The new year has seen quite a bit of progress made on the game as our growing team settles into a steady rhythm. Weve been slaving away on developing and improving new systems, including the dynamic AI system, revamped building system, and a far more flexible 360-degree furniture rotation tool. The biggest of these challenges has certainly been the massive changes weve made to the building system, which will now allow you to build way more intricate and detailed hotels.

IMPROVED AI BEHAVIOUR:

A new system has been designed for managing how guests interact with the hotel and fellow patrons. We wanted to shoot for more emergent gameplay possibilities with less predictability, which is where this fresh dynamic guest AI fits in. As you know, there are many different kinds of guests with varying needs and priorities. The type of hotel you build, how you manage it, and how you price things will affect what kind of crowd you draw in. This leads us to the guest review system weve been working on, which will give you an idea of how guests perceive your hotel and their overall experience within it. For example, if there is too much drunken behaviour or too many dirty rooms, guests may leave a negative review stating their grievances (unless theyre the drunk individuals). This bleeds into your hotels public rating, which determines what types of guests may visit in the future.

BUILDING SYSTEM:

A huge amount of refactoring has been done on the building system -- its pretty much brand new! Firstly, the system was entirely revamped to make it far more efficient with how it handles wall and floor props. Previously, wall segments were all separate objects that could be placed in two directions. This naturally led to quite a large performance hit and an unfortunate restriction of only allowing walls to be placed at right angles. The new system takes all of these wall pieces and smooshes them together into one entity for the entire floor. Youre welcome, frame rate. This revamp keeps on giving, as it also enables you to build diagonal and curved walls! Your customisation options just keep on growing. Heres a WIP gif of some of the functionality the new system offers. Its still in heavy testing and needs a lot of polish, so expect something even better when it reaches your hands.

FURNITURE ROTATION:

With the addition of curved and diagonal walls, we needed to update the furniture placement tool to allow you to place things down at different angles. A few kinks still need to be worked out and some new UI elements are on the way to make it easier to see how youre angling things. Were also working on a snapping tool that will snap furniture to adjacent walls incrementally as you drag it. There is still so much more to do, but we feel that were well on our way to getting the core systems in fighting shape. All of this will enable you to create even more unique and interesting hotels to delight or torture guests. We cant wait to see what you build! If you have any burning questions or just want to chat with us or other fans, join us on our Discord server at https://discord.gg/fYkJWWk. See you there!