I’m delighted to finally announce that Beta 15 is now available on Steam!
With this release, I’ve been focusing on adding more personality and a stronger startup-feel to the game. I am confident that new players will find the game much more appealing and user-friendly.
To all existing players: your savegames are compatible with Beta 15, but please note that the new investor feature is only available on new products. Due to the new interface, feature instances have also been revised so only your activated instances will be included in Beta 15.
If you don’t like the changes in Beta 15, you can now switch back to Beta 14 using Steam’s “Betas” feature. The different versions now use separate savegames.
Feelings & Emotions
In short, the update adds personality, demands and feelings to all of your employees. This week I have been working on emotions. Employees will now express feelings through speech and thoughts.
New “Demands” System
Work Environment Rating (or WER) has confused players for a long time. Beta 15 will include neither WER nor the “office bonus”, but instead introduce employee demands. A demand can be specific furniture, benefits, a desk type or short work days. For each demand you fulfill, the employee will receive a speed bonus and will also stay happy for a longer period of time. Employees can generate new demands over time.
Investors
Beta 15 will feature investors for the first time. When starting a new game or creating your first product, you’ll be asked to select between an investor or bootstrapping. Bootstrapping means taking care of funding yourself. New players should choose an investor. Investors take a cut in revenue but provide both money and advice (tutorial mode). Beta 15 currently only offers one investor, but more will be added later.
Venture Capital and Milestones
The product dialog will contain a new tab called Venture Capital, which replaces the existing “Goals” feature. In this tab, you’ll be able to buyout your investor and see a list of all milestones.
Milestones are how the investors set their expectations for you. Once you reach a milestone, a fixed dollar amount will be paid out.
The dialog also allows you to buy out your investor, meaning you will receive 100% of revenue from then on.
Simplified Infrastructure Tab
A lot of players have been struggling to understand the Infrastructure tab. To make it easier to understand, the tab has been renamed “Features”. The name change is accompanied by some neat updates:
- To improve instances (now features), you simply have to click “Upgrade” by hovering over the feature (you no longer need to go to the Lead Dev to improve features).
- Screenshots have been added to visualize the feature.
- The old “Quality” term has been changed to “Level”.
- Features can now be upgraded while in use.
- Frameworks now have a limited number of “feature slots”, starting with three features for the Basic Framework.
Other Beta 15 changes
🔵 Discord’s Rich Presence functionality is now supported.
🔵 Fixed recruitment bug causing fewer candidates to be put forward if fast-forwarding or using time-machine.
🔵 Deleted entered email from options.json after subscribing to the newsletter.
🔵 Improved “Big UI”/4K support for the product tabs.
🔵 Fixed bug causing an error to happen when firing employees.
🔵 Allow mods/workshop items to be installed even if Steam Cloud Sync is disabled.
🔵 Buffed rate of losing users when potential users are lower than registered users.
🔵 Adjusted required tiers for unlocking employees to fit new investor feature.
🔵 Reduced server requirements and increased prices for Virtual Clusters.
🔵 Increased income per user for all product types.
🔵 Fixed bug causing changes to mods to be reset when reloading the game.
🔵 Force player to create a product when starting a new game.
🔵 Disabled Angular debug info for performance gains.
🔵 Fixed issue causing an error when switching to the menu while employee dialog is open.
🔵 Fixed issue causing contracts requiring modules to be too cheap.
🔵 Fixed issue causing the fast forward function to skip every third in-game minute.
🔵 Changed click behavior to react to button down instead of button up.
🔵 Added keyboard shortcut CTRL+1-5 to quickly switch between floors.
🔵 Added number formatting to product graphs.
🔵 Increased marketing effect.
🔵 Nerfed organic growth.
🔵 Updated product stats page to show “new visitors” instead of “origin”.
I hope you enjoy it!
So, there you have it. Beta 15 in all its glory! I really hope you like all the changes. I’m now going to take a few days off before getting started on Beta 16, which will introduce at least two big new features! More information coming in future devlogs.
Thanks for reading!
All the best,
Jonas