After having been teased with them for a while now, the Challenges are finally IN the game! You can complete them and claim the rewards once per Challenge.
The rewards include Angry Letter Forgiveness and additional Reporters on your staff. There are 10 Challenges in the game, of which 2 become available per game chapter.
But wait, there is more! Two balance changes to note are slight nerfing of Angry Letter forgiveness rewards from the Owner, and increased Overhead costs as your newspaper levels up. The first of these is to give a value boost to the Challenge rewards, and the second is simply increase money-making pressure a bit as you progress.
There is even more new stuff in this update, but these were the major changes and additions. For a full(er) list, see below.
Alpha 9.7 Change List
- You can now Claim rewards for completed Challenges from the Challenges screen
- Challenge elements are listed in green if you've achieved them, and red if not
- Challenges display a button if unlockable, the label changes if unlocked or claimed
- Fanfare plays when you claim a challenge reward
- Lifetime game stats are now listed on the main game menu (pulled from Steam)
- All days of the week now have their own music track on the Map
- The "Typical Reader" in the Subscriber panel has been recoded
- 15 new last names were added (all from the game industry, see if you recognize any)
- 13 fresh newspaper name elements were added to the pool of randomization
- Balance: Office Overhead is significantly increased when a new distribution level is reached
- Balance: Angry Letter forgiveness has been nerfed to increase value of challenges
- Balance: The first theme of the month is now presented early in the game, is scripted to be "Local News" and has a set difficulty of 760
- Fixed a bug that would prevent F9 from toggling fullscreen on (only off was working)
- Fixed a bug on the Editor screen, that would cause you to accidentally send 2 stories back if clicking too close to the edge