Dear Retailers
It is time to give you some info on what will be by far the largest update from us so far.
So what is corporation mode?
In corporation mode you start off in a new city with no money in your pocket, and no reputation at all.
The Career Part
To get some money you will have to sign contracts with other companies to run their stores. These contracts will give you a daily wage, and also a bonus when completing the task at hand.
As you complete more jobs, your personal reputation with these companies will increase, allowing you to take contracts in better locations for higher wages.
Starting your corporation
When you have enough money, you can head to the city hall, and start your corporation.
Your corporation will be the center of it all. This is the "master" company which holds it all together.
A corporation will also need it's headquarters, but being completely new you might have to settle for renting an office space in the city hall.
...and make your first concept.
With your headquarters ready, you can make your first concept.
A concept is a unique brand, with it's own identity and targeting specific markets. So the concept is what your customers will see, and eventually come to know. However each concept starts small. You will need to develop it over time, to gradually expand it's reputation to the customers. Will you focus on becoming the expert in one category, or becoming adequate in several.
Depending on your HQ, your corporation can own lots of concepts. As each concept gets larger, it will require more management. So each concept will need various managers in the HQ to reach it's full potential. This being a sales managers, purchasing managers, and area managers among others.
Putting the concepts to use
Your concepts will of course need stores to be of use. So you have to find the lots you wish to place stores on. They will vary greatly in population and segment composition. So the celebrities might be nearer the stores at the beach, and the farmers near the rural areas. Off course the more attractive locations cost more.
You can both rent and buy the lots around the city, with buying off course being the more expensive choice. However buying a lot allows you to build on it, expanding the store, whereas with a rental you will have to make do with what is.
When you have decided on a lot, you assign a concept to the store which is going to be built there, invest some of your hard earned money in it and then start playing.
When playing inside the store, the game works at you know it. However customers also now look at the reputations of your concept when deciding if they want to shop at your store.
Multi-store owner
When you have the money to expand, it is time to prepare for your next store. Before leaving, it is best that you hire a daily manager to your current store. This person will take care of your store while you are away at another. While at a store, the other stores will still earn (or cost) you money, and contribute to your concepts. From time to time you will have to check in at the store, to make sure that everything is running smoothly, or extend your stay to improve it further.
Big spender
When everything is on track, you will need to expand you HQ to allow for more concepts, and more stores. And hopefully you will get the big skyscraper, crush the competing stores and dominate the city.
Some notes on the develpoment
It has taken some time
We wanted to explaing why you havent received any updates from us in a while.
As we are only two persons making this game, and this being our first, things take time, and we still have a lot of learning to do.
So making an update of this size by basically creating a new game on top of the existing is quite a mountainclimb for us, both in planning and executing.
As we have learned on the way we are also beginnig to see that some of our earlier practices could have been done in a much better way.
But as these practices has been used on the foundations of the game, we also have to spend some time "untangling" and improving this, to allow us to be faster and more efficient in the future.
So these are the main reasons of why this takes some time. But rest assured, we are and have been working hard every week to bring the content to you.
Why such a big update now
When we decided to make this, we weren't quite sure of how long it would take. However we felt that this was necessary to improve your experience.
Lots of you had already maxed out the game, and requested bigger stores. Increasing the sizes would only fix it for a small amount of time, as this would just be "more of the same". This also meant that our time was used making these hotfixes instead of progressing the game to where we plan it to go. And since you always would use up this content before we could add something new, we decided to go another direction.
So this is to give you a new experience, and a new challenge that went beyond of "just getting a big store", which hopefully will keep you entertained for longer. And when this is done, we will go back to improve the core game and adding more articles.
How long left
All of the core elements has been made, and we are now beginning to merge them together. When this is done, we start on adding some more content.
The city map only consist of the small area, which will have to be expanded.
The career part only contain the "mandatory" stores, and needs some more possibilities.
The HQ can not be expanded to unlock more concepts.
The city hall allows you to talk to NPC's, which work as a part of the tutorial, which also needs some work.
Upon adding this, a bugfixing and balancing period starts, and when that is done, we are ready to release it to you.
So a very rough, and unpromised, estimate is 3-4 weeks of time.
We hope that this answers some of the questions you might have, ans you are as aways more than welcome to comment and bring ideas to the game :)