Good day keepers!
In this weeks blog post (which may be a regular Monday feature from now on) we will be sharing details of the town/shop management system, crests, the world map and the clock.
Town Management
Close to your Shoppe is a new building called the Management house. Inside is a desk which will allow you to plan out your town and upgrade the shoppe. When interacting with the desk, a UI will pop up which will reveal statistics about your town and shoppe. Do keep in mind that this is is still work in progress as we want to include more statistics and information.
The two stats that are currently working are the amount of days which have passed since the shoppe has opened and an average item level of all the items that are for sale inside the shop. Once you reach certain objectives, you'll be able to upgrade the town to include more unique vendor NPC's but also change the way the town looks.
The above image shows the core five buildings that you can interact with. These included the following:
- Alchemist
- Cook
- Blacksmith
- Management house
- Your shoppe
Clicking on a building will reveal its level and the upgrades available which can include increased crafting yield but also the ability to upgrade thier building for additional features. We're still working on the management house upgrades and any chosen upgrade should be presented visually when exploring the town. We'll share more on that in the future.
When clicking on the shop icon while using the town management UI. It will bring up a New UI which will allow you to upgrade your shoppe.
Making any changes to this will not only be visible in the game world, but also be represented in the town UI. Check it out below:
We had already discussed parts of the crafting elements from our our last dev blog. We'll be returning to the crafting mechanics once we have finished the other two crafters (their houses are are already complete!). But we need to voice them, create their outfits and figure out their names.
Main Menu
The main menu will be continue to evolve throughout development. The gif above shows the main menu which includes a brief pan and a rapid day/night cycle which shows that the windows of the houses will light up at night time.
Each build we release during the development of Early Access will include a "notes from the devs" which will include important information or a general change log.
Crests
Don't mind the UI, currently this is just to test the systems functionality. Once our artists get their mitts on it, we assure you it'll look much better! Anyway, onto the feature, Each world save that you create will have its own crest. The crest that you create will be placed within the world and be included within certain parts of the UI. This was designed to add that little bit of extra piece of customization to make it feel like your own world. More designs will be available as time goes on.
Customer Navigation
Unfortunately, this section does not have any fancy screenshots or gifs, but we still wanted to share some progress on it.
The eternal struggle in the original Shoppe Keep was customer navigation within closed spaces. Because we allowed players to build objects within the shoppe it makes the navigation mesh even more dynamic and small in places. Customers can start to push each other, for now we are solving this by disabling customer collision when walking into other customers. However, to improve upon the quality of this element, we will be returning to this later when time allows.
Additionally, we've seen large numbers of customers enter the shoppe in SK2 once it has opened and has even just a single pedestal. We now feel there is more control over the amount of customers which will move towards your shoppe. Depending on how many items you have on display, it will affect the number of customers that will enter into your shoppe. Crowd control options will also be introduced via skills and upgrades.
World Map
In Shoppe Keep 2, players will be able to explore the world when they are not running their shoppe. We created a world map which will track the player location (As well as other players), and other dynamic information like the ship, which will be used for a merchant feature and travels from port to port. Additional landmarks will be shown once they are revealed by visiting them or as a quest reward.
Of course, you will be able to zoom in and drag the map around. The image above is of Arvydas spending some quality time in the management house with sir Poshington! You won;t believe how much time was spent to make sure that you are pinpointed and represented on the map exactly where you are!
Clock
it's not a vital game feature, but just more of a nice detail. any analogue clocks in the world will represent the time in the world. Just in case you don't want to look at the top right corner of the screen for a numeric digital display. Your choice!
That's all for this week
That's it for this week. There is far much more stuff in the game but we are pacing ourselves and will continue to reveal more information regularly. We are compiling a few more features which we aren't planning to talk about just yet, but will be included in a single mega post. So check out for that!
Of course, to stay up to date, do add Shoppe Keep 2 to your wishlist!
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