Dear Retailers,
First, the “Rise to the Top” update added verticality through elevators and multiple-floor stores. In the meantime, we’ve been introducing quality of life changes to fix up build mode and help players realize their multi-level store complexes.
But throughout King of Retail 2’s life, there’s been a recurring trend: the player has to do nearly everything relating to running a business. Employees can pick up some of the slack during the day, but you always have to be there to keep them acting.
No more. Today, we announce the launch of the “Macromanagement” Update. Now, employees come to the forefront and become the building blocks of your retail empire. It’s time extract the Human Resource and put your employees to work.
As well, with the update, we will be joining the Steam Autumn Sale for 20% off this Monday, September 29th until the 6th of October. So if you’ve just discovered King of Retail 2: welcome!
Here’s what you can look forward to in today’s update.
Macromanagement Major Updates
Run Multiple Stores!
This is our highlight feature for the Macromanagement update. In today’s update, multiple stores now generator concurrent income through the addition of Store Automation.
Stores will currently, hour-by-hour, generate revenue based on real-time dynamics between your store, your customers, and your staff. This feature is only the first of many improvements we plan to make to Store Automation in order to build out complexities and ways players can run their stores at a distance.
To run your stores, you’ll need a capable team that you can rely on in your absence. That brings us to…
Employees, Ready to Work!
Team Heirarchies have been implemented in the latest version as an accessible UI from your Headquarters computer.
One of our biggest ongoing bits of feedback are that employees do too little, putting a lot of busywork in the hands of owners. Team Heirarchy addresses that at its root, while opening the door for tons of new employee features in the future.
In this view, you can assign teams to manage stores on your behalf. Assign your team heirarchy, taking into account that your Manager sets the example for their team to follow, and that every team member needs support and structure in their workplace.
Promote Your Employees!
Inherent to Team Heirarchy is the roles of Manager, Assistant Manager, and Team Leader that are now available as assignable to your staff through the HQ.
Each serves a different role, structurally, in the management of your store.
Team Managers - Represents the store when you’re not there. Managers need high skills, as their talents (or lack-thereof) will have ripple effects on other employees productivity, mood, and workload. A strong manager can bring a team together, while a weak one will disorganize them.
Assistant Manager - Can serve multiple roles currently. In small stores, they can act as a manager when the Manager is off, but they can also work in a delegative role in larger stores under a Manager, in order to lighten the load during busy shifts.
Team Leaders - Team Leaders oversee specific functions, spaces, or departments within a store. This also allows you to break up your Team the same way, dividing the workload within your store around what specific roles you need done. Large grocery stores need Produce Teams and Stock Teams, while smaller stores may want rotating shift teams. The choice is entirely up to how you’d like to build your store.
Employees - Employees have had their functions assigned to areas in past update, now Teams can fully organize those for your store. In future updates, they will also have the ability to learn and grow by having positive work experiences with trained Team Leaders and Managers above them.
As with Store Automation, this is a constantly evolving feature, as we introduce new behaviors into the mix and expand intra-team relations (more on that after Patch Notes below!)
Macromanagement Update - Patch Notes
Update 0.3.2.0 changes are below!
Major
- Team hierarchy management
- Non-visited stores earn money.
Minor
- Made some skills hidden
- Skills have different weights towards the average score contribution.
- Adjusted, added and removed skills
- Skills are sorted by importance
- Removed EA disclaimer when buying second property
- Added short employee tutorial open entering HQ on day 2
- Added wiki entry about team management.
- Adjusted evening lighting levels on city map to be lighter, even in the worst weather
- Adjusted city zoning colors to be more balanced in all lighting.
Bug Fixes
- Saving and loading roofs are now working properly
- Blue customer has colors again
- Conference room floor is now showing properly
- Adjusted selected colors of wiki buttons to be blue
- Can open wiki and settings properly in the HQ
- Only paint floors is now possible in HQ
- Improved ESC functionality in menus (still need city)
- You only see the employees of the given store in employee overview
- You can now say no to deleting a role
- Adjusted customer overlay UI where names overlapped each other
- Adjusted product info to fit trends properly.
What’s Next?
Once again, with another update out of the way, it’s time to consult the roadmap.
We're looking to continue to build functionality into Employee behavior and build out store functions within the team, but we’re also going to be looking at additional smaller updates down the road to flesh out the experience of the features that we’ve already added.
Store Maintenance
With employees hard at work, a good business owner, indeed any good manager, will need to find more tasks for employees.
“Store Maintenance” is where we’re starting: introducing additional tasks and visual features into the game that reflect the general wear and tear of your store as hundreds or thousands of customers walk through the door to peruse your items, track rainwater across your floor, and generally misuse the perfect store you’ve built.
We’ll be introducing new behaviors progressively depending on the nature of our updates, as Employee behavior is an always-on development goal. But Store Maintenance will allow us to build out the visual changes to the store and create fun new tasks such as:
Cleaning, facing and merchandising displays to keep them tidy and stocked.
Cleaning floors, as rainy/snowy days can lead to water being tracked inside the store.
Dusting and cleaning under or overused displays.
And much more, there’s really no end to drudgery if we put our mind to it!
Quality-of-Life Fixes
While the last thing we’lll be talking about in this update post, I want to stress that, after two major updates, the time to refine and improve the game experience is more important than ever.
We wanted to build a strong cadence to push major features out the door with “Rise to the Top” and “Macromanagement”, but I’m personally conscious that there is such thing as too quick a pace when it comes to major updates. In the near-term, we will be actively sourcing feedback from the community and testing these new Employee features rigorously, while also picking up a host of visual and technical fixes that are long overdue.
We won’t be long off from the next major update, but since one has just arrived, I hope you take the time to explore what Macromanagement has to offer, and I ask for your support in the coming weeks to make it even better.
This Friday, I’ll be doing a livestream and going over any questions, comment or feedbacks while you can see me work on King of Retail 2. Please join me on my Twitch Channel, or join the Community Discord and let us know what you think.
Until next time, happy sales.
-Daniel