Hey guys, another month, another update. Continuing down the path I laid out in the last update, implementing guests was my top priority. I started by enabling you to open and close the ranch. If it is open, guests will come to your ranch based on your ranch's reputation and limited by the amount of guest rooms and horses you have available. You can then assign specific horses to each guest and put guests in groups that share an activity schedule. It will be beneficial to group guests with similar profiles because it will make it easier for you to create a schedule that fits the guests’ preferences. The guest profile consists of age, riding experience and three stats that describe the guests preferences on a scale from 1 to 10. They are playful-competitive, calm-energetic and theorist-practicalist.
Furthermore, I took the opportunity to expand on the schedule mechanic of horse training and guest activities while working on guests. The guest activity plan works really similar to the training schedule you have already seen but consists of 6 activity slots instead of 4. These can be filled with activities for each guest group you create individually. So far, the order in which you put these activities (guest activities/training foci) into the schedule didn’t matter much, and I felt like the feature could use some more depth that makes it more fun to create the perfect schedule. This is why activities are now categorized and the order of different categories in your schedule impacts the success of the training and the satisfaction of your guests.
Training foci categories are: Physical, Recovery, Mental, Foundations and Skills
Guest activity categories are: Basic Riding, Advanced Riding, Horse Interaction, Social and Leisure (all names might change)
In general, repeating activities of the same type decreases the effect of the second one, while other combinations increase the effect of the second activity. For example, a skill training like "Jumping Basics” benefits from a Foundation focus like “Groundwork” that is scheduled before it (Image). Let me know what you think about this idea.
I also did some first tests with guests running around the ranch and they went really promising. It was a lot of fun seeing the guests that so far only have the intelligence of the average fly trying to leave your room through a window, run around your ranch like a pile of ants and the performance hit was also fine. In the second part of the month I worked on fixing some bugs, creating a more secure backup system for my project and another secret upgrade to the games visuals that I think many of you will really like. I will talk more about this in the next update, when I’m a little further along with it.