Hi everyone,
First of all, sorry for the following wall of text. I have already tried to reduce the length but with no luck :-)
The Beta 17 release was awful
For various reasons, the Beta 17 release was not as great an experience as I had hoped it would be. I’d like to apologize to all of you who had a bad experience with the new beta.
While I always try to do my best, I’m still learning and with Beta 17 a lot of mistakes became obvious:
Translations were not ready on time
When I started translating Startup Company into multiple languages, I didn’t have the money to pay translators to do the work. Instead, I asked the community for help and a lot of people have been helping out over and over again, translating each new beta in their native language.
This has been amazing and I’m very thankful to everyone who helped out over the years.
Unfortunately for this release, I was still missing translations for six languages one day before the release date. My solution was to start contacting professional translators and pay them to translate the missing strings within 24 hours. It was obviously quite expensive but also the reason why I had to postpone the release.
To ensure this won’t happen again, I have chosen to outsource all translation work to a professional translation company.
The transition from Beta 16 to 17 was too steep
A lot of players experienced their companies shutting down shortly after booting up in Beta 17. The combination of changing the income model (revenue features) and also introducing product satisfaction was simply too much for a lot of players. It resulted in lots of rage quits and a lot of very angry emails coming my way.
The reason is obvious – I was way too ambitious. I wanted Beta 17 to be super exciting, so I introduced a lot of big changes in one big update.
To fix this, I will start releasing more (and smaller) updates, but each one only containing one major change.
The devlog gives a sneak peek into what has been developed on the game over the past week. It is not a new release and is not available yet. New features are always released as official Beta releases.
RIP Ad Space Calendar. Welcome to time slots.
Overall, I’m quite happy with how the new ad space/deals work, but there are some obvious flaws that have to be fixed.
The first thing is to get rid of the ad spaces calendar as it didn’t really serve any purpose.
Instead, new time slots have been added. An ad contract now runs for a specific number of days. By default, you have one time slot (full day) allowing you to have one contract. You can choose to split that into multiple time slots, allowing you to run multiple contracts on the same feature.
Ad Contracts
Ad Deals are now called Ad Contracts. When you go into a contract, you now decide how many impressions per day you want to guarantee. The customer (lead) sets the maximum, but if you can’t meet their expectation you’ll have to lower it. This results in you receiving a smaller payment from the customer.
Contracts can be cancelled but you will incur a penalty amounting to 20% of the payment. This is also the reason why increasing your contract length increases your payment.
Updated Sales Executive dialog
Considering the above changes, I obviously had to also change the Sales Executive dialog. It now features a cool graph that shows you how well the ad contract is performing. You’ll also be able to see all leads. The employee will be able to manage one contract, but also continue searching for better leads. The prices is the initial CPMs offered by the customer, which can be improved by negotiating.
All contracts can be auto renewed, meaning you’ll no longer have to constantly accept or deny deals!. You only negotiate a new contract if your daily impressions (online users) have increased significantly.
Money animation
It’s not a biggie, but I think it’s really cool. You can now see every time you gain or lose money.
Do you have suggestions or ideas for the game?
Check out our Conflux board.
I plan to release the above changes within the next couple of weeks as a hotfix for Beta 17. There will not be any official release date for this one.
Alright, that’s all for this devlog. Thanks for reading!
Best,
Jonas
Note: Starting from today the future devlogs will be posted on Sundays 9:00AM Pacific Time.