Hey everyone!
This update brings a lot of quality of life improvements, fixes, community requests, hefty optimizations, and 2 new big features: multiple office floors and game editions.
Before I get on with listing the changes, I would like to thank the game's Discord community for testing the in-development content as it became available on the 'develop' branch. They have done me a tremendous service in helping find various bugs, and I am very grateful for that. With that said, here is the full changelog:
- added multiple office floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not
* removed the 200 employee limit in accordance with this new feature and all the optimizations done to the game
- added the ability to create game editions:
* the setup for this feature is available in the pricing drop-down box
* offering good value relative to the game's base price will provide you with extra cash, Reputation, and Opinion points
* filling your game with needlessly large amounts of editions will hurt your Reputation and Opinion
* offering very little value relative to the game's base price will hurt your Reputation and Opinion
- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player
* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge
- added the ability to create demo versions for your games:
* demos can be created during the Polishing stage of a games development cycle
* the demo will provide either a boost or a penalty to the game's Popularity points, depending on the quality of the game at the point of the demo's creation
* your Reputation level will act as a multiplier for the penalty and the bonus
- added a new advertisement type - Release Screenshots:
* this advertisement type costs nothing
* the result of this advertisement type depends on the quality of the game as well as your Reputation level
* the efficiency of his advertisement will decrease after every screenshot release
* releasing a lot of screenshots in a short period of time will reduce potential Popularity gain, since you're giving too much info to the players
- added a new mass advert type - Gameplay Trailer:
* the Popularity boost provided by this mass advert highly depends on the quality of the game
* it is the cheapest mass advert type and will aid greatly in making profitable games at the beginning of any playthrough provided the game is of a high enough quality
- added 4 new activities:
* Photography Course (provides Photography knowledge)
* Art Gallery Visit (provides Stylizing knowledge)
* AI programming course (provides Machine Learning knowledge)
* Parkour school visit (provides Parkour knowledge)
- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge
- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering, UI rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 50% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)
- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added the ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- added the ability to set up the amount of mass advertisement rounds to perform
- added mass advertisement info descbox to mass advertisement setup popup
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- added sounds for time control, popups
- added a confirmation popup that appears when trying to load a savefile with mods that are no longer present; due to the way it works it will display the missing mod names only for savefiles saved on version 1.1.0.0 (and later) of the game
- it is now possible to enter values into the platform production/support value boxes using your keyboard
- it is now possible to enter values into the server rent value box using your keyboard
- when a lot of themes are present, a popup will open instead of a drop-down menu (to allow modders to add as many themes as they want)
- right-clicking on MMO server renting, platform support/production buttons can now decrease/increase by 5 per each click
- adaptive standards now lower when games with lower quality are released, which fixes an issue where it is almost impossible to reach 100% in game scores in late game
- updated sounds for when something good or bad happens
- enabled object move sound in Expansion mode
- when loading a savefile it will now be paused regardless of the speed the game was saved at
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode
- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- increased maximum platform advertisement duration to 6 months (was 2 months)
- increased the amount of maximum visitors per day on small Game Convention booths
- managers will now report a price point one notch above the ideal price to ensure players make a profit
- hovering the mouse over a game project element in the project box will now display the largest remaining work chunk by skill in the current stage
- when a neutral rival goes defunct an element will be added to the event box (previously it would only show a popup if the rival was hostile to you), which also fixes the 'Ravioli & Pepperoni' campaign being impossible to finish
- text over residential buildings will no longer follow the mouse when hovering your mouse over them in Office Expansion mode
- improved multiple UI elements
- improved compatibility of mods that add genres/audiences without ensuring that all the other genres/mods have the genre-audience matches
- increased the amount of review remarks from 2 to 3 in accordance to the new game editions gameplay mechanic
- the task/project box now becomes hidden when there is nothing happening
- loan interest rate lowered to 8% per year (was 12% per year)
- the base sale amount was reduced to 12000 due to the addition of the new advertisement types
- fixed auto-assigning managers not displaying the result in the event box, instead creating a regular popup
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed non-player winners of the Annual Game Awards carrying out the speech the player has written (one could say it is a case of in-game plagiarism and is a feature, but it's not!)
- fixed time display until Annual Game Awards begin being off by 1 month (ie. 1 day remaining until it begins, but it shows 1 month)
- fixed being unable to view nominees after registering your own game for the Annual Game Awards
- fixed time display until registration for the Annual Game Awards being off by 1 month
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- fixed rival games not going off-market in the background when they would go bankrupt, which could lead to potential issues
- fixed "Radio Station Ads" mass advert type not unlocking
- fixed selecting just "New campaign" for an expansion pack not marking it as suitable for development
- fixed a minor UI glitch which was creating an unused descbox that wasn't displaying anything nor was removed until you'd quit to the main menu/load a savefile (and it would get created again then)
- fixed MMO expansion packs being pirateable
- fixed a crash that occured when opening certain menus with the keyboard bindings to them being unbound
- fixed being able to present an already-released game at a convention, which could potentially lead to a crash
- fixed changing the resolution while in some kind of tutorial potentially leading to a crash in specific scenarios
- fixed a crash that occurred when placing floor and pressing "escape" to cancel the placement (this key is not even displayed to the player, but it shouldn't crash regardless)
- fixed being able to start development on engines with nothing written in their names, resulting in issues like unable to revamp said engine
- fixed being able to start development with no names in certain circumstances
- fixed the VSync setting being "Disabled" while in reality it is enabled on the first game start
- (MODDING) fixed the Enabled/Disabled status display not update when toggling the mod state in the "Created mods" of the Workshop menu
- fixed unassigning teams in employee assignment mode not updating the scroller with UI elements for the employees that were unassigned
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods
- (LINUX) switched LuaJIT from 2.1.0-beta3 to 2.0.5 due to instability on the former version
Thank you for reading. I hope this update makes the game a lot more fun for you.
If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!