Dear Retailers!
It is yet again time for a little update regarding King of Retail 2.
What happened since last time?
Big alpha update
A few things has happened. First of all i realeased a big alpha update allowing alpha players to play the full core game. Yes, it has bugs, and is many features are missing, but it's playable and you can run your stores continually.
Contests
Many people now engaged in the alpha, the community is in general very happy and positive and it is a pleasure for me to engage in. So i thought it was time to give something back as well. Contests are good for that, so from now on there will be a monthly contest on our Discord with prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. Each month will have a new topic, and we start this month off with a free-for-all "Design the best looking shop". I really enjoy seeing your unique creations, and i hope you will enjoy participating.
New admin
We also got a new person on the team. He has been very active on the Discord since it started, and was very interested on joining our little team. He will manage some of the community tasks like collecting ideas and bugs, as well as some other things which will free up some of my time, so i can work more on the game itself.
Whats in the game
When i made the last blog only the design features of the game was available on the alpha. So there was something to play, but only people who enjoy the aesthetic parts of the game would get real pleasure out of the game, and even though i can still spend a good amount of time just messing around with displays, that is of course not was the game is about.
But the creation of our Patreon, and the possibility to open for an alpha version, i quickly needed to set some limits to the playable parts rather fast. But then my goal has since been to open up for the real gameplay so you have some actual retailing going on.
And last week i released en update for the alpha, where it is possible to go "full circle" with the game.
Now what does "full circle" mean? It means the core game is up and running, with the following included:
Game startup:
- Full city with navigation and building management.
- Explorable HQ with Manager's room and computer.
- In store placements of inventory.
- In store ordering and delivery possible.
Daytime (where shops are managed):
- Full customer flow. Entering store, browsing and taking articles, queuing and paying at register.
- Customer interactions. All customers are approachable when looking at articles.
- Day starting, running and ending.
Evening (where headquarters are accessible, and buildings can be managed):
- Article statistics at office.
- Financial statistics at office.
- Concept floor allows for limited branding.
That is what is in the alpha this very moment. Taking an analogy from the post last month, we have now built the "skateboard" in our quest to build a fine tuned sports car.
But work of course does not stop there.
Whats next? (The theory part)
Skip to the next headline, if you don't care for a long section of theory. :)
With the basics up and running, what is then on the to do list?
When thinking of a way to describe it, an old university graph that i have not had in my mind for many years, suddenly pops up. Something called the "Agile Unified Process". A theory on how to manage a software project, like a computer game.
This in a way explains some of the phases i go through when making this game. It is generally applied for the whole lifetime of a project, but for me it can also be put on a smaller scale with a few adjustments. Let's try and explain them in human language.
Inception phase
Ideally this is where you gather ideas and design whatever you are working on. That is shown in the graph as "model". You try to model what it is you are about to work on.
We can also see "implementation", "test" and "deployment" are non-existant at this point. That means, you actually don't do any programming at all. That is no work on the actual game. You sit with pen and paper, whiteboards, minmaps, planning programs etc. and try to figure out the best combined idea, for whatever it is you want to add.
It is at this point the "Great Ideas" forum on the Discord comes into use as it is at this point check out the great suggestions you might have.
This phase does not necessarily take a lot of time. Around a few days, to get the core ideas jotted down.
An example could be our goal of getting the customer flow to work. In the inception phase we could for instance deal with following question.
Should customers be unique, and if yes, what makes them unique and how do we group them and identify them?
KoR had very specific groups. Pensioners, Students, Labrorers, Celebrites. To me it was a bit limited. These are just titles as in written text the game itself doesn't care about. But for the player and their immersion, it would be better if more gropus were represented.
So the "segment" system works. But it can then be improved if we identify them by colors instead. A color can then represent a larger group of people, and differentiate them by their primary occupation.
So i did some reasearch and found this:
There are of course as many opinions as there are colours, but it was a foundation to start from, and i could adjust it to fit the game. So we ended up with following colors:
- Gray (Retired people)
- Green (Ecological aware people)
- Blue (Manual labrorers)
- Red (Administration sectors)
- Pink (Service sectors)
- White (Financial sectors)
- Yellow (Tourists)
- Orange (High paying sectors)
This is of course very caricatured, but we are making a game, and that is how games work.
Now we have a system, which can contain a multitude of people. First problem solved.
Next question, how should they differ, other than a color?
In KoR we used a matrix. Quality focus (Buy cheap, or get the best product available), and Fashion focus (Be concerned about how trendy something is, or only focus on quality/price).
This was a very mathematically streamlined solution, where everyone have their own little area on this graph. But it was too clean.
So instead they will be defined by personalities telling what a group focuses on when shopping.
The gray segment can be described as low income. They also have plenty of time, and can be a bit unsure. So when a gray segmenter goes shopping, they dont care about queue times, or waiting for a salesperson. They have plenty of time, so things taking too long will not impact them negatively. However if they can't get help, get bad help, or a quick brushoff at the cash register, they will take serious offence to that. They want respect, and want someone who take their time to give the proper help they need. Due to income, they are focused on saving money, and will look for the lower pricings.
THen we have the blue segment. They are busy workers and earn decent money. They expect quick service and a short lines at the register so that they can return to work immediately. They don't need good service as they know what they want, so if a salsperson can just point them in the right direction, they are good.
Yellow can be anybody on vacation visiting your store, so they are very random. Orange are willing to pay big money, but expect the best of the best regarding service, time, quality etc.
So i feel this system captures real shoppers better. It also challenges the player to adjust your store to the right set of people, and not only by adjusting prices. So we have planned out customer segments. Then we can go on to the next phase where we can start actually coding them.
Elaboration phase.
With the ideas ready, you can now prepare the foundation, setup the needed code structures etc. While in this phase you can still get the ideas as they present themselves. "Maybe they should also measure how much they care about cleanliness in the store".
So a way of setting up this structure could be preparing tables like these:
And along the way you populate these tables when ideas come along.
(And doing this, i found a bug. The sharp reader will notice that Pink is not part of the rows in the first table.)
And as more work gets implemented, you spend less time on coming up with ideas, as the core is getting in place, meaning getting many new ideas will not fit in with what is already in place.
And slowly you transition into the construction phase.
Construction phase.
As described above, you get to focus more on the actual implementing of your ideas. A new idea can enter but they are more related to improving what already exists. For instance it could be "When i interact wiht a customer, i would like this and that to be shown".
And as the implementation gets more and more complete, you begin spending time with testing your implementations as well. And when you are relatively satisfied with this, you are at the final phase.
Transition phase.
This is the final phase where you get ready to release your work to the users. That means getting the system tested by professionals, preparing various system that needs to be setup for the users to access the program etc.
This is again mostly for ending big scale projects, and is where we diverge a bit. Looking at the cycle of smaller implementations, the transition phase is for me more of an reactive phase. It is also this phase where multiple updates comes with shorter intervals.
I can't make an update in the the construction phase, as the game often is completely broken in this period becaust parts of the game can be disassembled to fit the new additions. Imagine merging two spider webs together. Until it's fully assembled the temporary web would be a mess.
So an update i made when reaching the transition phase. We added new stuff, spent a lot of time playtesting and fixed the most severe bugs we find. But we can playtest forever and still find bugs. So that means it's better for you to do playtesting at this point.
100 players WILL find more bugs then i do. One is the simple math of time. 1 hour from each player is 100 hours of testing, which might be what the team can do with a whole week of testing.
Furthermore 100 players means 100 different ways of playing the game, leading to the discovery of new bugs i will never find.
So this update is to get the real bug hunt going. During this period, my time is spent on fixing the bugs you submit.
Fixing a bug is like fixing a very small piece of the spider web. That means the game is playable most of the time, meaning i can send out updates more often. Sometimes feedback also reveals something that should be added. Not a bug, but more some quality of life, or smaller implementation. These can and should also be added during this period, as this is where it is still new to everyone, meaning it has the highest chance of getting feedback.
Whats next? (The factual part)
Tutorials
We were through a longer development phase of implementing customers and proper game flow. Now we reached this transistion phase of finalizing this, and starting the next big development. It means that i for the next period, will fix bugs and add smaller implementations. For instance, feedback indicated that many had a hard time figuring out how they should get to actually playing an ingame day. This means that i am currently working on a tutorial system, that will help you through the first stages of the game in a more steamlined way.
Other QoL
When tutorials are added, i will look at which quality of life features are needed the most right now. So that is where i need your feedback, as you will have very big influence on what i will add.
New characters
We are also laying last hands on implenting the actual customer characters. The current models are quick placeholders for the original "robot" that some of you have seen pictures of. The new customers will contain 1 male and 1 female models for each segment, themed in the segment color for easy recognition. They will contain randomized hair (10 male, 10 female), hair color and skin color.
This is also part of the foundation for the character customization system which will be added later on.
New characters part 2
The above will feature in the next update. Next step of the characters will be skin aging, eye colors(Was a very popular request) and face morphs, and after that, work will start on making the manager/staff characters.
New articles
We have also again gotten new articles in the game. Previous update contained various beverages.
And in the next one we started preparing for the candy shop, where we will begin using articles of the "spear" type.
And further away?
Staff
Currently there are a quite a few major implementations that needs to be done. Construction & building, staff, running multiple stores & simulations and headquarters & events are probably the biggest ones. To me the most important is staff. Currently they are the bottleneck of what needs to added to the game. For instance:
Too many customers at your store? We need staff to man another register.
Open a second store? We need staff to simulate how is goes in the first store.
Want a busy HQ, we need staff to man the positions.
Construction and building, is the only one that doesn't rely on staff. But would we like to be able to expand a store, but still being the only employee in it? Or would we like to get most out of the store and the visiting customers by having staff to manage?
To me it's an easy answer. Staff is such a central part of the game, that it needs to be the next thing to be added.
Character customization
So when characters are ready and staff will come in, it would make sense to add the character customization at this point as well, including unifroms, such that you can personalize your stores.
And this is what the next big development sprint will be focused on.
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That was yet again a lot of writing and i will go back to writing tutorials.
Again, thanks a lot for the interest and support :)
If you are not already there, you are very welcome on the Discord server, and feel free to give comments, feedback, bug reports and/or ideas. They are all very helpful, and very appreciated.
Thanks for reading and following along, and until next time, happy sales.
Cheers, Daniel.