Dear Retailers We would like to wish you a happy new year, thank you for a great 2019. Since our last update in December we decided to slow it down a bit, as December is always a busy month. But now we have reached January, and daily life is back to normal, but with a whole new set of ideas to try out, this being one of them. We have always wanted to keep you informed of what is happening at our side of the screens, but we have not been consistent in doing so. Therefore we will start making a regular newsletter here on Steam to tell you what we are working on, along with other things of interest, and let you know that the game hasn't gone quiet. This will also allow you to give feedback to our ideas, and perhape make them even better even before we are finished making them. So as always, don't hold back with any comments you might have :)

Since the last update

Although we have had a busy december, we haven't been idle at all. We have 2 projects we are working on simultaneously.

HQ improvements

Since we released the Corporation Mode, we have been focusing on making this a more stable experience by removing bugs, and unintuitive implementations. As the bug reports went down, it was time to carry on with the improvements. We know that the bugs are still out there, so please, PLEASE let us know of the ones you find :-) At the release of the Corporation Mode, your HQ only had the bare necesseties for playing the game. As we want this to be a more focal part of running your corporation, we wanted to improve this area. The main floor is dedicated for control of the corporation itself, with each of your concepts occupying an entire floor of it's own. This will allow for more control and more possibilities, as these areas gets filled out with content. So hopefully it will make more sense to why you must expand your HQ to allow for more concepts.
The first thing we have started out with, was implementing various corporate managers. So each concept now has space for 3 managers. An Area Manager, which affect the stores that are run by daily managers. A Sales Manager, which affects your staff, your customers, and new stores. A Marketing Manager, which affects the traffic into your store. Then the corporation itself will have 2 managers. A Financial Manager, which affects rents, loans and owned property handling. A Corporation Manager, which affects all of the above mentioned managers. This should mimic the structure of a larger corporation with a hieracy of leadership.
For aquiring these managers, there will be an interview process like when hiring staff, where you can interview the person for a certain role. You can then appoint an interviewed person for that role, or move one of your other managers. It will also be possible to have one of your staff in your stores to send an application to your HQ. In this way it will be possible to take your rookie employee all the way to the top, to become manager for the entire Corporation. Each manager has to familiarize themself with your corporation, and with their role before they can use their abilitiesto the fullest. So this erquires you to make a decision. - Hire a person from the outside, who has to spend more time familiarizing. - Take another manager, who only need to learn the new role, but leaves another role unmanned. - Promote one from your store, who might need a replacement, but is very familiar with the ways of the corporation. All of the will be handled from your manager's office in the ground floor. To interact with the managers themselves, you will need to go to their office and do your business. That being spend their talent points, offering them a raise, or taking the dreaded talk of letting them go.
All of the above is already implemented into the game. The next thing to do is to influence their optimism, such that you also need to keep them satisfied, and to implement their actual skills into the game. After that CorpManagers v 1.0 is ready, and the next update will be released. In our next letter we will tell about our other project, which is the community translator tool, with which you can help improve, or create new translations in the game. Until next time :-)

[ 2020-01-06 13:52:56 CET ] [ Original post ]