Dear retailers: Update 0.5.0 is out.
New category: Computers
We listen to what you want - More items to sell.
The addition of computers seemed like a straightforward thing to do. So this is a new category, with corresponding new new displays.
These articles are more expensive, both when buying and selling and are of a higher luxury.
This means that the customers are pickier, and needs an overall better sales efforts before they purchase.
Events, calendar and mails
The city has to be more dynamic. So various events will occur once in a while. For instance a discount from a certain supplier or an increase in a population segment.
You can see various events on your new Calendar. This is accessible through the HUD menu in store, or from the newly placed calendar near the door in your office.
When an event occurs, you are notified via mail on your computer. Your staff now also mails you about various events like sickness or resignations.
This system is just finished, so you can expect lots of events to be added in the future.
Bankruptcy
Yes. Due to the arrival of the event system, it is now possible to go bankrupt. So no more owing the bank millions of (insert currency here),
but instead you have a certain amount of days to fix the situation before the store gets closed.
Improved AI movement
The AI had a tendency to clump and walk in the way of each other, causing some undesirable behavior and following frustration.
This has been adjusted allowing for a much better flow even when crowded. In crowded situations they still "wiggle" about, but manage to pass each other and reach their destination.
We hope this will improve the experience in bigger stores.
News
We wanted to be able to communicate with the players more directly, so a news feed has been implemented at the main menu screen. Here we will post about what is coming, tips to things we see players struggle with and other notifications.
More bugs
We are receiving a lot of bug reports, and thank you very much for those.
We have removed a fair share of them (but others are bound to have arrived). Please continue to post any difficulties or bad experiences you might have, and we will try to solve them.
Up next
It is summer and 50 % of the team is going for a well earned vacation, and the other half of the team (me) will stay home and continue working.
Currency selector
We see people get confused about the prices, which makes perfectly sense. At the moment the game uses an unspecified currency, with values based on the unknown Danish Krone which makes no sense to 99.9 of the earths population.
So we will make a currency designer where you can select various currencies, or create your own. This should make the game more familiar to all of you.
User Preferences
There has also been requests for various minor implementations. So we will create an overdue preferences menu for you to customize your experience. This will off course grow over time, so feel free to let us know what you think this screen should contain.
Next Category
Since we have the clothes / shoes pair. It should also be possible to sell minor computer accessories. So we will begin making monitors, keyboards, mice and what else we might think off.
Languages
There has been an increasing demand to translate the game into different languages, and we will therefore begin working on this. However as this is totally new to us we don't know how long this will take to do.
City mode
We have a dream of making a 3D city overview that contains the game instead of menus. This should contain entrepreneur and career mode combined, along with opening chains of stores that work together.
This city view should also contain a corporate HQ, supplier expos, tutorial school and what else we might put in there. This should make for a more complete gaming experience, making it feel like building an empire, and creating a more diverse and challenging gameplay.
So this will be our next major project that we will begin working on.