Winkeltje: The Little Shop - OUT NOW!

Release Day!

https://youtu.be/UeWOUP_YFSU
Winkeltje: The Little Shop is finally released on all major platforms! As of today you can enjoy Winkeltje on Windows, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 at the affordable price of $14,99, or €12,49, or your regional equivalent.

Launch Features

Below are the launch features that you can enjoy right now!

Employees

With this much requested feature you can hire and manage employees that will help you in keeping your shop stocked. Employees will gain experience and grow to the limit of their ability. Manage salaries and keep an eye out for new talent as your employer skill increases.

Upgradeable End-Game Storage

When you reach the end-game you will now be able to buy a storage basement hatch. This is an upgradeable storage that will enable you to increase your storage capacity if you can afford it. As a result you can reclaim your store space without losing storage capacity.

New Decorations

You can look forward to a bunch of new decorations themed around spring, summer, and the outdoors that can be unlocked through some new objectives or by increasing your shop level. Some unique item pedestals can be obtained by reaching the maximum item crafting level.

New Cosmetics

Both shopkeeper types received a new outfit, boots, and hair. New color options for this outfit can be unlocked by completing new crafting achievements.

New Floors

New floor options have been added. Some are accessible from the start while others will be unlocked as you progress.

Major Performance Improvements

With a massive effort to improve performance on console devices we have found and applied numerous performance improvements across the board. We took care in maintaining the look and feel of the game although you may notice some differences in aesthetics.

New

• Achievements - Added 12 new achievements.
• Cosmetics - Added 2 new outfits with 7 colour combinations, these are unlocked as a reward for hitting certain crafting milestones.
• Building - Added 14 new floors.
• Decorations - Added 39 new decorations.
• Decorations - Added 49 new Pedestal decorations for when the player has maxed out the crafting of an item.
• Employees - Added employees to help with restocking the shop.
• Objectives - Added new objectives for Employees, Spring, and Summer.
• Objectives - Updated the 'Item Placement' & 'Building' tutorials to show both the count & bar.

Changes

• Art - Updated the default and large shop preview images.
• Customers - Renamed Tetta -> Letta, because apparently the former means "boob" in Italian.
• Effects - Slightly reduced the windiness on the foliage.
• Language - Updated and reviewed all translations.
• Lighting - Increased the shadow depth bias to adress some shadow acne.
• Objectives - Removed the Kitchen Planter from being unlocked by the Potato Farmer objective as the initial planter can only be unlocked by spending a crafting skill point. This should remove the objective mention from the Unlock Menu when inspecting the Kitchen Planter.
• Objectives - The 'Pitchfork Supplier' objective will now also award turf as a crafting resource.
• Objectives - The 'Axe Smith' objective will now also award coal and steel as a crafting resource.
• UI - Removed the 'in development' disclaimer in anticipation for the release update.
• UI - The direct sell confirmation window will now omit the accept button instead of disabling it as the latter would cause issues.
• UI - Moved wall and crafting categories in the unlock menu to be more noticeable as people tend to easily miss them.
• UI - Added Exit to Desktop button.
• Setting - Community - Added an option to allow the game to continue running while in the background.

Fixes

• Art - Tweaked the small, medium, and tall torch for better compatibility across platforms.
• Art - Moved a terrain tree as it was clipping through walls on a large map.
• Audio - Community - Lowering the audio sliders would set the volume at -60dB instead of the lowest possible engine value of -80dB.
• Code - Fixed a rare issue that could prevent crafting unlocks if unlock skillpoints happened to go below zero.
• Commissions - Community - Placing the initial commission board could cause a critical error if the available commissions are null.
• Cosmetics - Max crafting outfits should now also unlock matching boots.
• Customers - When customers went home they would destroy the NPC object instead of the associated gameobject. This would likely cause an error.
• Customers - Dismissing a customer will now disable the outline instead of disabling the interactable as the latter could lead to a critical error.
• Effects - The snowmask is now also applied to the main menu background shops.
• Effects - The snowmask would repeat instead of clamp which would look strange on foliage outside of the shop bounds.
• Effects - Added snowmask padding and offset to fix clamping issues.
• Effects - Dismissing a customer would leave a grayed outline visible until it walked out of the player's awareness radius.
• Effects - Fixed a critical snowmask error by removing a race condition.
• Effects - A recent performance improvement change broke the snow effect on outside furniture when within interact range. The snow effect should reapply if that is the case.
• Effects - Community - Planters should no longer revert their soil material when walking out of interact range.
• Effects - Round bushes would not toggle waviness when placed.
• Effects - Placing bushes outside during winter would not make them appear snowey.
• Effects - The stove's fire animation should now use scaled time.
• Effects - Reverted change to the interactable class responsible for outlines as caching the materials would cause highlighting issues across different furniture states.
• Effects - The watered material on a planter would reset when picked up.
• Employee - Fixed issue where employees would stop restocking.
• Graphics - Removed several missing entries from the shader variant collection.
• Graphics - Enabling either screen space ambient occlusion or depth of field should now enable the creation of a depth texture as both effects rely on it in different ways.
• Lighting - Terrain has been cut into smaller chunks to adress an issue with lighting.
• Saving - Added fallback for when files would not be able to be saved in the steam folder, this should stop the crashing on bootup for some people.
• UI - The furniture cost label would show the wrong position for a single frame when placing furniture.
• UI - The objectives counter would not update when gaining, completing, or failing an objective.
• UI - The layout price label would appear in the wrong position after buying furniture.
• UI - Planters that can be unlocked through objectives had duplicate objective listings in the details panel of the unlock menu.
• UI - The Stucco & Brick Archway did not have all preview materials set which could result in an error.
• UI - Fixed the firepit previews in the unlock menu.
• UI - Attempting to load a corrupted save file would prompt a window that would cause issues once closed with a controller.
• UI - Appeal level would not correctly set itself when losing an appeal level.
• UI - Objectives that turned inactive should no longer have their animation routines be cancelled when subsequently called to be shown.
• UI - Attempting to favorite furniture while the filter returned no options would cause an error.
• UI - It should no longer be possible to upgrade a display using a controller if the upgrade button is not visible.
• UI - The normal difficulty was not using the correct image preview.
• UI - Fixed floor previews and descriptions in the unlock menu.
• UI - Added 4 missing floor unlock IDs.
• UI - The snowy keyword setter should no longer call the awake function when instantiated for use in the UI.
• UI - Fixed an issue where the employee preview would be blurry.
• UI - Added several checks to inspecting employee details in the employee menu to prevent an out of range error.
• UI - Updated credits section.
• UI - Pressing menu hotkeys while a menu is open should no longer cause the game to unpause.

Performance

• Art - Reduced GC alloc in Bush colour update.
• Art - Reduced GC alloc in item sell price calculation.
• Art - Structure Kit0, Kit1, Kit2, Kit3, Kit4, and Kit5 model and prefab optimizations.
• Art - Optimized shop sign.
• Art - Replaced the forge coals material with a new material using the smolder shader to increase graphics performance.
• Art - Terrain mesh improvements.
• Art - The shop sign chain was using the wrong material.
• Audio - Removed unnecessary repositioning call on the shop opening.
• Audio - Footstep sounds now use the cached transform instead of Unity's transform.
• Characters - Optimized character animation import settings.
• Code - The placement appeal component was added but not removed which would eventually slow down the game.
• Commissions - Optimized the commission generation.
• Effects - Optimized Snow Mask GC allocation & speed.
• Effects - Moved the snow mask interpolation transition to the shader.
• Effects - Snow mask update will now only be called when in the main scene or game scene.
• Effects - Disabling screen space ambient occlusion will now also disable the depth texture generation that the effect relies on.
• Effects - Highlight materials are now cached, reducing calculations & GC alloc when highlighting furniture.
• Effects - Snow keyword and material optimizations.
• Effects - VertexColorChannel shader performance improvements.
• Effects - Vertex shader performance improvements.
• Effects - Foliage shader performance improvements.
• Effects - Interact shader performance improvements.
• Effects - Structure shader performance improvements.
• Effects - Improved terrain performance.
• Effects - Removed obsolete color property from the foliage shader.
• Effects - Optimized the butterfly particle effect.
• Effects - Reworked the foliage shader to use texture arrays and reduce math operations in the fragments shader.
• Effects - Additional terrain shader optimizations by using a texture array and storing uv calculation into a seperate UV channel.
• Effects - Heat distortion shader effect should now be disabled for the Switch.
• Effects - Removed redundant shader keywords from the build selector shader.
• Effects - Improved graphics performance by disabling mesh renderers and/or shader keywords of effects that were not visible but could still cost resources to process.
• Effects - Character shader optimizations.
• Effects - Removed snowy keyword from the sign material as this is set during runtime.
• Effects - Interactable materials should no longer set fill keyword on initialization. This would result in additional setpass calls.
• Effects - Community - Updated shader variants to include fill and outline shader keywords.
• Effects - Removed material property block from the wallmask effect as it breaks batching.
• Effects - Removed the material property block from the foliage material.
• Effects - Pruned sparks effect from fireplaces on low-end platforms.
• Effects - Candle flame effect should cost much less resources now.
• Effects - Keyframing shader properties were causing material property blocks in furniture using fire or glow effects which resulted in breaking SRP batches.
• Effects - Keyframing shader properties were causing material property blocks in furniture using fire or glow effects which resulted in breaking SRP batches.
• Graphics - Anisotropic filtering now happens on a 'per texture' basis on floors and walls.
• Input - Changed the input module to ignore mouse buttons 3 and up to reduce GC allocation.
• Lighting - Disabled spot light shadowcasters for console.
• Movement - Reduced the amount of calculations done in the player movement.
• Objectives - Moved the init of the MilestoneObjective to the loading screen instead of the first time the shop opens.
• UI - Money label background now only updates when the width of the string actually changes.
• UI - Preloading the interaction cooldown & game settings.
• UI - The trader patience HUD element would be assigned twice and was not pooling correctly resulting in performance regression when playing over a long period of time.

Hotfix

• Achievement - The Professional would not unlock correctly. If you've maxed all crafting professions, you can open up any station and the achievement will pop.
• Art - Increased the anisotropic value of tileable wall textures to make them appear less blurry at an angle.
• Code - Community - Fixed critical issue when loading a save file after backing out to the main menu.
• Employees - Community - Directly selling an item while an employee was trying to restock would cause the display to be permanently reserved by the employee.
• Graphics - Added 2560x1080 and 2560x1600 resolutions options.
• Lights - Tweaked the candleholder lights to emit more light compared to the lanterns.
• Movement - Community - Click to move should no longer slow down near navigation waypoints.
• UI - Community - UI scaling options should now adjust for 4k monitors.
• UI - Community - Added an exclamation mark to highlight unlock options.
• UI - Community - Added settings to adjust the camera sway on each axis. Currently PC only until the required translations are covered to pass a console submission.
• UI - Community - The UI atlas was showing some sprite bleeding at the pivot of the event ribbon. A repack of the atlas using looser packing settings on the ribbon sprite fixed the issue.
• UI - Community - The employee previews would look blurry on increased UI scales.
• UI - Community - The Alchemy Station did not have its Preview Appearance component set up correctly.
• UI - Clicking on an unlock reminder would not bring the player to the correct tab in the unlock menu.
• UI - Crafting stations did not show the correct level for the category & item level.
• UI - The skill increase animation in the crafting menu was not animating from the right starting value resulting in strange looking level transitions.
• UI - Removed the ability to save while the shop was open, that was never supposed to be possible.

Update: v6914
Hotfix: v6953