To continue playing alpha 10, you should switch to the "Legacy" branch in steam, click here for example.
What’s new?
Graphical upgrade
During the development of alpha 11, Lasse, who made the current character model, joined Coredumping and increased the company size to 2 people. He’s already begun improving the art style and creating new art for the game. Here are some of his massive upgrades over the previous programmer art:
Hardware inc.
I finally caved to the most demanded feature request and added hardware manufacturing to Software Inc.
To be honest, I just decided to add conveyor belts to improve the product printing aspect of the game and hardware was a simple shoe-in at that point. Hardware adds an entirely new layer to console and phone development, and greatly improves the potential of mods.
Unlock new furniture rewards
Software inc. has gotten fairly big in terms of game mechanics over the last couple of…*checks date*… Many years! So, to avoid people only seeing a small part of what the game has to offer, I’ve added a new reward system to guide you through the game’s mechanics. The rewards are not gating any major features, can easily be unlocked and persist through all save games. I’ll definitely be adding more as I come up with ideas for rewards…
New tools to create your dream HQ
Style panel
Picking the colors and materials of your software mansion has become a lot easier with the style panel. I’m hoping this change will result in a lot less default grey rooms in your screenshots!
Rounded and smooth walls
You can now stretch walls into circular shapes and smooth over any hard edges.
Temperature, security and acoustics
Building your office in Software Inc. brings forth new challenges for you to plan around and overcome.
The new temperature regulation system means you can build rooftop ACs and distribute cool air throughout your office through inconspicuous floor grills and/or plop down electric radiators in every single room until your electric bill explodes.
Just make sure you don’t watch it all go up in flames due to poor fire safety and lax security systems. Or just get it insured, maybe, I don’t know.
You may also notice a slight echo when placing down the first table in your new office. Big empty halls will now be a horrible place for your employees’ ear holes, but luckily, it’s easy to combat with some well-foamed walls or well-furnished spaces.
Overhauled software development system
The development system has been completely revamped to promote creativeness, make research more interesting and make interdependencies clearer. This change will also have a huge impact on the "update"-update, which you can read more about below.
This change adds the notion of tech levels that are researched over the years to unlock better technology for existing features. Target demographics are now simulated in the form of submarkets, which will impact which features you should pick for your software. Frameworks have been added, which allow you to speed up development by reusing old code or licensing it from competitors. Finally, special features have been added to the game, which contain small scripts to alter the simulation in unexpected ways, fully moddable!
New employee education system
Your employees' educational specializations are now split up into 3 stars, which limit which features they can work on, and their base skill in each role now fully controls their effectiveness and how much quality they can add to a product. You can easily send multiple employees out for education and you'll finally be able to queue up several courses at a time.
Your development staff aren't the only ones with fancy degrees anymore, as leaders now have their own specializations, which control which managerial tasks they can perform, and the Support role has been split into Support, Marketing and Legal, each with their own specialization level.
Publishers
You can now get help with funding, marketing and distribution through the use of publishers, if you're willing to part with a percentage of the profits.
The future of Software Inc.
Immediate future
After keeping up with support for this release, I'll start working on the "Update"-update. This update will include the ability to release updates and extra content for already released software and, in extension, the ability to sell your software as a subscription service. My plan is to push this update out as part of Alpha 11. Which is to say it shouldn't break save compatibility, but I can't guarantee anything at this point.
I expect this update will take a while, as it touches a lot of core systems, which was written anywhere between now and 5 years ago, and it will include a lot of new UI work/rework. So there'll likely be the usual major-alpha-testing-release 3-9 months radio silence.
Towards Beta 1
When the "Update"-update is out officially, the game will move into beta, which means no more large mechanical overhauls and more focus on polish and balancing. The first mechanics I want to tackle in beta are research, subsidiaries, project management and digital distribution. The research and digital distribution mechanics still have some work to go before being completely done and the subsidiary and project management mechanics seem like the usual suspects, when it comes to gameplay issues I see raised in the community.