Other than the three new levels opening up ( that would be 6, 7 and 8) I've been focusing on providing players with more tools to "manage" the tavern. For example, many players have reported that it is difficult to find out why a particular guest is having a bad time and hence the negative reputation. To help this issue, I've added a new furniture item called "Information Desk" which similarly to the reception desk, will allow a clerk to be stationed. This then allows exiting guests to leave feedback before leaving the tavern completely.
Another big feature is the new annual report feature to allow players to compare their progress with neighboring competition. The depth of this feature is still WIP, but I expect good things along with the new pause function I've been working on. (Pause function is available in the dev build now but is very buggy. The current implementation that I am working on should be much better and stable)
As for the release date, my current estimate is that the dev build version (db005) will be released around the first week of December and hopefully pushed down to the default branch (0.3) by mid or late December. Let's just not forget that this is all tentative and release schedules may change :D
Lastly, I wanted share a bit more about performance improvements. Currently, Tavern Tycoon is able to handle around 100~200 guests on screen at 60FPS on a relatively modern CPU (quad core). I've been working on solutions to improve performance, and with the upcoming db005 build, Tavern Tycoon should be able to handle up to 350 guests at 60FPS. Above is an in game capture of 500+ guests running at around 45FPS (Measured with Steam FPS overlay). It seems after this point FPS seems to suffer immensely. This boost in performance was possible by moving some of the CPU load to the GPU.
My goal, is to have more than 1000+ guests running at 60FPS eventually without rendering the memory footprint ridiculously gigantic. This means that Tavern Tycoon will become more GPU dependant and less CPU dependant in the future.
Hope this helps!