Welcome back! We hope you’re all staying safe. We’ve been doing our usual thing, which means that there’s some cool stuff to discuss! Let’s get right to it.
Guest AI
Guest AI has been our favourite child at home over the past month, so it received most of our attention. We are currently testing out some new tweaks and so far the results have been quite good! It’s still in a pretty rough state, so it won’t yet be included in our newest patch.
Why? Well, we’re also still in the process of wrangling some of the wild animations and models to ensure they’re properly implemented. Personally, we love that the guests can transform into spindly 2-meter-long-flesh-dagger death spiders, but it isn’t exactly the theme we’re going for. Maybe a Halloween update? We’ll see.
However, we have had some great success with our randomised guest clothing system:
UI Backend & Game Systems:
Alongside AI, the last month has seen a lot of progress in our UI backend/game systems. We were a bit stuck on where to begin, considering that so many systems rely on one another to work. We decided to focus on one of the core mechanics, the rating system, and work backwards to what influenced it.
This is subject to change in the future as more testing is conducted, but there are two primary ratings that every hotel will possess. First up, the “Hotel Star Rating” that corresponds to the level of luxury or prestige your hotel has (like the 1-5 star treatment real-world hotels receive). The second is the “Guest Review Rating”, which can be thought of as a Google/Yelp review of your hotel (determined by guest reviews over the past year).
As a result, you could have a 2-star hotel but a 5-star review rating, or vice-versa (which means your 5-star hotel sucks). The Guest Review Rating is the more complex of the two and has received the most work. It is determined by your guests’ individual experiences of their room and the hotel as a whole.
Room Pricing & Marketing:
To price and market rooms, players will have to group bedrooms into bedroom categories. You will then be able to set the price for that entire category of bedrooms. This enables you to group all rooms of similar quality together and offer them for a certain price. You can then run marketing campaigns for each of those categories to attract different guests.
If you market low-quality rooms to higher-end guests, those guests will not enjoy their rooms and will most likely leave a negative review. A low guest rating will greatly impact how many guests come to your hotel, both organically and through marketing campaigns. So try your best to keep your guests happy!
Here is an early concept drawing for an improved furniture selection menu we are designing:
New Team Member!
Guess what! We have a new team member! Everyone on our team is super excited to welcome Mareike Reh. She is our one and only generalist artist and will be handling our UI/UX design and ensuring we maintain a consistent art style.
Pre-Alpha Build HotFix - What's New
We’ve just released our latest build for Alpha backers! It’s more of a hotfix, but it addresses many of the bugs that have been reported to us in the past month. If you are interested in trying out our pre-alpha build, you can purchase the game HERE. It’s available to all of our backers who pledged towards tiers with the “Alpha” reward and anyone who purchased the Founder Edition linked above.
Changes:
- First iteration of UI scaling that will allow for people to properly take advantage of higher resolutions or change the size of the UI
- First iteration of wind effects for surrounding trees/vegetation
- New cursor
- Added costs to wall + floor painting (needs balancing)
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed bug that turned every texture black when changing quality settings
- Fixed some furniture placement bugs
- Fixed performance issues associated with building the first wall on the map
- Fixed some performance issues with floor painting
- Fixed an issue where a crash could occur while building
- Fixed some general wall building bugs
- Partly fixed issue where floors can get buggy and turn to grass
Known Issues:
- Can still cause bugged rooms by building really tight angled walls
- Pressing Shift while painting floors will not paint the entire room and lead to weird behaviour. (Use CTRL instead)
That’s it for now! Be sure to ring the lobby bell over on our Discord server and chat to us and the community.