Weekends have arrived in Above The Fold. Continuing the theme of adding progression to the game, you now have to unlock Saturday and Sunday editions for your newspaper. You (can't yet) do this by completing Challenges! More on this below. For a quick overview of all the changes, scroll to the last part of this post.
Challenges are huge new feature coming to the game. I say coming, because at the time this update goes out, they are not yet fully implemented. Everything is there, but needs a little more testing and balancing. That said, you can access a list of them, which gradually fades in as you unlock new challenges to complete (2 per game stage). Actually being able to complete a challenge is coming in the next patch, but some of the stats required are already tracked - like your highest scoring themed issues, per theme!
Contentwise, more than 100 new headline elements have been added, giving you much more variation and potential silliness in the random story headlines in the game. If you get a funny or noteworthy front page, please upload a screenshot to Steam - I love to see what you get!
In terms of balance, not publishing on weekends means less time between bills, in which you can make the cash you need to keep the paper afloat. The weekend is good for some things though - your Reporters recharge and may come back to work happier than they were at the end of the week.
Besides this, this update has a truck load of bug fixes and quality of life adjustments.
Changes in Alpha 9.6
- 100+ new headline elements added for greater variation and absurdity
- Added 1 new music loop, which plays on Fridays. One away from having one for every day.
- Each in-game hour is 2 seconds longer* to allow more fine tuning (+/- keypad keys adjust speed)
- Saturdays and Sundays are now skipped by default, until weekend editions are unlocked
- During the weekend, there is a chance Reporter happiness will go up slightly
- Ticker now shows the date and weekday (easier to see when weekend is approaching)
- Every time you break your own record with a themed issue, you get bonus score points (50-200)
- Ticker now shows when your last themed issue scored higher than similar and/or all themed issues
- Challenge screen accessible via the Office, and you can see what your available challenges are
- Fixed male reporter's hair, sometimes floating 1 pixel above where it should be
- Fixed happiness-related Strategic Goals*, which could trigger prematurely
- Fixed an issue related to advertisements carrying over into a new year*
- Fixed Reporter cards having overflowing text in cases with several long trait names
- Fixed issue where newly unlocked story types wouldn't appear until the game had been restarted
- Larger responsive area on screen, when right-clicking to remove a story from the front page
- Typical Reader algorithm messed with some
- Various bug fixes, incl. at least one typo-related crash
*Only tested with a fresh save game.