Finally, it's out steamhappy First of all, a GREAT thanks to all of you who are playing our game. We have been very overwhelmed of the interest it has received. The amount of playtime we see is more than what we could have hoped for. We also received the attention of several youtubers playing our game with, these 3 creating rougly 2 million views combined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW2btbC-oro&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSelrrOMs1g&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3iBeWsoGjU&t=9s But after a long developing period to this patch has finally come to an end. We have managed to put a lot into it, including accomodating a few community requests. We are sorry we passed the promised deadline for all of you waiting for the update. We hope you can forgive us :-)

So what did it end up with?

City changes

As mentioned earlier, the way the city functions has changed. Customers are divided into segments, each having distinct traits. So you now also need to gain reputation with these segments, along with reputation for the categories that you sell.

Staff updates

As mentioned a big part was building talent trees for your staff. This means staff develop in the way you desire for them. They might be experienced in a role upon hiring, bringing additional bonuses to that task. They might be inexperienced in others meaning negative actions might occur while learning that part. Some they can not even perform before having taken the appropriate course to learn. Although not changed dramatically, a few changes has been made to the interviewing part to accomodate these changes, and in preparation for future features.

Customer interactions

There was a lot of feedback coming from you, indication the desire for a change to the way of interacting with customers. So we prioritized this. Instead of being a hit or miss system, you can now interact with the customers in a more direct way. Try to boost a need, or create a desire for a specific article. Quickly jump from customer to customer in a busy hour and help them all a bit, or spend your time with one, trying to build up the big sale. You decide completely. In the dull hours, you can stand outside, and pull in some of the pedestrians walking by the store.

Magazine designer

At the office it is now possible to create advertisment spreads to feature in the city's magazines. Select the magazine, the size, the featured ads and publish it. It will provide a boost to your reputation, along with a boost to certain customer segments walking by your store.

Forum posts

You can also build reputation by creating posts at the community forums. Choose the parameters of the post, and watch it gain momentum with views and comments. This feature is still in the early stages, as we would like to gain inputs from you on how to proceed with this feature. So it will be improved upon in the future.

Others

A lot of bugs has been fixed (and others most likely arrived). The time of performing various actions has been adjusted, along with customer waiting times. Customers are now a bit more expressive during their shopping experience. While we have had no focus on adding graphics content, the main menu world have been changed along with other minor graphical changes.

Saves

Due to the previous setup your saves will be deleted from the game. We are sorry for this inconvenience of losing all of your magnificent store out there, however we have been cought a bit off guard on managins several versions (As this is our first game, we are still learning a lot all the time). We will try and restructure things in the future to accomodate different version compatibility, but will not yet promise that it won't happen again in the future, due to this restructuring. We know it sucks, but we might as well be up front about it.

What's next

More content

Since the majority of the feedback requested more items, we will spend a fair amount of time from now on adding more content into the game. This means, among other things, that we will focus on adding more articles, more inventory, more categories, more career mode possibilities, and more of other forms content we can create.

Shorter development periods

Due to the duration of this patch, the next couple of patches will be aimed to have a considerably shorter development time. So along with the adding content, we will try not to make so many big implementations at the same time.

Feedback is VERY welcome

Due to the changes of this patch, there are bound to be bugs we have missed. We are also, as always, interested in your opinions, ideas, experiences and cool stories you might have regarding the game. We are interested to know if there are any balancing issues, so we can get it adjusted. So please, PLEASE, feel free to let us know about it. We encourage you to use the discussion board here on Steam as we regularly check in to see what you have written, and are very interested to talk about what direction the game should take.

Roadmap

As of now we have not decided 100 % on what the next patch should contain, other than the addition of content. So regarding the topic above, you can have a great influence on what will come next. We off course have a million ideas on things we want to do, so our task is to organize the next part of the development. And with that, we will try to make a road map, so all of you can see what our thought on the game is, and what you might expect in the future. That escalated to a lot of reading steamhappy We hope you enjoy the new additions, and again we are very interested in antyhing you might have to say about them. Kind regards The King of Retail dev team.

[ 2019-06-09 16:31:16 CET ] [ Original post ]