With time, Blockbuster Inc. becomes a better game with a wider variety of mechanics and enhancements - designed to keep you satisfied and coming back for more. Today's major patch is the showcase of our recent hard work, and we hope it meets your expectations. We're still constantly working on the game, so even more things to come! Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Patch 1.9.0! 🎉
Especially for this occasion, we’ve prepared a video showcasing the changes over the past few months!
✔️ customizable backgrounds
✔️ up to 15 actors on scene
✔️ regency and superhero updates
✔️ subtitle system
✔️ new lightning options
Let’s not forget that this week we’re celebrating Halloween! 🎃👻🍬 To mark the occasion, you’ll find a new Ghostkiller theme, costumes, and set designer objects in the game!
Apart from the cosmetic additions, a lot has changed in the game mechanics too! The full list of changes is below!
🎥 New Features & Improvements:
- Facial Expression Controls: New sliders for facial expressions (happiness, anger, surprise) in the Animations tab within Direct Scene.
- Lighting Control: A Lights tab in Direct Scene allows you to adjust environmental light color and intensity for better scene ambiance.
- Copy Scene Properties: A “Copy to Other Scenes” button in Product Creation lets you transfer scene settings quickly to other scenes.
- Employee Search Upgrade: A new “Find More Candidates” button in the Hire menu lets you pay to find more or higher-quality employees.
📅 Gameplay Adjustments:
- Quarterly System: Each in-game day now represents a quarter instead of a month (Q1-Q4), with awards held every second year.
- Added difficulty setting that can be chosen in the new game menu and can be changed anytime in Settings. Available levels: Sandbox, Easy, Normal, Hard. The differences of each level are shown in the difficulty selection menu
- Trending Themes: Now, two themes trend each year, boosting product hype when used.
🎬 Rival Studios & Economy:
- Rival Studio AI Improvements: Rivals now make smarter hiring, firing, and product release decisions.
- Bankruptcy Mechanic: Rival studios can go bankrupt, pausing operations for a year before returning.
- Shared Consumer Pool: A new, limited sales pool (starting at 1M in 1920) grows over time, creating competition for sales among studios.
- There is now a fixed-size shared consumer pool, which means there is a limited amount of sales to be achieved per year and is shared among studios and products. If there are many products being released by many studios at the same time, the people will prefer the ones with the higher hype and quality, leading to reduced sales for the rest of the products. The consumer pool size starts at 1 million sales in 1920 and slowly increases, reaching the limit of 5 million in 2020
🧑💼 Employee Management:
- Employees may now become stressed if overworked, and can issue resignation notices if unhappy for extended periods.
- Employees will now give a resignation notice if they stay unhappy for longer than 3 days. During this time, you can offer them a raise using the Negotiate button to persuade them to stay. If you don't, or if they don't accept your raise offer, they will leave the studio and can't be hired again for one year
- Firing employees with unpaid salaries may lead to union actions, requiring you to pay owed salaries.
- You can now use the Negotiate menu anytime to offer a raise to your employees for a happiness bonus and to guarantee they won't quit for some time
- Employees will now become unhappy if they feel that they are underpaid, in which case you can give them a raise to appease them
- Employees now have higher salary expectations if they have high skills, long employment record, or worked on many products
- If you fire employees that have unpaid salaries, you will need to pay the owed salaries before hiring them again
- if you fire too many employees that have unpaid salaries, at some point when you will have enough money to pay them back, their Union will take legal action against you and demand that you pay all the salaries you owe
- The Hire and Manage Employees windows now use pagination instead of scrollbar and have multiple sorting options
🎙️ New Options & Additions:
- Radio Lines: Random radio lines play throughout the day (disable in Settings if needed).
- Custom Sound Effects: Import custom sounds in the Video Editor for unique productions.
- Bank Loan Payoff Option: Instantly repay bank loans.
- The Studio Charts now show the number of employees and products of each studio as well as the studio status (active/bankrupt) and the number of bankruptcies so far
- The tooltip of the happiness bar in Character Sheet now show positive/negative effects with green/red text respectively
- A warning is now shown if you try to import the same custom-made character twice, but you can ignore the warning and proceed, which simply creates a clone
- Extra scenes can now be added only in movies, not in TV shows. This is to prevent a complex bug that caused some scenes in TV shows to be deleted
- Product sheet now lists all involved employees, not just actors
⚙️ Bug Fixes:
🟢studio shares now work properly and bring back a portion of the original studio's revenue every quarter. If that studio goes bankrupt, you lose the shares you bought from them. You can sell back the shares of other studios but you can no longer sell your own studio's shares, as this could often cause a disadvantage that was hard to recover from
🟢 filming tasks are now prioritized over education (e.g. previously actors wouldn't go film their scenes if they were in a classroom)
🟢 sorting options sometimes were not working correctly in all types of Charts
🟢 TV show episodes after 1st episode were showing incorrect number of fans and awards
🟢 the set prestige bar in the product score breakdown would always appear half-empty even if the set's prestige was maxed out
🟢 moving the camera downwards by moving the cursor to the viewport bottom was not working in Build Mode
Feel free to join our Discord!
Thank you for everything and have a great Halloween! 🦇