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!