Hey everyone! I've just uploaded the third devlog for my new game 'Intravenous': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wVa1aTaldI

There I talk about various big changes to the gameplay that the game has seen since the last devlog.
There's a lot to cover there, but to give you a short idea: the game now allows the player to go prone, to use their real-life mic to create noise in-game and bait enemies in!

Those are just two new things the game has to offer aside from the myriad of changes mentioned in the video, so if you're interested - be sure to check it out!

You can also wishlist the game on Steam now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1486630/Intravenous/

Thank you for reading!

Hey everyone!

This is a quick announcement to let you guys know that the Steam store page for 'Intravenous' is now public!
You can take a look at it here.
You might notice that the art is rather rushed, or seems unfinished - that's because it is. In fact, currently I have practically no art for the game's cover, and other such things.
I wasn't planning on having a Steam store page for the game this early, but I had to make one, and make it public, for something cool upcoming on Steam. :)

Regardless, now you can wishlist the game on Steam, as I've seen multiple people express their wish to do so!
The game's preliminary release date is set to May 21st of 2021. This is a rough estimate, and it's entirely possible the game will be finished earlier than that, or it might take more time to finish it. Regardless, the good news is the biggest chunk of work is already done.

What's left now is to:
1. finish up the remaining game levels
2. work on the levels in an iterative fashion to make them better and prettier
3. finish up work-in-progress art
4. play-test the absolute hell out of the game, so that there is NO repeat of the mess that was the launch of Game Dev Studio.
5. and lastly - release it.

I do hope you're excited for Intravenous - I sure am! It's very close to the stealth-action game I've always wanted to play, and it plays almost exactly how I wanted it to play!

Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll love this game when it's finally out!

Hey everyone! This is a small patch that fixes a crash reported by a community member.

- fixed a crash that occured when clicking on the platforms list button, but with no platform licenses
- (MODDING) added 2 new events to the SaleDisplay GUI element: PRE_SETUP and POST_SETUP - both are fired before and after setting up the SaleDisplay GUI element, respectively. 1 argument - the SaleDisplay GUI element instance.

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

I've noticed that some people were upset following the previous community post in which I talked about the new game I'm working on.
They say you can't please everyone and that you shouldn't try to do so, and that is 100% correct.
However I want to clarify the situation regarding future updates for Game Dev Studio so that everyone is on the same page.

The first and most important question: does this mean the end of future content updates for Game Dev Studio? Most likely not.
As I've stated on the GDS Discord server, and in the developer commentary I am simply burned out from working on Game Dev Studio. A bit ironic, given that this is a feature in the game itself, eh? At the time of the last big update, it was already nearly 5 years of my life put into the game. Working on a single project for that much time burns you out, whether you like it or not.

The second biggest factor leading to switching my attention to working on a new game is simply due to the fact that the sales are bad. The sales always remained weak no matter how many updates I released for Game Dev Studio, no matter how much effort I put into it. Now factor in the fact that I've worked on this game for nearly 5 years in total.
I am a regular person like everyone who plays Game Dev Studio and pretty much any other game, and putting food on the table is a necessity.

It seemed pointless to keep making big content updates when the sales remained weak despite multiple updates that added a lot of new content, so I had to look for an alternative.
This left me with two choices: find a job or start working on a new game. I chose the latter. Regardless, with either choice the amount of time I would invest in GDS would be lesser.

So now that I'm working on the new game, what does it mean for Game Dev Studio? It's simple - Game Dev Studio was a passion project from the beginning, and as long as I have the ability to return to my passion projects, I always do so. I wanted to make a game dev sim that I would enjoy playing. I hope you can understand how disheartening it was to release something I put so much love, effort, and care into, continue pouring these same things into it with consequent free content updates, and in return only watch as the sales got worse, and worse over time.

Basically, if Intravenous sells well (or if the sales of Game Dev Studio suddenly get a lot better) I intend to come back to Game Dev Studio and make more content updates. If it doesn't, well, I can't promise anything. However I intend to return to GDS only after the release of Intravenous, not before.
One of the things I want to do is to release a graphical overhaul update. There are also some gameplay features I wish to add that I have in the back of my mind, too.

Keep in mind that, as always, bugfix updates will keep coming as long as people report bugs that I can reproduce with ease. However to put it bluntly, as long as I don't have a steady source of income I can't afford to invest time into a game that sells badly.
Not once did I have the idea of raising the game's price now that it has a lot more content compared to what there was in the 1.0 version of the game. All the gameplay content the updates added were always free, and will continue to be free in the future, so long as I don't have to worry about my finances.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank the community members that have volunteered to translate the game into German and Chinese for free. Westman and Mochongli, you guys rock. Thank you so much for helping me out with the game.

If you wish to check out the new game I'm working on, Intravenous, check out the Game Dev Studio Youtube channel, as I will be uploading devlogs there.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,
Roman Glebenkov

Hey everyone! This post is different from the ones I usually make, as I usually only post update notes. In any case, the new game I'm making would not be possible without Game Dev Studio in the first place, so if you're interested - read on!

'Intravenous' is a top-down hardcore stealth/action game, with heavy emphasis on stealth.
The reason for its existence, - just like with Game Dev Studio, - is I wanted to play a stealth game reminiscent of the early Splinter Cell games, but also make it have really fun combat.

The idea came for it when I was working on the 'Anger Issues' mod for Game Dev Studio to showcase the modding possibilities of the game. I realized that I have everything I need to make a top-down game, and so I thought "why not?" to myself. The result is Intravenous.

I've been working hard on it for the past 1.5 years, but took a break from working on it during Spring of 2019 to make more updates for Game Dev Studio. Below you'll find links to the first two devlogs for Intravenous, be sure to check them out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA3_QtJX7yM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-36QMC0swI

Please keep in mind that the game is still a work-in-progress, and that there are a lot of unfinished assets. Regardless, I hope to hear what you think of the game!

I intend to release more content updates for Game Dev Studio, one of which includes a graphical overhaul, once I'm done working on Intravenous.

Thanks a lot!

Hey everyone!

This patch fixes an issue and updates the chinese localization.

- improved game project loading to avoid bad project loading in certain cases
- chinese localization update
- minor optimizations to GUI

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch tweaks the Simplified Chinese localization present in the game, courtesy of its author Mochongli.

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This patch fixes a couple of memory leaks that were present in the game for a long time, but I was unaware of them. These fixes should improve game stability and performance, especially during very long playing sessions without restarting the game.

- fixed a memory leak related to spritebatches
- fixed a memory leak related to pathfinding
- fixed an issue with the input service not removing certain handlers, which could result in either issues and/or memory leaking
- fixed various issues related to entering, leaving the map editor, and then loading a savefile, and repeating

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This patch adds Chinese localization made by a community member by the name Mochongli! I would like to thank him and everyone that has helped with the development and updates for this game. Your input, bug reports, and suggestions have been invaluable during the development of Game Dev Studio.

- added Chinese localization

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
I'd like to thank the community members for reporting the issues fixed in this update.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone.

I've uploaded an update yesterday, and it brought about some issues that caused crashes. This is a post to let you know that a hotfix update has been uploaded which takes care of the issue.
I'm deeply sorry about the inconvenience.

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a couple of issues.

- fixed reloading a savefile resetting the game edition buffer, resulting in being able to save & reload after sales to get the initial sale buffer counter back to 10,000, effectively avoiding having to pay for manufacturing new game edition copies
- fixed a crash that occured when attempting to sell a door after cancelling moving it
- fixed a potential issue with losing track of related games after loading in some strange cases, resulting in crashes
- the quadtree optimization in Update #31 Patch #3 was reverted due to being unstable; the issues in the optimization have since been fixed, the optimization is now present in the game, and provides an even bigger performance boost than before

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
I'd like to thank the community members for reporting the issues fixed in this update.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch provides a hefty optimization to the CPU side of things.

- optimized the quadtree module:
* a performance uplift of up to 20% or more (your mileage may vary) depending on the situation
* reduced frame drops and hitching when moving the camera around
* this has also very, very slightly lowered memory usage

If you come across any issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch addresses a couple of issues reported by community members.

- made the comma, full-stop, page up, and page down bindable keys
- fixed selling a door removing the wall on the tile it was hovering over
- fixed exiting expansion mode while having a door selected removing the wall on the tile it was hovering over
- fixed a crash that occured when click-holding down on an object to start moving it, and then cancelling the move action

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes an issue reported by a community member.

- fixed an exploit that allowed to indefinitely scrap games, which could be used to get infinite money, and could potentially lead to crashes

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This update doesn't add any new gameplay mechanics, but instead adds something that people, especially other indie game developers like myself, could find interesting.

added Developer Commentary scenario:
* playing through the scenario as usual will trigger developer commentary, giving you an insight into how various gameplay mechanics were designed, the iterations they went through, and other various things you might find interesting
* the scenario is available to everyone, but the narration for it can be purchased separately for $1.99.

- fixed a bug potentially leading to the 'Introduction' scenario getting stuck at the court stage
- russian localization fixes
- added speech volume slider to sound options menu

Now I know what you're thinking, and let me put those doubts to rest: this is the only piece of content that's in the form of DLC for Game Dev Studio. The reason why I chose to make the narration a paid DLC is simple: some people in the community wished to support me beyond the act of buying Game Dev Studio, and others asked me what my thought process was behind the development of the game. With the Developer Commentary scenario and the Developer Commentary Narration DLC I set out to kill two birds with one stone: give an insight into the design process of the game, and provide those wishing to support me with a way to do so without segregating gameplay mechanics into separate DLC packs.

I will never sell gameplay features as separate DLC packs, and any content to be added to Game Dev Studio will always be in the form of free content updates. Raising the price of the game is out of the question, too. I didn't want to use Patreon either, because I don't like the fact that I would be taking money from people every month in exchange for measly rewards. Naturally, this seemed like the best solution: those wishing to support me (or express gratitude for the free content updates I've released) once more get something in return even if it is superficial, and is more of a "thank you" from me to them.

Those that wish to go through the Developer Commentary scenario but don't want to purchase the narration can do so without any restrictions, and don't miss out on any gameplay mechanics. Those that wish to support me, but aren't interested in the Developer Commentary scenario can do so by purchasing the Developer Commentary Narration DLC. Those that wish to both support me and play through the Developer Commentary scenario can purchase the Developer Commentary Narration DLC. :)

To celebrate the addition of the Developer Commentary, the game will be 50% off until February 14th 10:00AM PST!
I hope the Developer Commentary scenario provides a fun view of how the game was developed.

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hello!

This small patch fixes a crash.

- fixed a crash that occured after deselecting the related game by clicking on a button that appears when a game is selected, and then clicking on the "inherit related game setup" button

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading, and Merry Christmas!

Hello!

This small patch fixes a crash on an undocumented feature.

- fixed a crash that occured when holding down a shift key and placing floors; this is due to the fact that this allows you to place single tiles without dragging, and was a feature that was supposed to be removed, but wasn't

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hello!

This small patch fixes a couple of issues and adjusts several aspects regarding reviews to make more sense.

- fixed a potential issue with GUI rendering
- capped minimum purchasing power of a platform to 40% (was 0%) which fixed an issue where releasing a lot of games at once on a player-made platform would sometimes yield 0 sales
- disabled review chance decay per day (this didn't make any sense)
- increased amount of possible game reviews in a single day to up to 10 games (was 1 game)

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes one rather serious issue.

- fixed a crash that occured when buying out a rival with one (or more) employee being successfully poached from them but still working under the rival
- fixed incorrect PVP MMO task description text

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a couple of issues.

- fixed time controls sometimes not resetting when quitting to main menu
- fixed platform-genre match being incorrectly displayed in reviews (always as a "great" match)
- fixed rivals sometimes having bugged funds, resulting in the 'Introduction' scenario getting stuck and being unable to be finished

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a couple of issues.

- fixed a crash when selling an object under certain circumstances
- fixed the object interaction descbox not updating when placing an object on top of another

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a couple of minor issues.

- fixed the 'Back to Basics' achievement not being granted when finishing the tutorial
- fixed 5 germanic last names being misplaced as 5 germanic female names; therefore women in the game now have 5 new names, and men and women have 2 more surnames

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch optimizes the lighting compute a bit.

- minor optimizations applied to lighting compute, should further help PCs equipped with slow CPUs

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

This small patch fixes two small issues.

- fixed "New campaign" expansion pack task not counting as enough for starting development on an expansion pack (I seem to have reverted this change)
- (MODDING) fixed game.addLoadComponent crashing, and load components crashing upon loading

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a text issue and adds a method requested by the modding community.

- fixed incorrect text translation key for the discovery of part desire in game editions
- (MODDING) added util.dumpeventlist() method - will find all events in the game and copy them to the clipboard. General usage is to call this method, and to print the text to a text file of some kind for use later when modding.

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a small issue.

- fixed buildings not having the proper amount of floors set to them (if you've upgraded to 3 floors on buildings that can have only a maximum of 2 prior to this update, then you will still be able to use all 3 floors)

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

This small patch fixes two isses that could cause crashes.

Fixes
- fixed several issues related to moving lamps between floors
- fixed a memory leak that is related to moving objects that cast light
- improved mod compatibility by defaulting MMO matches to 1 when registering a new genre without providing a MMO match value for all the genres there may be

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch fixes a couple of minor issues.

- fixed office expansion being locked until game restart if quitting the construction part of the Tutorial without completing it
- fixed office expansion losing its locked state after reloading a save game, resulting in being able to expand the office borders in advance, which could lead to a soft-lock in the Tutorial
- fixed the dialogue portrait being drawn under the construction mode control descbox
- updated the Russian localization

If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This update brings a lot of quality of life improvements, fixes, community requests, hefty optimizations, and 2 new big features: multiple office floors and game editions.

Before I get on with listing the changes, I would like to thank the game's Discord community for testing the in-development content as it became available on the 'develop' branch. They have done me a tremendous service in helping find various bugs, and I am very grateful for that. With that said, here is the full changelog:

- added multiple office floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not
* removed the 200 employee limit in accordance with this new feature and all the optimizations done to the game

- added the ability to create game editions:
* the setup for this feature is available in the pricing drop-down box
* offering good value relative to the game's base price will provide you with extra cash, Reputation, and Opinion points
* filling your game with needlessly large amounts of editions will hurt your Reputation and Opinion
* offering very little value relative to the game's base price will hurt your Reputation and Opinion

- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player

* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge

- added the ability to create demo versions for your games:
* demos can be created during the Polishing stage of a games development cycle
* the demo will provide either a boost or a penalty to the game's Popularity points, depending on the quality of the game at the point of the demo's creation
* your Reputation level will act as a multiplier for the penalty and the bonus

- added a new advertisement type - Release Screenshots:
* this advertisement type costs nothing
* the result of this advertisement type depends on the quality of the game as well as your Reputation level
* the efficiency of his advertisement will decrease after every screenshot release
* releasing a lot of screenshots in a short period of time will reduce potential Popularity gain, since you're giving too much info to the players

- added a new mass advert type - Gameplay Trailer:
* the Popularity boost provided by this mass advert highly depends on the quality of the game
* it is the cheapest mass advert type and will aid greatly in making profitable games at the beginning of any playthrough provided the game is of a high enough quality

- added 4 new activities:
* Photography Course (provides Photography knowledge)
* Art Gallery Visit (provides Stylizing knowledge)
* AI programming course (provides Machine Learning knowledge)
* Parkour school visit (provides Parkour knowledge)

- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering, UI rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 50% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)

- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added the ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- added the ability to set up the amount of mass advertisement rounds to perform
- added mass advertisement info descbox to mass advertisement setup popup
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- added sounds for time control, popups
- added a confirmation popup that appears when trying to load a savefile with mods that are no longer present; due to the way it works it will display the missing mod names only for savefiles saved on version 1.1.0.0 (and later) of the game
- it is now possible to enter values into the platform production/support value boxes using your keyboard
- it is now possible to enter values into the server rent value box using your keyboard
- when a lot of themes are present, a popup will open instead of a drop-down menu (to allow modders to add as many themes as they want)
- right-clicking on MMO server renting, platform support/production buttons can now decrease/increase by 5 per each click
- adaptive standards now lower when games with lower quality are released, which fixes an issue where it is almost impossible to reach 100% in game scores in late game
- updated sounds for when something good or bad happens
- enabled object move sound in Expansion mode
- when loading a savefile it will now be paused regardless of the speed the game was saved at
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode
- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- increased maximum platform advertisement duration to 6 months (was 2 months)
- increased the amount of maximum visitors per day on small Game Convention booths
- managers will now report a price point one notch above the ideal price to ensure players make a profit
- hovering the mouse over a game project element in the project box will now display the largest remaining work chunk by skill in the current stage
- when a neutral rival goes defunct an element will be added to the event box (previously it would only show a popup if the rival was hostile to you), which also fixes the 'Ravioli & Pepperoni' campaign being impossible to finish
- text over residential buildings will no longer follow the mouse when hovering your mouse over them in Office Expansion mode
- improved multiple UI elements
- improved compatibility of mods that add genres/audiences without ensuring that all the other genres/mods have the genre-audience matches
- increased the amount of review remarks from 2 to 3 in accordance to the new game editions gameplay mechanic
- the task/project box now becomes hidden when there is nothing happening
- loan interest rate lowered to 8% per year (was 12% per year)
- the base sale amount was reduced to 12000 due to the addition of the new advertisement types
- fixed auto-assigning managers not displaying the result in the event box, instead creating a regular popup
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed non-player winners of the Annual Game Awards carrying out the speech the player has written (one could say it is a case of in-game plagiarism and is a feature, but it's not!)
- fixed time display until Annual Game Awards begin being off by 1 month (ie. 1 day remaining until it begins, but it shows 1 month)
- fixed being unable to view nominees after registering your own game for the Annual Game Awards
- fixed time display until registration for the Annual Game Awards being off by 1 month
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- fixed rival games not going off-market in the background when they would go bankrupt, which could lead to potential issues
- fixed "Radio Station Ads" mass advert type not unlocking
- fixed selecting just "New campaign" for an expansion pack not marking it as suitable for development
- fixed a minor UI glitch which was creating an unused descbox that wasn't displaying anything nor was removed until you'd quit to the main menu/load a savefile (and it would get created again then)
- fixed MMO expansion packs being pirateable
- fixed a crash that occured when opening certain menus with the keyboard bindings to them being unbound
- fixed being able to present an already-released game at a convention, which could potentially lead to a crash
- fixed changing the resolution while in some kind of tutorial potentially leading to a crash in specific scenarios
- fixed being able to start development on engines with nothing written in their names, resulting in issues like unable to revamp said engine
- fixed being able to start development with no names in certain circumstances
- fixed the VSync setting being "Disabled" while in reality it is enabled on the first game start
- (MODDING) fixed the Enabled/Disabled status display not update when toggling the mod state in the "Created mods" of the Workshop menu
- fixed unassigning teams in employee assignment mode not updating the scroller with UI elements for the employees that were unassigned
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods
- (LINUX) switched LuaJIT from 2.1.0-beta3 to 2.0.5 due to instability on the former version

Thank you for reading. I hope this update makes the game a lot more fun for you.
If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

I'm happy to announce that work on Update #30 is finished, and right now the update is in its last stage of development - testing. The discord community is being a great help in this regard, and are helping me find all sorts of issues that are then fixed. I would also like to say that a new build is now available on the 'develop' branch. The content you see there is final for Update #30.

Below is the changelog so far for Update #30:

- added multiple office floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not
* removed the 200 employee limit in accordance with this new feature and all the optimizations done to the game

- added the ability to create game editions:
* the setup for this feature is available in the pricing drop-down box
* offering good value relative to the game's base price will provide you with extra cash, Reputation, and Opinion points
* filling your game with needlessly large amounts of editions will hurt your Reputation and Opinion
* offering very little value relative to the game's base price will hurt your Reputation and Opinion

- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player

* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge

- added the ability to create demo versions for your games:
* demos can be created during the Polishing stage of a games development cycle
* the demo will provide either a boost or a penalty to the game's Popularity points, depending on the quality of the game at the point of the demo's creation
* your Reputation level will act as a multiplier for the penalty and the bonus

- added a new advertisement type - Release Screenshots:
* this advertisement type costs nothing
* the result of this advertisement type depends on the quality of the game as well as your Reputation level
* the efficiency of his advertisement will decrease after every screenshot release
* releasing a lot of screenshots in a short period of time will reduce potential Popularity gain, since you're giving too much info to the players

- added a new mass advert type - Gameplay Trailer:
* the Popularity boost provided by this mass advert highly depends on the quality of the game
* it is the cheapest mass advert type and will aid greatly in making profitable games at the beginning of any playthrough provided the game is of a high enough quality

- added 4 new activities:
* Photography Course (provides Photography knowledge)
* Art Gallery Visit (provides Stylizing knowledge)
* AI programming course (provides Machine Learning knowledge)
* Parkour school visit (provides Parkour knowledge)

- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering, UI rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 50% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)

- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added the ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- added the ability to set up the amount of mass advertisement rounds to perform
- added mass advertisement info descbox to mass advertisement setup popup
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- added sounds for time control, popups
- it is now possible to enter values into the platform production/support value boxes using your keyboard
- it is now possible to enter values into the server rent value box using your keyboard
- when a lot of themes are present, a popup will open instead of a drop-down menu (to allow modders to add as many themes as they want)
- right-clicking on MMO server renting, platform support/production buttons can now decrease/increase by 5 per each click
- adaptive standards now lower when games with lower quality are released, which fixes an issue where it is almost impossible to reach 100% in game scores in late game
- updated sounds for when something good or bad happens
- enabled object move sound in Expansion mode
- when loading a savefile it will now be paused regardless of the speed the game was saved at
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode
- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- increased maximum platform advertisement duration to 6 months (was 2 months)
- increased the amount of maximum visitors per day on small Game Convention booths
- managers will now report a price point one notch above the ideal price to ensure players make a profit
- hovering the mouse over a game project element in the project box will now display the largest remaining work chunk by skill in the current stage
- when a neutral rival goes defunct an element will be added to the event box (previously it would only show a popup if the rival was hostile to you), which also fixes the 'Ravioli & Pepperoni' campaign being impossible to finish
- text over residential buildings will no longer follow the mouse when hovering your mouse over them in Office Expansion mode
- improved multiple UI elements
- improved compatibility of mods that add genres/audiences without ensuring that all the other genres/mods have the genre-audience matches
- increased the amount of review remarks from 2 to 3 in accordance to the new game editions gameplay mechanic
- the task/project box now becomes hidden when there is nothing happening
- loan interest rate lowered to 8% per year (was 12% per year)
- fixed auto-assigning managers not displaying the result in the event box, instead creating a regular popup
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed non-player winners of the Annual Game Awards carrying out the speech the player has written (one could say it is a case of in-game plagiarism and is a feature, but it's not!)
- fixed time display until Annual Game Awards begin being off by 1 month (ie. 1 day remaining until it begins, but it shows 1 month)
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- fixed "Radio Station Ads" mass advert type not unlocking
- fixed selecting just "New campaign" for an expansion pack not marking it as suitable for development
- fixed a minor UI glitch which was creating an unused descbox that wasn't displaying anything nor was removed until you'd quit to the main menu/load a savefile (and it would get created again then)
- fixed a crash that occured when opening certain menus with the keyboard bindings to them being unbound
- fixed being able to present an already-released game at a convention, which could potentially lead to a crash
- fixed changing the resolution while in some kind of tutorial potentially leading to a crash in specific scenarios
- fixed being able to start development on engines with nothing written in their names, resulting in issues like unable to revamp said engine
- fixed being able to start development with no names in certain circumstances
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods

Follow me on twitter!
Come join the Game Dev Studio Discord server!

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

A new build is now available on the 'develop' branch. It adds the Game Editions mentioned in the "What's next? 7" community post. You will also notice it also changes the look of the UI in a lot of places.

As always please keep in mind that content on the 'develop' branch is not guaranteed to be stable, so if you run into any bugs or crashes please report them here!

Below is the changelog so far for Update #30:
- added multiple office floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not
* removed the 200 employee limit in accordance with this new feature and all the optimizations done to the game

- added the ability to create game editions:
* the setup for this feature is available in the pricing drop-down box
* offering good value relative to the game's base price will provide you with extra cash, Reputation, and Opinion points
* filling your game with needlessly large amounts of editions will hurt your Reputation and Opinion
* offering very little value relative to the game's base price will hurt your Reputation and Opinion

- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player

* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge

- added the ability to create demo versions for your games:
* demos can be created during the Polishing stage of a games development cycle
* the demo will provide either a boost or a penalty to the game's Popularity points, depending on the quality of the game at the point of the demo's creation
* your Reputation level will act as a multiplier for the penalty and the bonus

- added a new advertisement type - Release Screenshots:
* this advertisement type costs nothing
* the result of this advertisement type depends on the quality of the game as well as your Reputation level
* the efficiency of his advertisement will decrease after every screenshot release
* releasing a lot of screenshots in a short period of time will reduce potential Popularity gain, since you're giving too much info to the players

- added a new mass advert type - Gameplay Trailer:
* the Popularity boost provided by this mass advert highly depends on the quality of the game
* it is the cheapest mass advert type and will aid greatly in making profitable games at the beginning of any playthrough provided the game is of a high enough quality

- added 4 new activities:
* Photography Course (provides Photography knowledge)
* Art Gallery Visit (provides Stylizing knowledge)
* AI programming course (provides Machine Learning knowledge)
* Parkour school visit (provides Parkour knowledge)

- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering, UI rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 50% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)

- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added the ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- added the ability to set up the amount of mass advertisement rounds to perform
- added mass advertisement info descbox to mass advertisement setup popup
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- added sounds for time control, popups
- adaptive standards now lower when games with lower quality are released, which fixes an issue where it is almost impossible to reach 100% in game scores in late game
- updated sounds for when something good or bad happens
- enabled object move sound in Expansion mode
- when loading a savefile it will now be paused regardless of the speed the game was saved at
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode
- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- increased maximum platform advertisement duration to 6 months (was 2 months)
- increased the amount of maximum visitors per day on small Game Convention booths
- managers will now report a price point one notch above the ideal price to ensure players make a profit
- hovering the mouse over a game project element in the project box will now display the largest remaining work chunk by skill in the current stage
- when a neutral rival goes defunct an element will be added to the event box (previously it would only show a popup if the rival was hostile to you), which also fixes the 'Ravioli & Pepperoni' campaign being impossible to finish
- text over residential buildings will no longer follow the mouse when hovering your mouse over them in Office Expansion mode
- improved multiple UI elements
- improved compatibility of mods that add genres/audiences without ensuring that all the other genres/mods have the genre-audience matches
- increased the amount of review remarks from 2 to 3 in accordance to the new game editions gameplay mechanic
- the task/project box now becomes hidden when there is nothing happening
- fixed auto-assigning managers not displaying the result in the event box, instead creating a regular popup
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- fixed "Radio Station Ads" mass advert type not unlocking
- fixed a minor UI glitch which was creating an unused descbox that wasn't displaying anything nor was removed until you'd quit to the main menu/load a savefile (and it would get created again then)
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods

Thanks for reading!

Hello!

Recently people have been bringing up the fact that they are having trouble reaching 100% of a particular Quality type in game reviews after releasing games. This is a quick community post to let everyone facing this issue that this is a bug and is currently being looked into. You can expect this to be fixed in Update #30. In addition to this fix, Update #30 will be the biggest game update so far, and is going to bring a lot of new content and replayability value.

Follow me on twitter!
Come join the Game Dev Studio Discord server!

Thanks for reading!

Hello!

A new build is now available on the 'develop' branch. Changes since the last one are the inclusion of the ability to release screenshots to market your game(s), and the addition of a new mass advert type - gameplay trailer. These new advertisement options are using placeholder assets while I'm waiting on the artist to deliver them, so bear with me!

Below is the full changelog so far for Update #30:
- added multiple office floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not
* removed the 200 employee limit in accordance with this new feature and all the optimizations done to the game

- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player

* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge

- added the ability to create demo versions for your games:
* demos can be created during the Polishing stage of a games development cycle
* the demo will provide either a boost or a penalty to the game's Popularity points, depending on the quality of the game at the point of the demo's creation
* your Reputation level will act as a multiplier for the penalty and the bonus

- added a new advertisement type - Release Screenshots:
* this advertisement type costs nothing
* the result of this advertisement type depends on the quality of the game as well as your Reputation level
* the efficiency of his advertisement will decrease after every screenshot release
* releasing a lot of screenshots in a short period of time will reduce potential Popularity gain, since you're giving too much info to the players

- added a new mass advert type - Gameplay Trailer:
* the Popularity boost provided by this mass advert highly depends on the quality of the game
* it is the cheapest mass advert type and will aid greatly in making profitable games at the beginning of any playthrough provided the game is of a high enough quality

- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 47% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)

- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added the ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- added the ability to set up the amount of mass advertisement rounds to perform
- added mass advertisement info descbox to mass advertisement setup popup
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- added sounds for time control, popups
- updated sounds for when something good or bad happens
- enabled object move sound in Expansion mode
- when loading a savefile it will now be paused regardless of the speed the game was saved at
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode
- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- increased maximum platform advertisement duration to 6 months (was 2 months)
- increased the amount of maximum visitors per day on small Game Convention booths
- managers will now report a price point one notch above the ideal price to ensure players make a profit
- hovering the mouse over a game project element in the project box will now display the largest remaining work chunk by skill in the current stage
- when a neutral rival goes defunct an element will be added to the event box (previously it would only show a popup if the rival was hostile to you), which also fixes the 'Ravioli & Pepperoni' campaign being impossible to finish
- text over residential buildings will no longer follow the mouse when hovering your mouse over them in Office Expansion mode
- improved multiple UI elements
- improved compatibility of mods that add genres/audiences without ensuring that all the other genres/mods have the genre-audience matches
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- fixed "Radio Station Ads" mass advert type not unlocking
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods

Follow me on twitter!
Come join the Game Dev Studio Discord server!

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This is a quick post to let you guys know that a new build is available on the 'develop' branch. The new features found in this build is the ability to adjust the amount of mass advertisement rounds (repetitions of the entire campaign), and the addition of a button which inherits the settings of the related game that you've picked.

As always please keep in mind that content on the 'develop' branch is not guaranteed to be stable, so if you run into any bugs or crashes please report them here!

Below is the full changelog for Update #30 so far:
- added multiple office floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not
* removed the 200 employee limit in accordance with this new feature and all the optimizations done to the game

- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player

* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge

- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 47% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)

- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added the ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- added the ability to set up the amount of mass advertisement rounds to perform
- added mass advertisement info descbox to mass advertisement setup popup
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- added a button for inheriting the selected related games feature setup to the New Game creation menu
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode

- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- increased maximum platform advertisement duration to 6 months (was 2 months)
- when a neutral rival goes defunct an element will be added to the event box (previously it would only show a popup if the rival was hostile to you), which also fixes the 'Ravioli & Pepperoni' campaign being impossible to finish
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods

Thanks for reading!

Hello!

I'd like to let you know that the 'develop' branch has a new build. The multiple building floors feature was thoroughly tested by the community, so the content on the branch is relatively free of issues.

The new build features some balance tweaks and the addition of several new events that can further boost the popularity of your game.

With these features in place, I move on to working on the last feature on my to-do list: game editions. You'll be able to create new game editions and select what goes into them. Once this feature is finished, I'll be putting it up on the 'develop' branch like I did with the features present there now.

If you haven't joined the game's Discord server yet, you can do so here!

Below is the changelog so far for Update #30:
- added multiple building floors:
* purchasable in Expansion mode
* most buildings can have up to 3 floors, with some very large ones limited to 2
* can be purchased regardless of whether your office is fully expanded or not

- added new sub-events to game projects that occur under certain criteria:
* Word of Mouth - has a chance of occuring when a game with a rating of at least 8/10 is released:
^ it boosts the Popularity of the game based on how close it is to a 10/10 rating and the Reputation of the player

* multiple various knowledge-related boosts that have a chance of occuring when a game with a lot of knowledge is released:
Gun Nut Enthusiasm - Firearms knowledge
AI Bonanza - Machine Learning knowledge
Breathtaking Photorealism - Photography knowledge
Aging like Wine - Stylizing knowledge

- greatly increased the amount of Knowledge gained from activities:
* most activities now grant more than twice as much Knowledge points
* Airsoft now grants Stealth and Military Jargon knowledge
* Paintball now grants Stealth knowledge
* Camping now grants Primitive Technology knowledge

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 47% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)

- added a "Design new" button to the genre selection popup
- added a HUD button that leads right to the game conventions menu
- added ability to start price research from the project interaction combobox
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen
- can now click and hold on mouse-hovered objects for 0.5 seconds to start moving them while in office expansion mode

- removed the "N employees can't reach the office exit" dialog when trying to exit Expansion mode with some of the employees blocked off somehow, they will now instead be returned to their workplace
- enabled object sell sound
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- when an employee retires with the "skip retire dialogue" Office Preference enabled, the element will now display which team they were part of (if any)
- job seekers are now more likely to appear when searching for an employee when selecting interests they should have
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- fixed scheduled events not activating properly under certain circumstances
- fixed a potential memory leak with pedestrians enabled
- fixed incorrect scaling on game convention result popup on aspect ratios that are anything but 16:9
- fixed incorrect scaling on role filter UI elements in the employee assignment menu
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods

Thanks for reading!

I'd like to let you guys know that the multiple floors feature is now on the 'develop' branch. If you would like to try it out and give feedback, that'd be very appreciated! In order to try out this new feature, switch over to the 'develop' branch by opening the properties of 'Game Dev Studio' on Steam, going into the 'BETAS' tab, and picking the 'develop' branch in the drop-down menu.

Please keep in mind that savefiles saved on the new game version (1.0.8.0) will NOT be compatible with the game version that is currently on the regular, stable branch. (1.0.7.7)
If you want to try out the new feature and be able to load back to your savefiles on the version present on the stable branch, I suggest either starting a new playthrough, or loading an existing one, saving it, and naming it appropriately to not accidentally overwrite the old one.

As always please keep in mind that content on the 'develop' branch is not guaranteed to be stable, so if you run into any bugs or crashes please report them here!

Here is the changelog for Update #30 so far:

- added multiple building floors
- mouse-hovering over a building in expansion mode will now display some general information of that office in the upper left corner of the screen

- optimizations:
* optimized the lighting compute, developer rendering handling, textbox rendering
* when combined, these optimizations bring a performance improvement of up to 47% or more (may be more or less depending on your setup)
* reduced memory usage by pathfinding and lighting compute threads, this also reduces loading/new game initialization times

- enabled object sell sound
- added the ability to disable employee retirement in Freeplay, this can be toggled at any time in the 'General' tab of the Options menu in the Freeplay mode
- fixed time until employees ask for raises being reset after loading (which meant it could've taken them more or less time to ask for it depending on how much time there was left)
- fixed sale display bars occasionally displaying an out-of-bounds bar
- fixed monthly costs being incorrectly calculated, with some objects adding costs that they shouldn't even add
- fixed incorrect rendering of the office workplace display in employee assignment mode
- fixed prefab editor incorrectly saving wall positioning
- fixed prefab editor not tracking mouse movement when placing walls/floors
- fixed attempting to find a publisher for a game not working properly later in the game
- fixed expansion mode display disappearing when moving an object
- fixed finishing the tutorial not granting the 'Back to Basics' achievement
- fixed finishing the 'Introduction' scenario on the hard difficulty not being subject to granting the 'Mount Everest' achievement
- (MODDING) added gameProject event FILL_GAME_INFO_SCROLLER, fired when opening the Project info menu; 4 arguments: project object, scroller containing all the elements, category element, finances element
- (MODDING) gameProject event OPENED_INTERACTION_MENU now has the comboBox instance argument passed into it (2nd argument, 1st is the project object)
- (MODDING) fixed loadComponents calling incorrect load and save methods

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This is a quick post to let you guys know what's happening with the development of Update #30.
The current feature I'm working on are multiple building floors. Progress is going nicely and I estimate that I will be putting up this new feature on the 'develop' branch in about 1-2 weeks. The main part is pretty much done, right now I need to add some more UI elements that will make it easier to understand what's happening in offices between the floors, and ensure that it all works well.

The biggest difference between the development cycle of previous updates and Update #30, is that I will be taking more time to release it. So while you will be able to try out the new content on the 'develop' branch, it will be officially released later than usual. The good thing about this is I will have much more time to test out the feature(s) I add, and I won't feel like I'm on a time constraint for the new content.

Aside from that I also bring good news for people with old/slow computers: so far Update #30 will bring a performance uplift of up to 37% over Update #29! The optimizations increased FPS in that particular scenario from 140 to 191. As usual your mileage may vary and the figure I mention here was measured on a laptop with a dual-core 4th generation intel processor.

I am super excited for these optimizations because for the 1.0 release I set myself a target of 150 employees with acceptable performance. With these optimizations, the employee count target may as well go up to 300, and this is perfect because with multiple floors come lots of new additional workplaces!
Players that are fine with having up to 100 employees are in for much better performance, and players that want huge offices and ridiculous amounts of employees will get just that!

Thanks for reading!

Hello!

This post is a recap of all the changes in Update #29 and all the patches that followed its release. Going through multiple patch notes can be annoying, so I figured I'd do one big post in which I mention all the changes. The consequent patches brought significant improvements for the performance, which I thought was worthy enough of a mention in one separate big post, so here is the full change log of Update #29 with the changes in all of its patches accumulated:

New gameplay mechanic: Piracy

An issue as big in Game Dev Studio as it is in real life. A lot of people pirate games before they decide to purchase them in real life, and now they do too in Game Dev Studio. If your games are good - have no fear, your piracy rates will be low! If they're bad, however, now that's a whole different story...
This gameplay mechanic will add more challenge to the late game stage, when people have a high Reputation level and a lot of funds. Players can additionally counteract the piracy rates of their games by implementing Digital Rights Management (DRM) into their games, but that doesn't mean that your customers will be happy about that either. This directly extends into a new player stat: Opinion.

New player stat: Opinion

The Reputation stat in Game Dev Studio in a way acts as fame. The higher your Reputation value is, the higher your sales are because you are more well-known. This type of currency is hard to attain and easy to lose.
With that said, there is now a new player stat: Opinion. This stat affects what people think of you as a company and it directly ties into the Piracy mechanic introduced in this update. The Opinion stat determines how badly your games will be pirated in case they are not good, or your customers are outraged by some kind of decision you've made. Just like Reputation, Opinion is hard to attain and easy to lose. Releasing lots of bad games will surely bring a hit to your Opinion value. This is further amplified by your Reputation - the higher your Reputation is, the harder it is to attain more Opinion points, and easier to lose it.
Gone are the days when players with a very high Reputation level would get a slap on the wrist by releasing bad games. Releasing lots of bad games now will result in a low opinion value, which in turn will drive piracy rates of said games sky-high.

A re-make of the HUD.

It is no secret that people love with their eyes and let's be real here: the HUD in Game Dev Studio was not exactly very appealing to the eye. If you're going to be spending hours looking at the HUD as you play the game, then it should look better! With Update #29 this is addressed: the games HUD has been remade and is more intuitive, and easier to navigate both visually and with your peripherals.
Player stats are now displayed at the top with additional tooltips when hovering the mouse over certain elements, and all the buttons leading to various menus are now positioned at the bottom. Simple, yet so much better than what was there before.



A new Tutorial stage.

People were confused as to what all the employee stats do, and I don't blame them with how many there are. Now there's a new tutorial stage which shows you where to check them, what they do, and how much progress they have towards their next level.

With that said, here is the full changelog:

- added Piracy:
* the base sale amount (which is then affected by a multitude of various factors) was increased from 10000 to 13000 in accordance with this new mechanic
* the Piracy rate of every game is affected by your Opinion level, how good the game is, and can be delayed by implementing DRM:
* the time until DRM is bypassed depends on several factors including by your Opinion level (if people hate you, the pirates will want to crack your games faster just to spite you!)
* Piracy only affects non-MMO game projects

- made player platforms a lot easier to succeed on:
* base chance to get a new developer every month for a player platform increased from 10% to 15%
* the amount of people that will switch over to a player platform increased to 200% (ie. 1000 instead of 500)
* base amount of people that can switch to a player platform increased from 5000 to 10000

- added the Opinion stat:
* it is gained by making good games and properly managing your MMOs
* it maxes out at 1000 and has the lowest value of 1
* it is lost by making bad games, and not managing your MMOs properly, having bribe offers revealed, and being busted while shilling
* it is a general indicator of how good opinion of your studio is and affects how heavily your games will be pirated
* when loading a pre-1.0.7.0 savefile, the Opinion value will be 500 (half of maximum)

- sequels and expansion packs can now boost the popularity of the game they're made for:
* in the case of an expansion pack: the efficacy of the boost depends on how close the expansion pack is to completion
* in the case of a sequel: the efficacy of the boost depends on the scale of the new game

- HUD remake:
* the top part of the HUD is now clickable and displays extra info when hovering over the various stat bars
* the bottom part of the HUD has all the functionality that was in the game before

- optimizations:
* optimized visibility handling of employees and pedestrians
* optimized the animation library (used for pedestrians, employees)
* when coupled together, these optimizations bring a minimum performance uplift of up to 30% or more (your mileage may vary)
* at this point the game runs two times better than it did at launch!

- updated the Expansion UI
- updated the Employee Assignment UI to be more intuitive and easier to use
- extended the "Employees" tutorial to acquaint the player with the "Employee info" menu, where a lot of employee info (ie. stats, skills, interests, attributes, etc.) is displayed
- increased advertisement strength of contractors; contract jobs are now more worth it
- added a new task for game projects: DRM
- development costs now track QA costs as well
- loan interest rate reduced from 5% to 1%
- the game project info popup has been improved to show more info
- overall MMO server complexity value increase from MMO tasks reduced to 80% from 100%
- chance that a platform specialist will become busy with another project each month when available reduced to 5% from 30%
- reduced specialist busy time range from 1 year to 3 years to half a year to 1.5 years
- showing time until a platform specialist becomes available
- "CGI Trailer" advertisement now provides a hype increase boost to sequels with a good previous game
- increased Popularity value on C-EXPI platforms, which should help them not become bankrupt as easily
- managers will now always tell you whether or not the price for a game is too low/too high when you go to release it
- chance that an employee will leave to work elsewhere in the event of the players Reputation dropping reduced to 10% from 35%
- reduced MMO database corruption event chance to 0.5% per week (was 1% per week)
- capped MMO database corruption event chance to a maximum of 2% (was uncapped, resulting in potentially very high chances the more complex a MMO is)
- fixed the "Employee" tutorial not working when loading a saved game that was saved at a certain point
- fixed month fund change not being saved
- fixed the upcoming game awards notice disappearing after changing the resolution/window mode
- fixed 'CGI Trailer' advertisement not applying a penalty when making a sequel to a game that was bad
- fixed certain advertisement related functionality not being executed when a game that has re-entered the market goes off-market
- fixed a game going off-market not clearing some Let's Player related data if any of them were doing playthroughs at that moment, resulting in potential crashes later
- fixed employees not getting to work after returning from being away
- various UI fixes and improvements
- can no longer create savefiles with nothing in their name
- optimizations mentioned in Patch #2 and #3 bring a performance improvement of 30% or more in CPU-bottlenecked scenarios


If you're interested what's next in store for Game Dev Studio in terms of content, have a look here!
Thanks for reading!

Hello!

Content for Update #30 is currently in development, and I wanted to let you guys know of the change in the scheduling of content updates for Game Dev Studio.

Previously I would develop about one new feature and release it as an update. While this meant you guys would get new content quickly, it also meant that sometimes these features were not well-balanced because they were pushed out as soon as possible. Starting with Update #30 I will be taking more time to release updates, since the majority on Discord voted in favor of this.

What this means for you is that content updates will be fewer in-between, but they will bring more content than before. Getting into the game after an update is released now will have more "wow" effect for you, as well as have more content for you to play with and discover.

Patches for the game will be released as usual: when bugs are reported I make them my #1 priority. I usually drop everything I'm doing, fix the bugs, and upload a patch fixing them as soon as possible. So whenever a bug is reported you can rest assured that it will be fixed very quickly. (just like before)

The new content I'm currently working on for Update #30 are multiple building floors. You'll be able to acquire additional floors for buildings! You might have noticed that the game has been receiving a lot of optimizations lately, and that is no coincidence. The reason is simple: the game needs to run better in order to accommodate two or three times more employees. The better I can make the game run, the better the experience will be for everyone with employee counts beyond 100. Naturally this means optimizing everything to the best of my ability, so that even on a low-spec computer the game would be playable with 200 or even 300 employees.

With that said, besides working on new content I am also optimizing the game. Despite the game increasing in complexity due to the addition of multiple building floors, the optimizations I'm applying to the game are yielding extra performance. Rest assured I will do my best in making the game run as good as I possibly can!

Thanks for reading!

Hello!

This small patch fixes a couple of issues and makes the "database corruption" MMO event less of a nuisance.

- reduced MMO database corruption event chance to 0.5% per week (was 1% per week)
- capped MMO database corruption event chance to a maximum of 2% (was uncapped, resulting in potentially very high chances the more complex a MMO is)
- fixed employees standing still in certain cases while the walking animation plays out
- fixed incorrect positioning of the yearly goal tracking HUD element
- fixed employees not getting to work after returning from being away

I would like to thank the people that have reported the issues fixed in this patch.
If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hello!

This small patch fixes a few issues.

- fixed object culling sometimes hiding objects it shouldn't have hidden and optimized it too (lower CPU load)
- fixed MMO expansion packs being pirateable

I would like to thank the people that have reported the issues fixed in this patch.
If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hello!

This announcement is a congregation of bugfixes released today following the release of the optimization patches (#2 and #3). The fixes mentioned here were an oversight on my part as a result of the optimizations.

- fixed employees standing still outside the office when hired
- fixed a crash that occured when starting a motivational speech with one of the participants in a conversation with another employee
- fixed a crash that occured under certain circumstances related to the status icons of an employee

I apologize for the issues that arose as a result of the optimizations, but it should be smooth-sailing from here. If you come across any more issues be sure to report them here.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch further optimizes the game in preparation for the multiple building floors feature.

- optimized several systems:
* optimized employee visual update logic, avatar animation logic, developer path recompute queueing, object drawing loop, and developer actions
* when coupled together, these optimizations bring a performance uplift of 18% or more (depends on the situation, your mileage may vary)

- chance that an employee will leave to work elsewhere in the event of the players Reputation dropping reduced to 10% from 35%
- fixed object culling not working properly
- fixed tech discussion conversation sometimes not working properly

If you've been following the update logs of all the updates closely, you might be aware that the game has received numerous optimization updates. At this point I am fairly sure that the game performs two times better than it did at launch!

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

This small patch addresses a minor HUD issue and optimizes the game some more in preparation for the multiple building floors feature.

- optimized several systems:
* optimized visibility handling of employees and pedestrians
* optimized the animation library (used for pedestrians, employees)
* when coupled together, these three optimizations bring a minimum performance uplift of 10% (your mileage may vary), with some systems seeing an uplift of up to 25%

- fixed depth of objective notification element in the HUD (sometimes it would be under the objectives HUD element)

If you run into any bugs or crashes make sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

With update #29 released it's time to talk about what's next for Game Dev Studio.

#1 - Game editions. Ever wanted to release a "premium" edition of your game? With this feature implemented, you will be able to in one of the future updates! The general balance of the game will remain the same if you choose to just keep releasing just the regular game editions, but releasing multiple editions of your games may bring you extra cash and reputation, or it might accomplish the opposite...

#2 - Multiple building floors. People have been asking for larger offices, and I hear you! In one of the future updates I will add multiple floors to buildings, so that your employee count can go from 100 to 200! Just don't forget that you'll need to pay their salaries...

#3 - More random events.
As mentioned in What's next? #6, more random events will be added to the game.

#4 - Trading cards, emoticons, and backgrounds. With each update of Game Dev Studio you got more and more value in terms of replayability and content for the same price you paid when you purchased it. With the addition of trading cards (and all that they entail), you'll get even more value outside of the game itself!

With all that written down, I have to say I'm quite eager about implementing multiple building floors. This is something I considered when I was developing the game, but brushed aside in favor of adding more gameplay mechanics and focusing more on the game development side of things. With all these updates released, and with all the new features implemented it's time to get back to the feature I once considered adding to the game.
As always, the features listed here may be implemented out of order and you might see 2 or more features be added to the game in one update.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This small patch fixes 2 issues reported today.

- fixed a crash that occurred when customers would get suspicious of the legitimacy of the reviews of the players games
- fixed Managers constantly bugging you about the price of a game being too low/too high when attempting to release a game with the price not being the one suggested by the Manager, making it impossible to release the game on any price but the one the Manager suggests

I would like to thank the people that have reported the bugs fixed in this patch. If you run into any bugs and/or crashes, be sure to report them here.
Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

Update #29 brings a new gameplay mechanic and improvements to existing game elements just as promised!

New gameplay mechanic: Piracy

An issue as big in Game Dev Studio as it is in real life. A lot of people pirate games before they decide to purchase them in real life, and now they do too in Game Dev Studio. If your games are good - have no fear, your piracy rates will be low! If they're bad, however, now that's a whole different story...
This gameplay mechanic will add more challenge to the late game stage, when people have a high Reputation level and a lot of funds. Players can additionally counteract the piracy rates of their games by implementing Digital Rights Management (DRM) into their games, but that doesn't mean that your customers will be happy about that either. This directly extends into a new player stat: Opinion.

New player stat: Opinion

The Reputation stat in Game Dev Studio in a way acts as fame. The higher your Reputation value is, the higher your sales are because you are more well-known. This type of currency is hard to attain and easy to lose.
With that said, there is now a new player stat: Opinion. This stat affects what people think of you as a company and it directly ties into the Piracy mechanic introduced in this update. The Opinion stat determines how badly your games will be pirated in case they are not good, or your customers are outraged by some kind of decision you've made. Just like Reputation, Opinion is hard to attain and easy to lose. Releasing lots of bad games will surely bring a hit to your Opinion value. This is further amplified by your Reputation - the higher your Reputation is, the harder it is to attain more Opinion points, and easier to lose it.
Gone are the days when players with a very high Reputation level would get a slap on the wrist by releasing bad games. Releasing lots of bad games now will result in a low opinion value, which in turn will drive piracy rates of said games sky-high.

A re-make of the HUD.

It is no secret that people love with their eyes and let's be real here: the HUD in Game Dev Studio was not exactly very appealing to the eye. If you're going to be spending hours looking at the HUD as you play the game, then it should look better! With Update #29 this is addressed: the games HUD has been remade and is more intuitive, and easier to navigate both visually and with your peripherals.
Player stats are now displayed at the top with additional tooltips when hovering the mouse over certain elements, and all the buttons leading to various menus are now positioned at the bottom. Simple, yet so much better than what was there before.



A new Tutorial stage.

People were confused as to what all the employee stats do, and I don't blame them with how many there are. Now there's a new tutorial stage which shows you where to check them, what they do, and how much progress they have towards their next level.

With that said, here is the full changelog:

- added Piracy:
* the base sale amount (which is then affected by a multitude of various factors) was increased from 10000 to 13000 in accordance with this new mechanic
* the Piracy rate of every game is affected by your Opinion level, how good the game is, and can be delayed by implementing DRM:
* the time until DRM is bypassed depends on several factors including by your Opinion level (if people hate you, the pirates will want to crack your games faster just to spite you!)
* Piracy only affects non-MMO game projects

- made player platforms a lot easier to succeed on:
* base chance to get a new developer every month for a player platform increased from 10% to 15%
* the amount of people that will switch over to a player platform increased to 200% (ie. 1000 instead of 500)
* base amount of people that can switch to a player platform increased from 5000 to 10000

- added the Opinion stat:
* it is gained by making good games and properly managing your MMOs
* it maxes out at 1000 and has the lowest value of 1
* it is lost by making bad games, and not managing your MMOs properly, having bribe offers revealed, and being busted while shilling
* it is a general indicator of how good opinion of your studio is and affects how heavily your games will be pirated
* when loading a pre-1.0.7.0 savefile, the Opinion value will be 500 (half of maximum)

- sequels and expansion packs can now boost the popularity of the game they're made for:
* in the case of an expansion pack: the efficacy of the boost depends on how close the expansion pack is to completion
* in the case of a sequel: the efficacy of the boost depends on the scale of the new game

- HUD remake:
* the top part of the HUD is now clickable and displays extra info when hovering over the various stat bars
* the bottom part of the HUD has all the functionality that was in the game before

- updated the Expansion UI
- updated the Employee Assignment UI to be more intuitive and easier to use
- extended the "Employees" tutorial to acquaint the player with the "Employee info" menu, where a lot of employee info (ie. stats, skills, interests, attributes, etc.) is displayed
- increased advertisement strength of contractors; contract jobs are now more worth it
- added a new task for game projects: DRM
- development costs now track QA costs as well
- loan interest rate reduced from 5% to 1%
- the game project info popup has been improved to show more info
- overall MMO server complexity value increase from MMO tasks reduced to 80% from 100%
- chance that a platform specialist will become busy with another project each month when available reduced to 5% from 30%
- reduced specialist busy time range from 1 year to 3 years to half a year to 1.5 years
- showing time until a platform specialist becomes available
- "CGI Trailer" advertisement now provides a hype increase boost to sequels with a good previous game
- increased Popularity value on C-EXPI platforms, which should help them not become bankrupt as easily
- managers will now always tell you whether or not the price for a game is too low/too high when you go to release it
- fixed the "Employee" tutorial not working when loading a saved game that was saved at a certain point
- fixed month fund change not being saved
- fixed the upcoming game awards notice disappearing after changing the resolution/window mode
- fixed 'CGI Trailer' advertisement not applying a penalty when making a sequel to a game that was bad
- fixed certain advertisement related functionality not being executed when a game that has re-entered the market goes off-market
- fixed a game going off-market not clearing some Let's Player related data if any of them were doing playthroughs at that moment, resulting in potential crashes later
- various UI fixes and improvements
- can no longer create savefiles with nothing in their name

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the visual update!

Hey everyone!

Work on 'Update #29' is nearly finished, and right now I'm in the process of improving the UI of an area that saw the least love: the employee management menu.
Aside from all the changes listed in 'Progress update #22' this update will also feature an updated Expansion mode UI and numerous other UI improvements. It will also feature several balance adjustments that make it somewhat easier to play.
The update will be released in less than two weeks, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

I'm pleased to announce that the upcoming 'Update #29' is now on the 'develop' branch. As always please keep in mind that the content you see on the 'develop' branch might not be stable. You can opt into the 'develop' branch by going to the properties of 'Game Dev Studio' in Steam, switching to the "BETAS" tab and enabling 'develop' from the drop-down menu. If you run into any bugs or crashes make sure to report them here.

The current changelog is:

- added Piracy:
* the base sale amount (which is then affected by a multitude of various factors) was increased from 10000 to 13000 in accordance with this new mechanic
* the Piracy rate of every game is affected by your Opinion level, how good the game is, and can be delayed by implementing DRM:
* the time until DRM is bypassed depends on several factors including by your Opinion level (if people hate you, the pirates will want to crack your games faster just to spite you!)
* Piracy only affects non-MMO game projects

- made player platforms a lot easier to succeed on:
* base chance to get a new developer every month for a player platform increased from 10% to 15%
* the amount of people that will switch over to a player platform increased to 200% (ie. 1000 instead of 500)
* base amount of people that can switch to a player platform increased from 5000 to 10000

- added the Opinion stat:
* it is gained by making good games and properly managing your MMOs
* it maxes out at 1000 and has the lowest value of 1
* it is lost by making bad games, and not managing your MMOs properly, having bribe offers revealed, and being busted while shilling
* it is a general indicator of how good opinion of your studio is and affects how heavily your games will be pirated
* when loading a pre-1.0.7.0 savefile, the Opinion value will be 500 (half of maximum)

- sequels and expansion packs can now boost the popularity of the game they're made for:
* in the case of an expansion pack: the efficacy of the boost depends on how close the expansion pack is to completion
* in the case of a sequel: the efficacy of the boost depends on the scale of the new game

- HUD remake:
* the top part of the HUD is now clickable and displays extra info when hovering over the various stat bars
* the bottom part of the HUD has all the functionality that was in the game before

- extended the "Employees" tutorial to acquaint the player with the "Employee info" menu, where a lot of employee info (ie. stats, skills, interests, attributes, etc.) is displayed
- increased advertisement strength of contractors; contract jobs are now more worth it
- added a new task for game projects: DRM
- development costs now track QA costs as well
- the game project info popup has been improved to show more info
- overall MMO server complexity value increase from MMO tasks reduced to 80% from 100%
- fixed the "Employee" tutorial not working when loading a saved game that was saved at a certain point
- fixed month fund change not being saved
- fixed the upcoming game awards notice disappearing after changing the resolution/window mode
- various UI fixes and improvements

Thanks for reading and testing the game on the 'develop' branch!

Hello! This hotfix addresses an issue that arose in Update #28 as a result of optimization.

- fixed "Firmware update" element in the project box not disappearing after finishing, resulting in being able to crash the game if choosing to cancel it when it is finished

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

In yesterday's "Progress update" community post I mentioned that there's a HUD remake in the works for Update #29. As of today its implementation is finished, so I can show what it looks like to you guys.



Compared to the previous HUD, that's quite the contrast in looks and intuitiveness, isn't it?
The new HUD will feature tooltips for player stats in the top part, and all the functionality you know in the bottom part of it.
You might also have noticed there's a new bar aside from Funds and Reputation in the top part that wasn't present on the previous HUD. I'll let you speculate on what that is. ;)

Once I'm done adjusting the Scenarios to the new HUD (which shouldn't take long), I'll get on with making sure the new Piracy mechanic is balanced well, and then this update will become available on the 'develop' branch. I estimate that you'll be able to try it out in no more than 1.5 weeks. As always keep in mind that estimations are just that: estimations. The real time until it's available might differ either way.

Thanks for reading!

Hey all! It has been some time since the upcoming content has been announced and I'd like to give you all an update on what's happening.

The Piracy mechanic is almost finished, right now all I need to do with it is add some more dialogue related to it and make sure that the balancing is not off. Like mentioned in "What's next? #6" this gameplay mechanic will add more difficulty to the late game side of things, and will be barely felt when just starting out with a low reputation level.

Aside from that there is also a HUD remake in the works. This is a big one since it's going to make navigating the HUD itself a lot more intuitive. Let's be honest, the current HUD is not exactly pretty nor intuitive. So with the HUD remake this will be fixed.

This update will soon be available on the 'develop' branch, and I'll make another "Progress update" post to let you know when it goes live. Your feedback will be appreciated regarding the new Piracy mechanic, as well as any bugs you find with the new stuff!

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

It has been a while since I last made one of these posts. There are two reasons why development of post-release content for Game Dev Studio seemingly stopped:

1. The game sales had become really weak, and I couldn't invest more money into it since I'd be working at a loss.
2. I had run out of ideas for additional content.

With that said, as time passed by, both problems were solved. Recently the sales have picked up greatly, allowing me to work on content updates again, and with a fresh head I have some new ideas for the game. With that said, here's what you can look forward to in terms of new content:

#1 - Piracy. An issue in real life, and a soon-to-be issue in one of the upcoming updates for Game Dev Studio. The severity of the piracy rate for your games will depend on how well you treat your customers. If you fill your games with microtransactions or make bad games and sell them at a high price (or a combination of both!), then people will become increasingly displeased. The more displeased your customers are, the higher the piracy rates are going to be. This is a gameplay mechanic that will add extra challenge mostly to the late game side of things and be kept at a minimum in early game, since I am aware that a lot of people find the game difficult despite the addition of the "very easy" difficulty and the timescale adjustment.

#2 - Random events. This area of the game is something I didn't put much thought into, because I wanted the game to have deep gameplay mechanics rather than superficial, fluff type content. In hindsight that wasn't such a good idea, as having very few randomly occuring events (regardless of whether they bring a benefit or something bad) can make the game get stale and boring after some time. I will be looking into adding more of these to spice up the gameplay.

#3 - Additional stage for the tutorial. People have been expressing the fact that they don't understand what certain employee stats do. This new tutorial stage will be dedicated to acquainting players with employee stats such as attributes, skills, traits, etc.

#4 - Digital store fronts. Inspired by recent events in the game industry, I will try to add digital store fronts to the game. I say "try" because I want to make sure that this gameplay mechanic is interesting and provides depth to the game, as is the case with every other gameplay mechanic that I've added to the game so far. This feature falls under a big "if", meaning that if I can't come up with interesting gameplay mechanics then I won't add it.

Phew, with that written down I am quite eager to get back into developing more content for Game Dev Studio, and I hope that once it is released you will have as much fun playing with these new features as I will have developing them!
If you have ideas for random events that could be added to the game, feel free to share them in the comments or in the Discussions of Game Dev Studio!

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This update adjusts a couple of things within the game and fixes a few issues.

- Stylizing, Parkour, and Machine Learning were not used anywhere for Genre-Theme combination Quality point contribution, now they do
- the interest selection during character creation now shows the amount of tasks the knowledge provided by the interest contributes to increasing the Quality point gain from
- fixed incorrect display of the theme-genre combos knowledge given by interests (some genre-theme combos would be skipped over entirely) in the character creation menu
- fixed the "Goals & deadlines" HUD element remaining after changing the resolution/window mode
- fixed game crash that occured when cancelling an in-dev platform while employees could talk about some occurence related to it
- fixed platform specialists never freeing up from their busy state
- optimized event handling, resulting in slightly lower memory usage, and slightly better performance when a lot of things are happening at the same time (most often when playing with the x5 speed multiplier)
- minor optimizations done to lighting compute
- minor optimizations done to main logic loop

I would like to thank the people that have reported bugs fixed in this update.
If you come across any bugs or crashes, make sure to report them in the Steam discussions thread.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

It has been a year since release of Game Dev Studio, and wow, what a journey this was! Countless patches have been released, 27 of which have been documented, but a lot more that were simple bugfixes weren't announced. Many features were added to the game (some of which were what the community asked for), many quality of life improvements were added, and many bugs were fixed.

With that said, let's take a look at what the biggest changes were over the course of the year mentioned in the updates:

• added the ability to take a loan
  
• added the 'Comfort' drive affector and objects related to it
  
• added the ability to sell engine licenses
  
• added MMO project type
  
• added Platform Creation and a new campaign 'Console Domination' for this feature
  
• added a new tutorial, split up into 3 parts, so that players can easily replay any part they didn't understand fully
  
• added female employees
  
• added Achievements
  
• added Workshop support
  
• added Annual Game Awards
  
• added sub-genres
  
• French and Russian localizations were added
  
• German localization by community member Westman was added
  
• 118 various bugfixes
  
• and a ton of quality-of-life improvements
  

Hey all!

I'm happy to announce that Game Dev Studio is now part of a bundle named 'Tycoon Starter Pack'. It contains 3 games: Diner Bros, Train Valley 2, and of course Game Dev Studio! The bundle is currently 20% off, so if you (or your friend) were to looking for a bunch of new tycoon and management games to try out (or to gift to a friend) and save some money in the process, then check it out!

Click here to check the bundle out.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This small update fixes a crash that can occur during the tutorial, and adjusts the LuaJIT compiler to allow for slightly better performance.

- fixed a crash that occured during the tutorial's office expansion step if the player tried to move any object
- adjusted LuaJIT compiler settings to allow for better performance

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This small update adds display selection to the options menu.

- added display selection to the options menu; if the monitor used for the game differs from the one before, make sure to choose the right one in the options menu after this update is downloaded on your end (version 1.0.6.10)

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This update fixes a couple of gameplay related issues.

- fixed selling a bookshelf not removing its contribution to the skill experience gain until reloading the game or the savefile
- fixed genre selection button not closing on click when no subgenres are present
- (MODDING) fixed a crash that occured when removing a wall in the prefab editor

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This update fixes a couple of issues pointed out by the community.

- fixed some visual glitches with some of the female hair styles
- fixed the interview question about a new sequel being applied to expansion packs
- MMO DDOS and database corruption chances lowered
- (Linux) added several necessary libraries that are not necessarily bundled with a fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.04

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! Recently I've been uploading small updates to the game, with some updates being full re-downloads of the game. I would like to say that these are nothing but bugfixes. Such small updates have always been the case for Game Dev Studio, since when someone reports a bug of some kind, I try to fix it as fast as I can, because I consider fixing bugs the top priority.

I generally don't make community posts regarding such small patches since I consider them not worth a mention, because in most cases it's a single bug of some kind being fixed. But since some people have been wondering what these updates were, I thought I'd make it clear what they are.

The recent patches mostly consisted of fixes related to the Russian translation of the game. The small update today fixed a bug related to the lighting compute optimization in Update #23. The bug that is fixed in question was the light source color not being changed after choosing one of the lamp preset colors. Hopefully this clears up the confusion.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This update adds sub-genres and annual game awards, some nice CPU optimization, support for Ubuntu 18.04, and a couple of quality-of-life improvements.

- the game now supports Ubuntu 18.04
- added sub-genres:
* these become available when you have at least 6 genres researched
* they match together with genres, and can either hurt or improve the game sales; discovery of subgenre matches is the same as it is with other match types in reviews
* selecting a sub-genre will add 15% more work to the project

- added annual game awards:
* like the name suggests, this event occurs once per year
* the player can choose to skip this event
* if the player chooses to participate, they will need to select the game to nominate released in the year that the awards take place
* the player will also need to write a celebratory speech in case they win the Game of the Year award
* the winner can earn reputation

- optimizations:
* optimized the tilegrid visibility handler
* further optimization and parallelization of the lighting compute
* when coupled together these two optimizations bring a performance increase of up to 50% (your mileage may vary) in CPU-bottlenecked scenarios

- added buttons for instantly accepting and refusing all job candidates
- added target team selection for job candidates
- review ratings now also show 1/10th of the score
- added an option to disable the fly-in animation of popups
- when selecting a related game in the new game menu features that were present in the related game will be marked with a different color
- the date display remains visible in the upper left corner of the screen in any menu you open up, for quick reference of the current time
- fixed a bug that allowed you to quit the construction menu during tutorials which would then mess up various game functionality if you proceeded to load a savefile
- fixed an issue related to the selection bounding box of objects
- platform popularity boost popup will now be shown only once per playthrough, rather than once per every platform
- (MODDING) fixed a crash that occured when removing a downward or left-facing wall in the prefab editor

As usual, if you find any bugs or crashes, make sure to report them in the Bug & Crash Reports thread.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, this is a quick update to let you guys know that the 'develop' branch now has a new build. The build introduces the 'Annual Game Awards' feature, so feel free to try it out! The Annual Game Awards become available for the first time in September of 1998 in-game. If you find any bugs or crashes be sure to report them.

This update will be officially released in about a week, once I am sure that everything is smooth.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, it has been a while since I last let you guys know what's going on with the development of Game Dev Studio, so I thought now is a good time to do so.

Update #23 is nearly finished, right now the remainder of things to do on my list is to integrate visual assets for the Annual Game Awards feature.

With that said, the game now features a Linux build on the default (non-develop) branch of the game. This does not mean that the game officially supports Linux yet (it will when Update #23 is released). However it does mean that support for it is right around the corner. So if you have any friends that have been interested in the game, but weren't able to play it because they run Linux, now is a good time to tell them that this is about to change! As usual, because this content is still in-development, there may be stability issues with it. It's best to wait until Update #23 is formally released before trying out the Linux build of the game.

You can expect the update to be released in about 1-2 weeks, once I integrate the art assets for the aforementioned Annual Game Awards feature, and ensure that it all works well.

Thanks for reading!

Hello. Windows 10 recently received a new large update, and the game stopped launching with it installed. I've applied a fix for this issue, so do let me know whether it works for you now.

The issue in question, as described by one of the developers of the LOVE2D framework, was because "Windows 10 version 1809 changed the behaviour of an API love uses during startup, unfortunately.".

With that said, a new build of the game with a fix for this issue has been uploaded, so as usual, wait an hour or so for the game to update on your end, or simply restart Steam to instantly queue up an update, and let me know whether this has resolved the issue for you.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, this is a quick update to let you know that the 'develop' branch of the game now has some new upcoming content, so switch over to it and take a look if you'd like to check it out.

The content in question is the addition of sub-genres. These can be selected once you've researched at least 6 genres. Selecting a sub-genre will require you to put more work into the game, but if the genre + sub-genre combination is good, it will bring in even more sales. Just like with most other matches in the game they can also hurt your game sales in case the combination you've chosen does not work that well.

You might also notice that the game is running better now. That is because I started out Update #23 by optimizing certain parts of the game which require a decent chunk of CPU processing power, namely the lighting computation, and the tilegrid visibility handler. The lighting computation optimization brings the bulk of the increase in performance, and with these two optimizations taken into account they bring up to 34.6% higher performance in the same scenario! (on a laptop with an i5 5200U processor, your mileage may vary) This is especially useful for laptop owners, because the game will use less power to run the game at those 60 FPS like before, or, if have a really old/very low-spec laptop now you'll be closer to hitting that 60 FPS mark if you weren't able to reach it.

As always, please keep in mind that because the content on the 'develop' branch is work-in-progress, it might not be 100% stable.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This update adds and changes a couple of things suggested by the community, and fixes a couple of issues.

- added the ability to control the timescale in the new game menu, as well as the "General" tab of options menu while in-game
- added the ability to assign an employee to research tech via employee context menu
- added the ability to close menus by pressing the same key they're opened with
- added an option to raise request dialogues to approve & enable auto-approval of raise requests
- added an option to the vacation request popup to approve & enable auto-approval of vacation requests
- added a new office preference - refuse all contract work offers
- activities rebalanced:
* amount of gained Drive from any activity increased 4 times (ie. enjoyment rating of 80 used to give 8 Drive points, now it gives 32 drive points)
* activities now increase the time until an employee has to go on vacation
* to counter this huge buff, activities will now be on a global cooldown that lasts 2 months regardless of how much enjoyment was had, in addition to being on a per-activity cooldown. Going on another activity shortly after one was had will yield very low enjoyment gain.
* activity result & confirmation UI has been improved

- vacation requests will now display the role and employee's main skill level (or, in the case of a Jack of All Trades, the highest skill level in general)
- the amount of platform users available at the beginning of a playthrough now depends on the starting year of the campaign (every year past 1988 adds extra platform users)
- fixed wall grass decals being drawn under the southern walls
- fixed a crash that occured when zooming in/out during the rain under the right circumstances
- german translation fixes
- minor UI tweaks

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, in this post I will talk about what the future holds in store for Game Dev Studio.

With Update #20 released, and all the features I had planned on adding to the game since release finally implemented, my next step is to add some new gameplay mechanics that people have been asking for. With that said, starting from Update #20 (or update #21 for that matter), I will be taking extra time to ensure that the newly-added content has less bugs, in other words, updates might take slightly more time to release, but they will generally be far smoother than before.

With this update, I took a different approach to developing it. In most previous updates, I set myself a personal time limit within which I wanted to release some certain piece of content. While that did allow me to release a decent amount of content in a relatively short period of time, I did not have enough time to consider lots of cases for potential bugs, and so the new content would, most of the time, be released with bugs, or worse yet, crashes. The extra time taken to release Update #20 ensured that the release was smooth, and I was very, very delighted to see that the launch of the biggest update so far saw the least amount of bug and crash reports as of yet.

Please do keep in mind, that I am the only person working on the game, and this is the first game I've ever released!

Moving onward I will start with implementing small community-requested features, and once those are taken care of, will move on to picking out some of the larger features people have suggested. Please keep in mind that because I want to maintain the vision of the game I've had since the beginning, features that stray far from the game development side of things will most likely not be implemented. However I am willing to make an exception here and there, if I like the idea of certain features that people suggest, and it seems like something that would add a nice amount of content or gameplay variety to the game.

With that out the way, my to-do list for the time being looks like this:

#1 - Ability to adjust the pace at which time is passing by. People have voiced their concerns that the game time passes by too quickly, and it's hard to make more than one game for a single console generation. While the original vision for the game was to provide a rather realistic insight into how much time game development takes up in real life, a lot of people don't like that. I will be adding a slider to the new game menu, which will allow you to adjust the speed at which in-game time passes by. It will affect the speed at which time passes by, but not the speed at which employees work, so reducing the speed at which time passes by will make the game easier. When opening the main menu, the time slider will always start out at the speed which is true to the game's vision.

#2 - Ability to select more than one genre for a game. This is something the community has requested, and I will for sure be adding this to the game.

#3 - Annual game awards. A feature that people have suggested, but one that I refrained from working on because I couldn't come up with interesting gameplay mechanics for. With a clearer head following the release of this update, this is something you can expect to be added to the game in a future update.

#4 - Various small community-suggested improvements. You folks voice your suggestions, and I listen to them. There were various quality-of-life improvement suggestions, and I will be happy to implement them. Don't be afraid to share your suggestions, I read through all of them, even if you don't see me reply to your threads!

#5 - Japanese translation. A community member has reached out to me and has offered to provide a Japanese translation. I am most grateful for this help, and you can expect this to be added in one of the future updates.

#6 - Linux build of the game. Until now, I've been focusing my efforts on ensuring the game's overall stability, as well as focusing on one platform for the time being to not be overwhelmed with potential issues that would be isolated to specific operating systems. As of today, I am happy with the state of the game, and will be working on a Linux build of the game for one of the future updates.

As always, the points you see on the list will be implemented out of order, and some gameplay mechanics that weren't mentioned might make it into the game in one of the updates.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, a person in the community suggested creating a Discord server for the game, and after some time thinking, I came to the conclusion that it's a pretty good idea!

So, without further ado, you can join the server by this link: https://discord.gg/eHq2dNp

If you wanted to get in touch with me very easily, have a bug/crash to report, or you wanted to find other modders to collaborate with for your Steam Workshop mods, feel free to join! I will be posting various info on upcoming updates for Game Dev Studio there more often than on Steam, since it provides a very simple platform for spreading such news.

Don't worry, even with this new Discord server I will still make progress update posts on Steam, as well as all the previous types of posts you've seen so far.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This small update fixes a rather strange bug that made the game ratings far too high when picking the right theme-genre combo, and prepares the game for Japanese translation.

- fixed good theme-genre matches 5 extra points to the rating, and very good theme-genre matches providing a whole 10 extra points to the review score, resulting in 9/10 games being achievable for a game that is only worth 1/10
- (EDIT) fixed overhype reputation loss penalty being applied multiple times under some circumstances
- (EDIT 2) fixed being able to leave office expansion via pressing escape while the game was limiting clicks (during tutorial sequences)
- (EDIT 2) fixed a crash that occured in the prefab editor when exiting it after placing walls
- made preparations for the Japanese translation

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, in this post I will talk about what the future holds in store for Game Dev Studio.

As you may or may not know, as of Update #20, all the features listed in "What's next? #3" have been added. With the release of this big update, my efforts for the time being will be concentrated on fixing any bugs or crashes that may have arisen in this update.

Just like with Update #19, I will spend somewhere around two weeks monitoring the situation and fixing any crashes or bugs you folks report as quickly as possible. After that, I will move on to the next stage of development for Game Dev Studio.

If you find any bugs, or come across any crashes, be sure to report them here, it helps a lot, and it makes for a better game for every one of us.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! This update adds Steam Workshop support, optimizes various things for lower CPU load and therefore better overall game performance, fixes various issues, and has all sorts of improvements all around.

This update in particular is a very big deal to me personally, because if it wasn't for modding, then this game wouldn't exist at all. To celebrate this milestone of 20 formal updates released in 6 months since game launch, as well as the release of this update, Game Dev Studio is 65% off for 7 days!

I would like to thank everyone that has played the game, and especially those that have been actively giving feedback on the game in all of its aspects. Thanks to your feedback, Game Dev Studio is now in the best shape it has ever been, and will continue getting better.

- added Steam Workshop support:
* the game features full modding support and has documentation of most classes and libraries at http://www.gamedevstudiogame.com
* comes with several example mods, be sure to check out the Anger Issues mod! (especially if you're a modder looking into the possibilities of modding in Game Dev Studio!)

- added a new tutorial, which is a lot more friendly to new players (the old tutorial is still there, and is now called 'Introduction', think of it as a final exam of the basics you've learned in the tutorials now)
- added an outline to objects when hovering your mouse over them
- various optimizations:
* optimized handling of walls, resulting in faster loading times and slightly better performance when in an area with a lot of walls, as well as a lower framerate hit when panning the camera
* optimized handling of floor rendering, resulting in a lower framerate hit when panning the camera very quickly
* optimized map tile structure, resulting in slightly lower memory usage, slightly shorter map loading/initialization times, marginally smaller save file sizes, and slightly faster save and load times
* optimized project task logic, which results in lower CPU load, especially when a lot of employees are working on a game or engine project
* optimized handling of main employee logic (both player and rival), resulting in lower CPU load when employees are idling without a task
* minor optimization done to employee rendering logic, resulting in lower CPU load

- reduced employee salaries by 20%:
* this applies only to new playthroughs

- a good theme-genre match will now slightly boost the review score, in addition to boosting the sales
- improved the distribution of review ratings: the better a game is, the lower the lowest possible rating a review can roll is (for example, previously a game worth a 9/10 rating could get 7/10, now the lowest score a 9/10 game can get is 8/10)
- new difficulty setting, adjustments to existing difficulties
- can now adjust the amount of pedestrians and disable them entirely, in case performance is an issue (or you just don't like things like that), the amount of pedestrians is now set to 50 by default (was 200)
- busy teams will now also be shown in a different color, and will be positioned at the bottom of the team list in the team selection combobox
- holding down "shift" will now make the camera pan twice as fast using WASD or arrow keys
- added "select best employees" button to convention booking menu
- added a new team interaction option to quickly move members from one team to another without dismantling it
- team info descbox now displays what project (if any) the team is currently working on
- improved the accuracy of line-of-sight checks, resulting in more consistent light source illumination behavior
- viewing interests in the character creation menu will now show the theme-genre combinations it contributes to
- demolition mode will automatically disable when selecting an object for placement in expansion mode now
- additional game project info will now be displayed when hovering your mouse over it in the project box (bottom left corner)
- can now adjust starting money in Freeplay
- can now choose to start out without any extra employees in Freeplay
- increased the sale boost from genre-theme matches from 5%, 15%, and 25% to 10%, 25%, and 35%, respectively
- increased the time before employees will attempt auto-scheduling an activity
- doors now let light pass (the visual light) through when opened
- increased platform popularity values of Mega platforms, since the odds are not stacked in their favor
- workplaces now have a smaller bounding box for mouse-over selection
- reduced the amount of popularity points a platform gets from rival-made games, so that the player's games have a greater impact on deciding the fate of platform manufacturers
- various russian localization fixes
- various UI tweaks
- fixed a crash that occured when unplugging headphones or turning off the audio output device (ie. soundcard) while the game is running
- fixed a crash that occured with game conventions under certain circumstances
- fixed a minor visual bug related to employees carrying coffee cups
- fixed a resolution change at certain points in the tutorial locking the UI
- fixed the tutorial arrow pointer not appearing after changing the resolution at certain points in the tutorial
- fixed manager absense efficiency penalty not being applied to employees when a team manager goes on vacation/hospital/etc.
- fixed employees not having their "away until" variable saved or loaded, resulting in being able to save & load after someone goes on vacation/etc. to have them instantly return to the office
- fixed purchasing the pPhone platform license dooming the player to max. contracts of a scale of x4 for the rest of their playthrough, even though the largest platform game project scale would be x20 (platforms that are too small in max. project scale compared to other on-market platforms are now discarded when evaluating the desired project scale)
- fixed female employees using the male drink, eat and sit&drink animations
- fixed being able to select some inter-conflicting traits under the right circumstances
- fixed weather intensity setting not being applied until the player zoomed in/out or reloaded their savefile/went back to main menu and started a new game
- fixed a bug with game sale generation which caused a negative genre-theme combo coupled with a positive genre-platform combo to eat up sales to the point where it could sell 0 copies
- fixed a popup not being created asking the player whether he'd like to assign a team to fix the issues after testing a project more than once
- fixed 'Bombastic Games' office having an incorrectly-placed main door (one of the restrooms) in the prefab (requires a new game for the fix to take effect)
- fixed player platform dev license cost not being saved (and therefore being reset after each game save load)

I would like to thank the people that have reported bugs in the Steam discussions.

If you like the game, consider leaving a positive review, every little bit helps!

Thank you for reading!

Hey everyone. This is a quick update to let you guys know that another small update has been pushed to the 'develop' branch of the game for the upcoming Steam Workshop update. This update implements a simple, yet intuitive change to office expansion, which is: when clicking on an item in the object list while in demolition mode, you will automatically be switched back to construction mode. This change was inspired simply by watching my friend play the game in front of me, and this is a quick reminder that if you have any ideas for how to make the game controls more intuitive, then don't be shy, and share your ideas in the game discussions! I read through all the feedback (both positive and negative) that is left in reviews and in discussions, so don't be afraid to share your suggestions.

Another change is the addition of more information displayed about a project when hovering your mouse over the project progress display in the lower left project box. This should help new players with understanding what certain icons mean.

When selecting the Freeplay game type, you can now adjust the starting money amount, and can now disable the starting employees that the scenarios give out on the selected map. I've seen people mention that having such functionality would be a nice addition, and since the Workshop update focuses on improving the game beyond just adding Steam Workshop support, I've finally freed myself up and got around to taking care of this little feature.

Lastly, the prefab and map editors have undergone a slight UI change to make them more user-friendly, and the object outline (when hovering over some kind of office object or an employee) was further tweaked to be even more visible.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone! This is a quick short update to let you know that another small update has been pushed to the 'develop' branch of the game for the upcoming Steam Workshop update. This update focuses on optimizing several things related to employee and project task logic, and various other things in general. Generally speaking, the optimizations performed for this particular update focus on reducing the CPU load.

It also adds an outline to objects you hover your mouse over, so that indication of the object you're about to select/click on is a lot easier to see.

As always, it would be great help if you could switch over to the 'develop' branch and let me know whether the performance is any better for you, as well as reporting any issues you might be running into.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, this is a quick update to let you guys know that another update has been pushed to the 'develop' branch of the game for the upcoming Steam Workshop update. This update unlocks the prefab editor (which was previously locked out due to a very unfriendly user interface), adds more steps to the new tutorial (old savefiles saved in the middle of the new tutorial will not work anymore), changes how the review text looks (let me know what you think of this one in particular!), and fixes a couple of issues in the map editor.

All in all, while this update was meant for community content creators, you can still provide some feedback on the added steps for the new tutorial, and the new review text layout, which would be much appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone, I'm happy to announce that the Steam Workshop update is almost finished. If you've been wondering why there was radio silence for the last couple of weeks, that is because I was working on a rather unusual example mod for a game of the simulation genre, but because of its unusual nature, it will perfectly showcase just how much can be done with mods for Game Dev Studio. I will be releasing it in conjunction with the Steam Workshop update, once I am sure that everything is ready and is working as intended.

Overall I am estimating that this update will be released in about 2-3 weeks. Since this update is a very big thing to me personally, I want to put some more work into it to make sure the release of this update is smooth.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! Work on the Steam Workshop update is going nicely, and for the last couple of days I've been working on improving various aspects of the game, and making a new tutorial. This tutorial is not harsh in any way, unlike the current one. The current tutorial will remain, but has been renamed to "Introduction". The new tutorial consists of 3 parts (basics of construction, employees, and projects), and you can start any part at any time, so that in case you missed something, then you can simply start a specific part of it and play through it again. With this new tutorial, think of the tutorial that came with the 1.0 release as a final exam of the things you've learned in the new one.

Another new addition is the ability to control the amount of pedestrians on the streets. So in case you're having performance issues, or if you don't like the visual noise that they bring, then you can simply reduce the amount of pedestrians, or remove them altogether. Prior to this update, the amount of pedestrians out on the streets was 200, with the Workshop update it has been reduced down to 50, and the option allows you to further reduce, increase, or completely remove the pedestrians.

On the gameplay side of things, genre-theme matches now affect the review rating of games. Now, along with boosting the game sales, it also boosts the review ratings themselves, which means that picking a good genre-theme combo will be more beneficial than it was before, and will make up for some short-comings of your game when it comes to the quality itself.

Another thing that was changed is the distribution of review ratings: the better a game is, the lower the lowest possible rating a review can roll is (for example, previously a game worth a 9/10 rating could get 7/10, now the lowest score a 9/10 game can get is 8/10, and that is only if the game's rating is barely over the 9.0 mark)

The 'develop' branch has been updated with the changes mentioned here, and your feedback on the new tutorial would be very appreciated. So if you'd like to help out in that regard, just start up the game, play through the tutorial, and let me know whether there's anything that is in need of improvement.

Thanks for reading!

Hello! In the previous progress report post I mentioned that I was working on documenting the game for the Steam Workshop feature, and I'm happy to say that it is now fully documented. The upcoming update is now available on the 'develop' branch of the game. In addition to the Workshop support, you'll notice that some things have also been changed, that is because the Steam Workshop update will feature various changes meant for an easier introduction into the game.

With Steam Workshop support integrated, the next step for the Workshop update is creation of a couple of more example mods for developers, and then moving on to improving the tutorial by splitting it up into multiple separate parts, instead of having one big tutorial scenario. The existing tutorial will remain in the game, but will be renamed to something different, since while it does introduce people to the game, it is also very challenging and punishing. Think of the current tutorial as a final exam of the player's abilities after the initial, easier tutorials that will be added in this update.

Once that is done, I will be moving on to further optimizing the game, while working on a rather large Workshop example mod in parallel, to further showcase what can be done with mods, and how it all works, which is very important for developers, as the more reference material they have, the easier it will be for them to get into modding, and start making all sorts of cool content.

If you wish to start making mods for the Steam Workshop of Game Dev Studio, then switch over to the 'develop' branch of the game, read up on the documentation, and check out the example mods.

Currently the Steam Workshop is accessible through the tab at the top of the Community Hub, since the update is not yet fully released.

Goes without saying that the first couple of weeks (or maybe even a month or two) will see very little mods, but as people get familiar with how the game code words and how mods are made, you can expect all sorts of mods to be made from the community.

Thank you for reading!

Hello! It has been a while since I last made one of these posts, and I'm happy to let you know that I am almost done with documenting the game. You can take a look at the documentation over at: http://gamedevstudiogame.com

The site contains documentation for almost every single class and library, and I will soon finish documenting the rest of the classes.
I will be uploading the Workshop update to the 'develop' branch shortly after I'm done with the documentation, and once that's done you'll be able to make mods in case you're interested in that. Once the game is up on the 'develop' branch and the documentation is finished, I will get to work on the mod which will showcase how a lot of the various systems work. Aside from that, I'll also be uploading several small mods to further showcase how the systems work, so that those interested in modding can download them and take a look at what the mod does, how it interacts with other systems, etc. I will also be uploading the source code of many classes and libraries so that in case the game documentation is not enough, you'll be able to simply take a look at the source code and see how it all works there.

Over the course of all this I will also be working on optimizing the game where possible, improving the tutorial, and polishing several mechanics of the game. Once the Workshop update is released, I will be going back to working on new gameplay mechanics and adding more content to the game, as well as improving existing features.

Thank you for reading!

Hello! For the past 2 weeks I've been working on adding Steam Workshop support to Game Dev Studio, and I'm happy to let you guys know that the biggest technical side of it is finished. What remains is more UI work, making sure that everything works as intended, and documenting the game as best I can, so that people interested in making mods for it can make the best use of all the systems available.

With that said, I'm sure that the big question a lot of people have is:

What can be modded?

The answer to which is: everything! You can make any mod you wish, and if you know what you're doing, you could go as far as to make a mod which would allow you to go into a rival studio office and shoot everyone there. (this sounds a little bit weird now that I type this out)

The game, as I'm sure most of you know, uses LVE2D. The game was written in Lua, and as such any part of it can be easily changed, or added on top of.
I will provide more details on the modding documentation, as well as instructions on how to upload your mods to the Steam Workshop for Game Dev Studio once the update has been released.

Thank you for reading!

Hello! With Update #19 released it's time to move on to the next step of content development for the game.

The only remaining feature in the "What's next? #3" post is Steam Workshop support, and that's exactly what I will work on next. Aside from Steam Workshop support, I will also be going over all the new suggestions left in discussions, picking out the best ones and adding them to the game. I will most likely add new content after the Steam Workshop update, but don't be surprised if you see new features/gameplay mechanics get added to the game before that!

Once the Steam Workshop support update is released it doesn't mean that it'll be over for the development of the game. Quite the contrary, there are still things I wish to add and improve upon for it.

It goes without saying that with Update #19 released my main focus for the next couple of days is making sure that any found bugs/crashes are dealt with quickly, so if you find any, be sure to report them here, it helps a lot, and it makes for a better game for every one of us.

Lastly, I would like to say thank you to all the active members of the community for your continued interest in the game. I hope you enjoy playing the game with all the new features added in the last 3 months as much as I enjoyed making them!

Thank you for reading!

Update #19

Hello! This update adds achievements, female workers, Russian and French translations, and fixes a couple of issues

- added 28 achievements
- added female coworkers and pedestrians:
* employees in existing savefiles will remain the same, but new generated employees may be women

- added Russian and French localization
- fixed rain sprites not being updated after changing the resolution
- fixed incorrect setup of player-made platform IDs, resulting in some UI issues
- fixed discontinued player-made platforms still being selectable for new games
- savegames are now sorted by the save date when selecting a savegame to load
- various text corrections
- various UI tweaks and fixes

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Please allow up to an hour for the game to update, alternatively you can restart Steam to instantly queue up an update for Game Dev Studio.

Hello! In this post I will talk about what the foreseeable future holds in terms of content for Game Dev Studio.

#1 - Achievements. Some people have asked for them, and I think that those that haven't would definitely appreciate their presence.

#2 - Female characters. One thing that's absent in the game at the moment are female employees and player characters, so this will be added in one of the updates in the near future.

#3 - Russian and French translations. I've mentioned a Spanish translation, but plans have changed and it is now on the backlog. It will be taken care of for sure, but right now the aforementioned russian and french translations will be delivered first.

#4 - Steam Workshop support. Now that the biggest content updates that I've wanted to release are finished, this is something that I will definitely add to the game. The reason for Workshop support coming in last was to have more gameplay mechanics and content, so that modders interested in the game would have more things to play around with.

The features mentioned in this post will be done out-of-order and released one-by-one when they're ready. I estimate that the translations will become available first, with female characters second, followed by achievements, and Steam Workshop support coming in last. You can also expect various bug fixes, balance tweaks, and overall improvements to be done to the game in-between updates that add these features.

Thank you for reading!

Hello! This update adds a new gameplay mechanic (console creation), further improves various different aspects of the game, and fixes a couple of bugs.

- added the ability to create your own platforms:
* added "Console Domination" scenario, which serves as an introduction to this new gameplay mechanic
* console creation is the biggest risk-to-reward source of income (even more so than MMOs!)
* in order to create a platform you will need to select the hardware that it should be composed of, the amount of time it should be in development for, it's appearance, and optionally a lead architect, which provides an additional boost to a specific aspect of the platform
* various issues may arise with the platforms you create, the probability of some depends on how much development time you provide for the platform

- when placing walls, the side of placement will now automatically adjust based on the side that's closest to your mouse (manual wall side adjustment still possible via right-clicking and mouse wheel), right mouse click now destroys walls on the selected side (manual side adjustment still possible with the mouse wheel)
- fixed theme list button incorrectly showing a brief overview of the currently-trending themes
- fixed fake games providing a double boost to platform attractiveness
- fixed music playlist shuffle working incorrectly, resulting in repeating tracks in the same playlist
- fixed publishers evaluating games released in the last 25 years, instead of 5
- fixed being able to create expansion packs for non-existing games under certain circumstances, resulting in crashes
- slightly changed how rival game projects receive popularity
- optimized music playback to only store up to 2 tracks in memory per playlist, which reduces memory usage
- 4 new music tracks that play during gameplay for your listening pleasure
- various UI tweaks and adjustments

If you encounter any bugs or crashes, please report them here.

Please allow up to an hour for the game to update, alternatively you can restart Steam to instantly queue up an update for Game Dev Studio.