Hello everyone!
Well, next week is going to be a big one — Steam Next Fest is about to begin. I want to show off a little bit of what I managed to finish right before the festival.
What's new in Update 0.45 (TL;DR):
1. We can finally touch grass!
Yes, the "outside the office" area is now live. For now, it’s purely a decorative change, but I’ve already planned a lot of cool things to do outside. However, all of that will have to wait for future updates.
While the area is quite small at the moment, eventually, employees will have their own vehicles, hang out outside, hide from you behind the building, and do other fun things.
2. You can be buff now (at least in the game).
Since my game heavily relies on the character you play, I’ve started working on giving them more individuality.
Now you can customize your appearance (you don't have to be bald anymore!) and add unique character traits that affect the gameplay. For example, you can choose to be smelly — which is incredibly important, obviously. Or you can take some courses before starting the game. You can even finish GOOD courses.
3. Football and sprinting with Shift.
I don’t actually like football in real life. Want to know how the ball ended up in the office? Players kept telling me there was nothing to do while waiting for the boss, a new project, or something else. So, I figured, why not just drop a football into the office?
But players wanted more. They asked for goals. So, I added goals. According to the lore, the boss loves football, which is why he decided to set up goals for the employees (the boss doesn't actually know this yet, and there isn't much lore to begin with). Now you can score a goal, and confetti will fly everywhere!
And do you know why the goals are inside the office? There's a whole outdoor area now, why not put them there? Sounds silly, right? Well, they are in the office because now you can use the ball to smash things! (Right now, you can break a desk or a coffee machine, but I’ll add more breakable objects later).
Ha, how do you like that, stupid desk!
4. Slight adjustments to employee behavior.
Employees no longer just spawn inside the office. Now they appear outside and walk in. They also arrive at different times instead of spawning exactly at 09:00. It feels much more realistic this way.
5. Minor UI and tutorial tweaks.
I’m continuing to work on the FTUE (First-Time User Experience) and the interfaces. Every time I touch them, I realize there is still a massive amount of work left to do. But I'm moving forward, even if it's in small steps. I won't go into too much detail here.
6. Fixed a number of bugs found by players, including:
The ball wouldn't hit objects at 5x speed or higher.
An error involving the player's desk trigger during the tutorial.
The log didn't clear when starting a new game. Also, purchased desks wouldn't disappear unless you restarted the game.
Removed duplicate icons in events.
Fixed the description for the "Motivate" skill.
Fixed the notification message when a freelancer leaves.
Plus, a lot of other minor tweaks that players didn't notice, but I did. There are still plenty of bugs left in my backlog, but they don't seem to be high-priority right now.
There wasn't much time for this update, and I had to do a lot of drawing, so the update didn't turn out massive. But I really enjoyed working on it. I love that I can finally start focusing on the SIM aspect and breathe some life into the game.