Devlog #1: Customer Models, Cash Registers, Settings, and More
Hey everyone! I'm a solo dev working part-time on Computer Store Simulator, a game where you run a computer store. This is my first game and I'm pretty proud of the progress I’ve made recently, so I thought it was time for the first devlog!
In the past 6 months or so, I've been making consistent progress on all the various features of the game, but I thought for this first devlog, I would highlight some of the progress I've made in the last two weeks.
As you'd expect in a shop simulator, there is a cash register that needs to be operated to sell items to customers. One of the tasks I've been putting off has been actually implementing the cash counting and credit card minigames, up until the last couple weeks I just made it so the customers would automatically check out as long as you were standing at the register. But I figured it was about time to implement this, so here it is! All the mechanics in this game are written by me, no asset packs, no AI slop, it's all hand crafted with love.
And of course, with any cash register, you also need a credit card reader.
Up until now, I had two customer models, one male and one female, so this is a huge improvement, it really makes the game feel more complete. There are now hundreds of customer models, so your store will have a nice variety of patrons. Additionally, I made improvements to the pathfinding algorithm for customers and employees, so it should have much better performance, and they won't walk through each other and furniture anymore. Notice how they step aside to let each other pass? Very courteous of them.
One of the biggest changes I made lately was a complete rework of the price mechanics in the game. Previously, items had a static buy (wholesale) price and sell (retail) price. This felt way too boring, so I completely rewrote all the price code. Now, there are market dynamics that affect retail and wholesale prices, and those markets move independently (but correlated). So as a player, you have to decide whether you want to buy items that are historically cheap, or items that are currently very profitable. In testing it out, it feels way more fun and dynamic, so I'm excited to see what you all think!
The ability to move furniture has been implemented for a few months now, but the controls for it were pretty clunky, so I polished those up and added an outline to show the hit box of the furniture, to make placing and aligning your furniture a little friendlier. Also fixed some bugs with furniture colliding with the floor that caused furniture to not be allowed to be placed in valid spots, and added controls to cancel furniture movement or purchase, so decorating and expanding your store should feel much better now!
This is one of the less thrilling updates, but any game needs good settings. I spent several days getting the graphics settings working nicely, so you can pick your display mode, resolution, and quality. One challenge that I spent a while working through was having support for multiple monitors. The game engine I'm using doesn't have good support for detecting which monitor a game is running on, so I had to try out a few different approaches to get it to work well. But now, if you want to switch which monitor the game is running on, you can just switch to windowed mode, drag it to the monitor you want, and switch back to fullscren. It should even remember your preferences when you boot up the game next time!
What's next?
Next up, I'm gonna be focused on bashing some bugs, improving the UI, and generally making the game feel more polished. Once I'm happy with how all the current features are working, the next things I'm going to focus on are improving employee management, and exploring some of the more computer-related features in the game, like expanding how the repair and upgrade tables work, maybe look at letting players sell computers they assemble themselves, and adding some depth to the LAN gaming and Tournaments.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to keeping you updated!
- Jeremy