Dear retailers! Is is time to give an update to King of Retail 2.
--- The past month ---
As some of you might know, King of Retail 2 is primarily created by me and my wife working full time, along with a few others working part time, and it has been in progress for 3 years now.
Making a game is not easy, especially as an indie developer, as you need to do the same work that an established studio has a few hundred specialised employees to do, while it is also required to be more present and direct with the community.
It is a hard job, and for the past 2 years all our time has been going towards building this game. That means no vacation time, no weeks off, and overall a goodbye to "normal" life. This then culminates in a release period that a lot of stress and pressure with 100 hour working weeks, both up until, and after the release.
We are not complaining though. That is a choice we have made, and we choose it because it is fun making games, and there is something very rewarding in seeing people get entertained by something you created.
I am telling it to paint a picture of what a game developer goes through to make a game. A lot of hard work and very little living for a long period.
In February, when all of this was close to it's peak, our dog Loki had a seizure.
We took him to the vet and found out he had cancer.
In Denmark, the vet's answer to anything remotely challenging is usually, "there is nothing to do, consider putting him down".
As vets are very expensive here that is usually what happens in bigger cases, as they then have very little experience and you at the same time pay a lot for this lack of experience.
My wife talked to her friend who is a neurosurgeon (not from Denmark). He doubted their conclusions and methods, and said there are many things to do yet.
So through one phone call, he did a better diagnosis than danish vets who performed a 1000 € scan and blood tests, and then prescribed medicine that helped very little on these seizures.
He laid out a plan, for us to follow, and we thought, if we can give him one last, good summer, that would be worth it.
So for the past 6 months, we have been fighting with this every day, not leaving his side, administering medicine 5 times a day, and other things.
For instance we decided to drive to Poland and back to get an MRI scan, as that (including blood test and scans) became 700€ in total, which in Denmark that would have been 4000€ at least. Note that all of this is while preparing a game release.
We somehow made it through a very hard first half year, and looked forward to starting living a bit again. But unfortunately at the start of the month, our dear friend couldn't handle it any more, and we had to start living by making the hardest decision of them all, and free him of his increasing pains. For these years it was just the 3 of us going through it day by day, but when 3 became 2, it hit us very hard.
That is why we have been silent here the past month, as it hit us hard, and we then took 2 a week home vacation to deal with this.
But we are back working on the game, and have been so for a while. I felt l needed to explain the reason behind this, to those who might be concerned about not having a steam post for a month :)
--- Dev streams ---
On our discord we have received a tremendous amount of support and given us a very appreciated warmth which helped a lot when dealing with this. So our deepest thanks to our great community :)
To give something back, and to be even more open to our community, i decided to do live streams while working. You can come by and see how it is done, ask questions and come with suggestions.
I am a complete noob in the streaming world (which is why the first stream got deleted), so i have a lot to learn here as well, but it was very fun to engage with and show the community the work and all the new stuff live.
For now i plan to do this every Friday. And this Friday, i plan to do live bug fixing, where i will fix some of the bugs you choose to bring up.
Follow the link here:
View game page
--- What we have been doing ---
So what is actually on the way?
- Entrances
First of all we changed how entrances work, meaning you can now direct the flow of the customers. You can assign specific entrances and exits, as well as denying customers access through certain doors. You can also make a courier specific door, if you want you deliveries to come in form a certain direction.
So no more customers going in near the cash registers, or going through your storage room, unless of course it is something you want.
- Chunk system, and no limit walls
I promised that you would be able to design vertical stores. To do this new systems needed to be implemented. As a window "cuts" a hole in the wall, we now also need something that can cut hole in floors as well.
Before a wall "owned" its windows, where the store now is cut up into virtual chunks (like minecraft). This makes it easier for me to move things around and check if their locations are valid, and then cut holes in floors and walls as needed.
It also have the extra bonus effect of windows and doors no longer being limited to the bounds of a wall. Instead you can now freely move and scale them across multiple walls if desired, removing the limitations there was before.
- Elevators
The above was made so we could implement elevators of different kinds, which can both stand freely, as well as inside walls. So now it is possible to take the elevator to the floor of your choice, taking the first steps to multi-floor stores and pseudo malls.
- Ceiling painter
Because i now need to cut holes in the floors/ceilings, i needed to change the ceiling mesh. So the ceiling is now fully flat, but is instead paintable. So you can now further your customisation by adding tinatable ceilings of your choice to your store.
- Music
Finding bugs and doing math-heavy programming can be very demanding, and hard for the head. At the end of a working day, i sometimesget too tired for this, and either work very slowly, or just start making stupid mistakes. In this case i need to stop the heavy stuff. But the working day is not over, so instead switch to some lighter tasks when that happens.
I really enjoy making the music in the game, and have so much fun creating these lyrics that is not so subtly complaining about the retail life.
And since it could get very repetitive to listen to a channel, i have double the amount of tracks in each channel, as well as added 2 new radio stations.
- New products
We have of course also been continuing the product-production with the focus on Beauty-products, which is now at around 250 items, leaving the total number of products in the game at over 2500 products.
- Chinese
We have also prepared Chinese localisation, so as soon as the next update is out, Chinese players will finally be able to play the game in their own language.
--- And after ---
So with the above being made, what will come after?
- Stairs and escalators?
I would like to add stairs and escalators to the game.
But since they work differently than the elevator, they require new implementations. I don't know yet how hard/easy it will be to make. And i feel that we urgently need to start working on the actual Retail part of King of Retail, since focus has been on build mode for a long period now.
So i don't know if they will be part of this update, or have to wait for a later update. But i can promise they will definitely arrive at some point.
- Final implementations
With elevators allowing for travelling up and down, i need the AI's to be able to use them, and to properly navigate between floors to reach their desired destinations. And then i need to make it possible to actually place your inventory on these various floors.
Then the final task is to allow you to move inventory around in Build mode, so you don't need to switch between these two modes, because a piece of inventory stands in a wrong position.
- Starting multistore
After the above, we will start on multistore mode. The game as it is now, flattens out after you have employees, and your store is up and running.
You also don't yet have much in options of actually managing your store.
So that will be the next we will work on for a long time.
First, allowing a management hierachy in your stores, so they can run in your absence, allowing you to switch between your stores when you desire during the day.
Then a massive upgrade to your HQ, where you will be able to hire promote managers, that will have a much more active role compared to the first game. Build your HQ, assign them offices, give them associates, and delegate tasks to them.
Be able to finally to marketing that allows you to influence your stores much more.
Go from being active on the sales floor, to start being the manager who just overlooks how things runs.
--- Community ---
- Contest
We had a contest on our Discord about making the best looking supermarket, and the winner was LauraLuff, who created this supermarket:
- Other cool pictures
- We have also scouted the archives for various player created stores, which we thought we would share here as well.
That was all the information for now:
Feel free to
if you want to be part of the community. And don't hold back on questions, ideas, suggestions, bug reports or what ever you might have on your mind.
Thanks for reading along, and until next time:
Have a great sale.
Cheers,
Daniel