Dear Retailers,
With the Rise to the Top update, we’ve seen some tremendous feedback from players and some really incredible creations. Thank you to everyone who turned out for our update and got involved in the community Discord: your input means a lot to this project and its continued development.
So, I’d like to begin by talking about next steps for King of Retail 2, with our first major milestone update out of the way: what’s next on the horizon?
Scaling Up, Bridging Gaps, and Improving The Flow
Some of the major changes you’ve seen: additional floors, access control, the newly rebuilt Build Mode have all been, in their own ways, challenging but necessary improvements that lay the groundwork for bigger and better features.
We can think of it as addressing technical debt, but also in reapproaching the fundamentals of building and designing so that the core game experience is as enjoyable as it can be. Thank you for bearing with us as we refined build mode and improved customer behavior, and it resulted in a system we can be genuinely proud of.
Catching Up, What Have We Done So Far?
1. Employee assignable work areas.
With the last update, we allowed staff to move up and down. That means a lot of wasted time for employees if they do this often.
Now they can assign which areas an employee is allowed to work at, meaning a much higher level of control, and better efficiency of your employees.
2. AI overhaul
We went into the first step of making your employees more intelligent. They will only refill displays that actually have products in stock.
No more constant checking if there is room for unpacking new products etc. No more running long distances to accomplish a task nearby.
3. Bugfixes and better info layers.
We have fixed some of the bugs that you have reported (and will continue to do so of course). We also noticed some of the info layers. (Zone layers in city, spacing zones in build mode) are rarely activated, which leads to confusion about the various possibilities of the game.
So instead of being disabled by default, they will be enabled instead, hopefully bringing an easier onboarding and handling of your game. You will still be able to turn them off manually.
And What’s On the Horizon?
Our next milestones will focus on building out two major parts of gameplay that are in high demand, and which work together to build that second layer of strategic gameplay that will define King of Retail 2: Team Management and Second/Automated Stores.
Team Management - Promote from Within!
Soon, we will add functionality for you to assign Team Managers. Managers will manage stores on your behalf, using their expert-level skills (you are hiring the best, right?) to keep your rank-and-file employees active, increase your store income, and take some of the manual work off your hands so you can focus on the bigger picture.
You may ask: what purpose does this serve if you’re already on hand to manage the store yourself? Well, it's a very critical component for allowing the addition of…
Adding More Stores to your Empire
In the current build of King of Retail 2, stores go offline when you’re not there. Many, many players are already exploring design possibilities in their second, third, and more stores; but there’s a lack of true managerial oversight that we’re working on bringing into the game in the coming months. Second stores and beyond can be fun, but they’re money sinks at this stage.
With the ability to set up multiple stores and assign internal management teams for them, we’re working towards fully automated stores that function and produce while you’re dealing with other things. This brings together Store Concepts and the overview map and will add a full new layer to the gameplay.
It’s time to start thinking bigger about retail, and our next few updates will make bigger and better things possible. Again, if you have any questions or suggestions, our Community Discord is not only the best way to get a hold of me, but also to chat with the community at large.
Thanks everyone, and we’ll have more updates coming in the future.
-Daniel