Hello, dear retailers!

First off, I hope you’ve had a lovely Easter break, if you celebrate, and that you’re having a great week so far.

I’ve got another live update for you today for both the Alpha & Demo versions of the build! To keep you in the loop, King of Retail 2 will be going into Early Access on the 22nd of May (remember to wishlist if you haven’t already!), and so I place a lot of my focus into getting everything ready for that date.

Let's break down what's new in 0.0.7.1 and what you can expect in-game

Major Changes

• Improved Character texture optimizations.
• Improved Article texture optimizations
• Articles now have different processing times to improve performance. (For example, clothes take longer to add to a display compared to groceries.)

Minor Changes

• You can now see your store’s area of influence as a ring when in the City view.
• You can also see the potential influence ring of any selected building.
• The Delivery unit menu shows type, capacity, and product counts.
• Storage units now show their capacity for Articles.
• Adjusted profile photos for characters.
• Readjusted the opacity of hair and beards.
• The current day is now highlighted on the Employee Schedule when in the store.
• Staff will now always go inside when arriving at work.
• Optimized AI task calculations for display and delivery units.
• On load game start, the values of actual storage versus expected storage are checked to ensure that they match.

Balancing

• Reduced the Skill and Greed influence on wage requests.
• Reduced the base store influence area.
• Increased each population’s contribution to customer spawning speeds.
• Store influence area is increased when your store’s lot size increases.
• Reworked customer flow. Different segments now have different shopping hours, spreading the sales more throughout the day.
• Audacious hair colors are now a bit less frequent.
• Customers now prepare to finish shopping 20 minutes prior to closing time, which was previously 40 minutes.
• Adjusted customer shopping patience, making them more need-dependent, rather than tiredness-dependent.
• Adjusted the staff idle move / check for work ratio.
• Adjusted the size definitions of many articles.
• Increased the capacity of storage shelves.
• Increased the capacity of delivery units.
• Increased the amount and variety of articles customers take when shopping.
• Customers now split out to registers based on queue size and distance; previously, it was only distance.
• Adjusted cash register speeds, making purchases run faster.

Bugs

• Beards now properly attach to staff members’ faces.
• You can no longer end the day at the HQ before it is fully set up.
• The Standby slider is now set to 0 when inactive.
• Selected Speed buttons turn grey to show they’ve been selected.
• Vacating a rented property no longer gives you money.
• Fixed a bug where the snapping grid remained when cancelling the placement of a display.
• Fixed a bug when moving interactable objects could cause the player to lose the ability to interact.
• The grid is now visible while moving objects.
• The City store pin no longer blocks the camera.
• Copying a decoration no longer opens an empty menu.
• You can no longer move when assigning a store from a rental property.
• Long messages should now stay within the border of the player message box.
• Delivery units didn't previously take product sizes into account, but they now do.
• Tweaked the Article selector’s button to display the correct color again.
• Storage units now only show appropriate products.
• Hair has been graciously returned to women.
• Characters now match the height shown in their photos.
• Staff will refill almost full displays.
• HQ floors will now properly save and load.
• The medium HQ office can no longer be placed inside other rooms.
• Added missing article images.
• You can no longer edit employee schedules in the store.
• Removed collision when opening a terminal drawer.
• The Presentation skill will now have an influence on refill speed.
• The Unpacking skill will now have an influence on unpack speed.
• Customers leaving without paying will now return their articles to be delivered the day after.
• Customers' ages fit their demographic more appropriately.
• Wages and bonuses are deducted properly.
• Some inventory items could emit light just because they felt like it, which has been fixed.
• Skills are now impactful at the cash register.
• Fixed weird animations when customers would take articles.

Visuals

• Added additional vegetable visuals.
• Added additional cleaning category visuals.
• Added additional decorations.
• Changed the building options UI.
• Improved character shaders overall.

Lots of tweaks, plenty of balancing, and a bunch of bug squashing, too.

I also wanted to take the time to extend my sincere thanks to the alpha players of King of Retail 2, who have reported bugs, provided their game saves for analysis, and helped me hunt down and destroy a nasty bug that found its way into earlier versions of this patch. Your feedback and overall assistance with this has been extremely valuable so, again, thank you!

Please let me know how you’re feeling about this update by either leaving your feedback on the Steam Community tab, or better still, hopping into the King of Retail Discord and sharing your thoughts there.

King of Retail 2 enters Early Access on May 22nd, and I can’t wait for you to dive in.

Take care, and have a great sale!