Update 0.65: The Silver and Tin Lanterns, Mod Support, Steam Workshop and More
Hello, people! This update gives your studio something to aim for besides the box office: a yearly award season with a night to watch and a shame to dodge. The game also opens up to your own content, with mods and the Steam Workshop. Here's what's new in Backlot: Hollywood Studio Tycoon.
Award Season: The Silver and Tin Lanterns
Every January the Academy of Screen Arts and Letters nominates last year's pictures, yours and your rivals' alike. Six weeks later it hands out seven Silver Lanterns: Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Music and Effects. Out back, the trade press hands the year's three worst pictures a dented Tin Lantern.
Campaign for it. When your nominations arrive you choose how hard to push. Stay quiet, run a modest campaign, or go lavish. A lavish campaign pulls hardest, but it can backfire and cost you fame on the spot.
A favourite is never a certainty. The winners are decided fresh on the night, so the pick you liked in January can lose.
Winning pays. Lanterns bring fame to your studio and to the people you cast. A Best Picture winner still in cinemas gets a fresh wave of ticket buyers, and an older winner can be brought back to the screen later.
The Tin Lantern is a choice. If one of your pictures is among the three worst, you decide whether to turn up and collect it for a small fee, or stay home and take a bigger blow to your fame.
The night is a show. Watch the curtain rise and the envelopes come out, then follow the Tin Lantern alley in the rain behind the theatre. The next morning, The Hollywood Herald reports it all on its front page.
Not a fan of ceremonies? Switch on Skip award shows on the New Game screen or in Settings. The night and the alley go away, but the two decisions above always reach your desk.
Mods and the Steam Workshop
The game now reads a mods folder beside it. Mods are plain folders of JSON files and images, so no coding is needed.
A mod can add or replace characters, scouted people, scripts, events, rival studios, properties, subjects, posters, portraits, name lists and the relationships between people.
A new Mods page on the title screen lists every mod with a switch, and you can reorder them. Your career remembers the mods it started with.
Steam Workshop: subscribed mods load beside your local ones, and you can publish or update your own mod straight from the Mods screen.
An example mod and a full modder's guide ship beside the game, showing every file format field by field.
More Faces
The character portraits are now much better. And 50 new portraits are in the game. Fewer people share a face, they have new garments and props to keep the town varied. More to come.
Cinemas
The 800-cinema ceiling is gone. A release can now use every cinema you own, plus up to 1,600 hired ones. The Release Day slider draws your own cinemas as a silver stretch, so you can see what you own against what you hire.
Balance
Rival stock dividends have been reworked. They used to be a slice of a rival's weekly takings, paid untaxed, which made buying rival stock far too lucrative. Now each company pays a share of last year's profit, once a year in January. Some pay nothing at all, and the payout is taxed like your other income. The real money in stock is the price, so buy after a quiet run and sell after a hit.
Co-producing a rival's picture now costs a slightly bigger premium, which makes a slice a closer bet.
Quality of Life
Rank the Casting Office and the browser by a genre's talent, either High first or Low first. The stars on each headshot follow the genre you pick.
The traits you've uncovered now show on each person's headshot, and only what your studio has actually learned. The new Background Checks research helps you learn more.
Esc now closes the screen you're on, then opens and closes the pause menu on the lot. Dropdowns and text fields close first.
Screens no longer stutter when a week ticks over, especially Productions.
Scouts you've rolled are now kept in your save, so they don't vanish when you restart.
Posters no longer carry a star bust.
The lot's soundstages and western street have more detail, and a film crew is now shooting on the backlot.
Ten new Steam achievements cover money milestones, shares on the gross, discovering talent and more.
Our immediate plans
More balance tweaks
Day and Night cycle (visual)
Creating a wiki or a guide for the game mechanics
Adding more events, including event chains where one choice leads to the next
Creating more event videos
Making owned cinemas earn their keep
Adding mod support for different languages for the game. So you can add your own languages to the workshop.