Dear Retailers!
It is Friday, and as promised, here is a follow-up update to our 0.4.0 release.
It seems like the faster game day speed, starter stores, and multiple complexity levels have been very well received. We have also received a lot of good feedback during the week, and we have used it to make a number of further improvements.
- Difficulty settings
Instead of only adjusting complexity, you can now also adjust the actual difficulty of the game. You can make customers and employees easier or harder to manage, depending on how you want to play.
- Reorganized tutorials
Many players go through all tutorials, but with starter stores, you really only need the basic ones to get going. Because of that, we moved some tutorials into an advanced category, so new players can focus on the most important things first.
- Balancing
Some areas needed balancing adjustments. Electronics in particular had some cases where certain products were hard to sell and gave strange profit results. That has now been corrected. Employee energy and happiness have also received a small boost, and base customer traffic in starter stores has been increased a little.
- Optimization
Unreal defaults to unlimited FPS, which is why some players felt like the game was pushing their PC too hard. This could already be changed in the options, but it is now set to 60 FPS by default. I have also tried to improve loading times when starting the game for the first time. That said, the game still has more than 3,500 products to process, so it will still take a bit of time.
- Quality of life
A number of smaller improvements have also been added. You can now set cart amounts in one place, the summary screen remembers your last selection, news messages will tell you if you are selling products at a negative profit, and customer collision has been removed so the camera will no longer zoom in when they walk nearby.
Overall, this update should make King of Retail 2 smoother, clearer, and easier to get into from the very beginning.
That was all from me for this week :)
Have a nice weekend, and I hope you get some great sales in your shops.
Kind regards
Daniel
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Here is the update log for those who are interested:
Major
Added an overall difficulty setting, allowing customers to shop more or less, reputation to increase faster or slower, and employee happiness and mood to be easier or harder to manage.
Minor
Default FPS is now set to 60 (can still be changed in the options)
Removed camera collision on NPCs
Added a field to set all cart item amounts at once
Separated tutorials into Basic and Advanced to avoid information overload for new players
Adjusted the one-day guides for scenarios
Added a reset-to-default-price button on the product overview
Summary screen now remembers the last selected category
Optimized first-time startup loading times
News messages now also report products with low profits
Balancing
Save games from before 0.4.0 will not take as long to adjust to the new values
Starter stores now have higher default corporation confidence
Added a bigger variety of products to the electronics starter store to avoid unlucky random product selection
All components now have proper versioning trends
Breaks now restore more energy
Nights now restore more energy
Adjusted component prices and average profit values
Adjusted help needs for components and phones
Existing newer stores now receive a bonus to local knowledge to improve game pace
Bugs
You can no longer access the staff bar while performing tasks
Trends now update correctly after loading
Products now use seeds for randomized pricing, so price adjustments keep a consistent range
Splitters are now copied together with displays