Dear Retailers The next version is finally out and ready for you to play. First of all i will apoligize for the elongated development time of this update, but i moved to a new location last month and had to work a lot to make it a liveable home. However on the good side, i will from next week be getting some extra help making the game from a friend who wants to learn how to make graphics. His job will be to add content in various areas, and in general help with the time consuming tasks, such that i can better focus on the programming itself. So hopefully it will be a good addition, allowing to add new and interesting things to the game. The Admin team has also been expanded on the discord with two new members who have been so kind to help out answering your questions, and keep a great atmosphere, and they are doing a great job at it. But now to the update.

--- The week ---

The main focus of this update has been to introduce the week, meaning that we now have days and months instead of just a simple day counter. And this brings a lot of new interesting things to the game.

--- Staff scheduling ---

You can now set the schedule of each staff for the individual days of the week including assigning days off and different roles on each day. So it possible to tailor a complete schedule that will make the store run smoothly from day to day.

-- Customer flows

The week also allows for different customer flows for each day. So farmers might prefer to shop on a monday, where the techies goes shopping on thursdays instead. And in the weekends everyone has a completely different shopping pattern compared to the workdays. So it's up to you to learn the different patterns and set up the store accordingly.

-- Opening hours

Because of the different customer flows you might also want to keep different opening hours for your store so this is also possible now.

--- New Hud ---

The main HUD in the store has also received an overhaul, to make it a bit more modern looking compared to the old one. This new hud also allows for some new features which you have requested.

--- First Person View ---

It is now possible to play the game from a first person view. Feedback on how this mode han be improved is very welcome.

--- Hiding the HUD ---

It is also now possible to hide the hud, for those of you who want to take better screenshots of your stores.

--- General Overhaul ---

The remaining screens has now been converted to the new style, and a few of them has received an overhaul.

--- Stats ---

The stats system has also changed. The previous one caused lagging in longer games because of some bad code structure. So while doing this overhaul, some new features have been added.


The customers will now give you feedback of their experience while shopping at your store through customer reports. It is also now possible to see what each segment perfers in a more understandable way. Finally you can also see the shopping stats for the segments on each day. So hopefully these tools will make it easier to make decisions on what to do. All of this can be found on your computer in your office.

--- Minor Updates ---

Besides this, other features have also been added.

--- Minimum Storage Sytem on articles ---

You can now adjust the desired amount of articles used by the Minimum Storage Info directly on the articles using the Edit Article menu

--- Customers Queuing ---

There have been lots of complaints regarding the queuing of the customers. They should now be more intelligent, and spread out to the various registers.

--- ABC locations ---

Have you got some articles you want to get rid of, or want more sales of that high earning item? Then make the customers see this as the first thing when they enter your store. You can now add focus on various articles in your store. The closer a display is to the store front, the more interesting it will be for the customer to look at.

--- Register speed by article ---

There were some balancing issues regarding selling groceries. As these are low priced items, the customers will now take more of each. However this then added longer queues at the registers. To combat this, the amount of time it takes to process an article now also depends on the luxury of that item. So selling a food item at the register, will now be faster than selling a computer. In future more will be added to balance out various categories.

--- Corp Applications ---

The applications you receive will now be based of your HQ level. So when obtaining a bigger HQ, you will most likely get better applicants.

--- Bugs ---

As always lots of bugs have been corrected, and a lot new has most likely entered. Thanks to all of you who have beta tested the game, and provided feedback.

--- Menu centering ---

There were some issues with ingame menus having weird offsets on other resolutions than the standard 1920 x 1080. This should have been corrected, and menus should now appear on top of their respective inventory.

--- LMB missing once in a while ---

There have been a longstanding issue with LMB suddently not registering when placing items. I can't get this to happen myself, so can't track it down. However i have tried to fix some of the areas that might cause this, but if it continues to happen i am very interested in hearing about it.

--- What's next? ---

So with this update out, what are the upcoming plans?

-- The stand by period ---

As always after a large update, there is a "Stand By" period, meaning i don't do larger changes for a week or so, but instead stand ready to fix bugs that might arrive, such that a fix can be made and uploaded quickly. So a few minor patches might arrive during the upcoming week.

--- More articles (And this time it's true) ---

It was the meaning that more articles should have been added this patch. However a lot of feedback indicated that it was a huge task managing the staff each day on larger stores. Therefore the only solution to this was to add a complete week such that you could add fixed days off for your staff, so that it would be more automated. But with this out of the way, it is time to add articles as promised. There will first be added various drinks, to round off the groceries category, and after that all attention will go to expand electronics. This will probably happen over two several patches, but work on this will start tomorrow. This was the info regarding this update. Please do let me know of bugs, balancing issues, thoughts or great ideas. Also feel free to join our discord at: https://discord.gg/fckN6bE

[ 2020-06-21 17:53:46 CET ] [ Original post ]