on the suggestions made on Discord by some of our community members.
We hope this gave you a better understanding of Employee Traits and where they are coming from, even if it was "old news"! ;) .
We promise, next time, we'll give you a sneak peek (world premiere!) at some of the upcoming features. We already have a date and the content mapped out and you will not have to wait very long! Until then, keep those presses rolling!
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