Dear retailers!
It is time again to get an update on what has happened in King of Retail 2.
We have worked hard to add many new features to the game, which will be the first topic. Second, we can share more of the plan on going to Early Access. And third, i am talking about what we are doing to honour our great community.
But let us get into the details of it:
--- Whats new ---
At the time of the last blog, we were finishing with carving out the base game. That means having the cycle of opening the shop, setting up articles, taking in customers, end the day, and redo all of the above.
That we finished, and then started with polishing this to make it a better overall experience.
During that process many new things got added.
Article management
Some of the following features was requested by the community to make it easier to handle your articles, and since article management is very much at the core of the game, i agree it should be easy and convenient to manage. So various new features was added to improve just that, as well as returning some of the screens you know from the old game in a new and upgraded versions.
It also means we will continue to add various implementations to assist you in managing your stores in the future as well.
Article finder
Now, anywhere when searching for articles, you can list them how you like. You want detailed big pictures, or small pictures where you can see many more at the same time.
You can sort by price, quality supplier etc, and each hovered article also presents a smaller screen with even more info.
This gives a fast and clear overview to make your decisions from, with out having to do too many steps to get the info you need.
Detailed article info
We also added the article info screen. Here you can see and edit all the details regarding any article. Thes screen can even be accessed from multiple places, meaning you always have all the info you need right at your hand.
Summary screen
The old summary screen is also back, but with an added calendar function. With this you can be even more specific when examining your sales.
New article implementations
In KoR all articles had their predefined stats, which also meant predefined prices and customer attractions. So when you found out that ShirtA sold well in your first game, it would sell the same in 2nd and third game, making it all predictable and removing the element of discovery.
In KoR2 things are more randomized, meaning that you can't count on your knowledge in a previous game to carry over to a new one.
The quality of an article is semi-random, and on top of that prices are now only loosely based on the quality, meaning there can be a big difference in the profit margin of 2 articles of same quality. Likewise they can trend differently with different customer groups, so an article that was highly popular at the Orange segment, may now cater more to the Red's.
So for all of you micromanagers out there, there will be much money to be made when diving into the right stats :)
More will be added to the flow of articles in the future making them more dynamic.
For instance, trends will go up and down over time, the seasons and even the weather on a given day will influence what will be in demand and not.
So no more selling winter jackets in mid-summer.
Various article types
We also try to do the actual article handling more realistic as well.
So for instance, various articles can only be stored and shown in designated cooling units. This means the storage room will now be more then just adding the same shelf over and over when you run out of space, but instead you have to plan a bit more ahead in this area as well.
Cooling units requre power, which you will see on your utilities bill etc. so we are also trying to go one dig deeper regarding all the small things that ultimately makes for a more realistic game.
New articles
We are also constantly adding more and more articles. Our main focus has so far being to add supermarket groceries to the game, close to reaching 1000 unique articles. And so far we have covered the following:
- Dry Foods: Various cans, jars, bottles & bags. Coffee & Tea, Cereals, Bread.
- Dairies: Milk & various milk based products, Cheese, Eggs
- Cooled: Ice Cream, Various frozen foods, meats & salads
- Candy: Candy bags, chips, bubble gums, chocolate
- Beverages: Sodas, Juice, Beers, Wine & Liquor
And we will of course not stop here. Currently we are finishing the food section, planning to add fresh fruit and greens, meats, bread & fish. But more in a deli way, where they are free and not already packaged.
After that we will cover the "Cleaning" section of a supermarket with soaps, detergents, toilet paper, and stuff like that, closing off the supermarket.
Then we can move to a different section of retail, where we will go to "Clothes", and here the selection comapred to the previous game will also be bigger as well.
New environments
Up until this point the outside enviroment of the store was a gray plane. Go to the edge and you could easily fall off it, into the deep eternal void. That is no longer the case. Now you will instead see the actual part of the city that your store is placed in, allowing for many different areas to run your store. It makes each area unique, and allows for greater immersion.
However to make the environment look decent at a close up level, the city map received an overhaul as well.
This is just the beginning, When it is time to really focus on this area of the game, much more will be added to this. There will be different maps to play, and many possibilities to add to the variation.
- Should you be able to choose between climates? Maybe.
- Should there different environment types? Why not.
- Should there be visible seasons and weather? Definately.
This, together with the city generator that will be overhauled as well, will certainly add replayability of the game, and make each game feel unique. But at the moment other things are more important.
--- What is next ---
As we progress with the game, it also becomes easier to see what we need to do and to estimate how long it will take to reach Early Access.
I would like to be able give people a proper gaming experience before the game goes into Early Access, so it is not just another tech demo. And as far is i see it, a few things need to be ready for an enjoyable experience:
First of all, there is a hard limit on the playtime as it is right now.
When your reputation has grown enough, you will simply not be able to handle the customers at the register. That means at this point, you can't grow more. Customers will start to leave due to the service, and an eqilibrium has been reached, and there is nothing you can do to change that.
Staff
So staff is next on our to-do list on the game, and it will be my sole focus for the next 3-4 months i estimate.
We already started preparing characters and various visuals for the different persons the game will require, meaning that soon you will finally be able to customize your manager.
After that, the actual implementation as staff will start.
It will be a heavy task since it has so much depth. First the general AI and basic shop behavior needs to work. For you to actually give them roles, it means scheduling and role assignmens need to be implemented. And for that to matter, it leads to implementing skills and personality.
With those things, you can handle staff at your store.
But then we have the staff managing. That starts with the application, negotiation and hiring process, which leads in to general contract management and staff progression, such as job satisfaction, life events and various requests.
With this, a sold core staff system is up and running. That however excludes HQ and high level AI managers, which will be saved for later.
But what when staff is done?
Again as i see it, a natural stopping point shows up again. At some point your little store is up and running with good personnel and now you would like to expand it to a bigger store. Or else there is simply not enough room for storage, registers, displays etc.
And that means expansions need to be possible as well. And it will work very differently from KoR.
Expansions
You will be able to buy the neighbouring buildings connect them to your stores area which will give you a bigger area to build on.
On top of being able to build the outer shell of your store as you see fit, you will also be able to design the outer areas as well.
In this free build mode, you will be able to place outer wall parts such as entrances, windows and structural decorations, and inside you can add various extra elements as well. Walls, pillars, roofing and other decorative shapes to really make your store look unique.
And finally there is the possibility of building upwards, adding multiple floors, escalators, elevators etc, to truly completing the build possibilities.
This will be part of the "Expansion" phase, and will also take a few months to do as well,
Early access
With these two things complete, i think the game will have a very solid single store experience where toy can play for a long time. Add some extra time to polish the game, remove bugs, add more content etc. and have what for me would be acceptable for Early Access.
With a rough time estimate, we arrive around the beginning of the new year.
In a dream world, I could make games without having to consider anything else but the game itself, but unfortunately that is not how it works. Then comes the real life stuff that influences all of this as well.
Unless you have a huge marketing budget, it is advised to stay away from releasing anything around this time, as the big companies and big games are fighting for all the christmas attention, and a little indie dev like me would completely drown in that noise.
The more sales the game will make, the more cool stuff i can add to it, which will make it sell more, and round it goes. So that means it is better for me, the game, and you to stay clear of this time. And instead of hurrying it up, it is better to wait and do it properly instead.
Furthermore, Early Access is kind of considered the actual launch of a game, so close up until this point the marketing need some solid attention. So i need to set some time aside for taking care of this as well.
So with that in mind our goal is the following:
--- Early Access in the first half of 2025. ---
That should be a realistic timeline, as that includes proper time time to do all of the the above without putting too much pressure on ourselves.
When we get closer we will at some point be more specific with the actual release date itself.
What else?
So the above is what i will be focused on, and as mentioned, we will continue to add articles.
But now that we are almost done with creating the characters of staff and customers in the game, we can now finally start bringing them to life.
The biggest investment of the game by far, has been to buy our own motion capture suit, and now it is finally time to start using it.
In KoR1 since as neither i nor anyone on the team was animators, the game was very limited on this way, leading to some, at best, clunky work. With our new motion suit, it should be MUCH easier, and MUCH faster to add some good animations for the game. So we have planned to add animations, and different varations of them to make the people in game seem more alive and unique, and also make it possible for the player to "read" the customers based on their actions, and i hope this will bring the game to a whole different level.
Our community
Contests
On our the Discord the community is growing and becoming more and more active as a result. Quite a few has also joined as alpha testers to help with the development of the game.
As an acknowledgement to our great community, i have been thinking about what we can do to give something back. And as a result we decided to start monthly contests, where you will be able to win prizes.
- Aprils contest
The first contest was about designing a store.
Here HeyHannes actually chose to work with the very limited clothes options that currently exists to make a luxurious looking store. It also shows a creative usage of the display designer to make the wall partitions between store and storage, since these walls by themselves are not existing in the game yet.
- Mays contest
This contest was a more free for all to be as creative as possible, and just take a cool picture in the game.
Letsi made a huge supermarket, and used the in-game photo mode to take a lot nice images of the shop from various angels and distances, showing of the fully stocked aisles and displays, as well as the store being busy with customers
- Junes contest.
In the last update, we allowed players to import and export their displays in the game, as it turns out far from everyone is a fan of building their displays from scratch.
So to further improve on that, we have opened up community sharing of displays on discord. Then we chose to let this month's topic to be to create the best looking displays.
Some of these will also enter the game as default displays, a great way of getting the creativity of the community to become actual in-game content.
Translations
We have also continued with our translations, which we are doing on Localizor.com and this is the progress is so far.
This is another example of our great community, as all of this is purely community translated. If you would like to help, you can also sign up and help with translations as well.
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That was all the news for now. I hope you enjoyed the read. You are very welcome at our Discord, which you can join here:
I will return to working on staff, so i can bring you some more interesting news in the next update.
Thanks for reading and following along, and until next time, happy sales.
Cheers, Daniel.