Dealer’s Life 1.17 update: Steam Achievements and Turkish localization!
Hello and welcome to all Great Dealers out there!
Today we’re back with another update and this one includes some changes that were requested by a huge number of our players! So we developed them in a timely manner and managed to release them in less than a month since the latest update!
Here are the release notes!
V. 1.17
Turkish localization!
Steam Achievements
Minor text and bug fixes
Let’s start with the Turkish Localization!
Dealer’s Life is having a huge success in Turkey and we understand that playing a game in your own language can improve a lot your experience, especially when there is a lot of text like in DL.
This was a very popular request and we really received a lot of messages and reviews about it: most of these were polite and kind, but honestly others were not so polite and not so kind.
We decided to listen to the kindest ones and, with the work of a professional and passionate translator, we managed to complete the Turkish Localization in just a couple of weeks!
As usual our Roadmap is always open if you find any typo, which can happen in a game with so many lines of text!
We hope this will make all the Turkish speaking players happy! Please consider reviewing or sharing the game if you want to show us your support!
The next big change in this update concerns Steam Achievements!
We didn’t include them at launch on Steam because we prioritized other tasks but we announced that we would have developed them as soon as possible, especially since the structure to support them was already implemented in the game and working fine on the mobile services (Google Play Games and Apple Game Center). It was not a difficult task but it was long as it was a matter of learning how to integrate Steam into our game and then thoroughly test the integration!
We worked on them in parallel during the latest updates and we have finally released them, so you can now unlock 45 achievements here on Steam too, one for every special moment in the game and each with of course a pinch of humour! 🙂
If you have any idea for an achievement you think that should be included, feel free to let us know on our Roadmap!
Going into more details on the Steam integrations topic, the changes released with this update laid the foundations for more features and the two things that we’ll surely evaluate in these weeks will be: Steam Leaderboards and Steam Cloud Save. Be sure to follow them and tell us if you think one should be prioritized over the other!
Moving on, we also included some minor fixes on text and localizations and some minor bug fixes. The most notable among these minor fixes concerns the clean exit of the game on PC, which on some machines had issues. We never managed to reproduce this issue but we analyzed all our code and made some small changes, this should be solved as it was confirmed by some of our players during the Beta testing!
And that’s all for this update!
We hope you’ll like all these improvements! As usual more is coming with the following releases (the big surprise was revealed and it’s “Storage Auctions”), so stay tuned, don’t forget to check our Roadmap and keep up the good deals!
Your friendly indie devs,
Abyte Entertainment
A word about Dealer’s Life privacy policy
Hello and welcome to all Great Dealers out there!
Today we’d like to spend a word on Dealer’s Life privacy policy.
We know that reading privacy policies is boring (believe us, it’s the same for us when having to write them!) and we also know that sometimes they can seem "scary" as they are not written in an "ordinary" language (some companies even exploit this thing). The two things combined may trigger fears for your personal information.
If you want to know more, the first advice regarding our privacy policy is to read it carefully and till the end, you should not stop at the first line and then start fearing for the worst because there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in our policy.
To prove this point we just updated it and made it clearer, especially for PC users as we have less active services on the PC versions of our games.
And to be even clearer, we will summarize here all the services we use in our games, including the "mobile users only" ones too to highlight that they are not included in the Steam PC version that you are playing!
Firebase Remote Config
This is our remote configuration provider, it lets us dynamically set in-game parameters without having to modify it (i.e.: we don’t have to release an updated build).
We use it to trigger “Holiday Themes” (soon the Easter Theme will be activated!), to show in the main menu the “new version available” animation and to show on mobiles a special animation in Dealer’s Life Lite if the Premium version is on sale. We also have more ideas on this topic for the future, as this really helps setting events and special situations.
🎵 Last Christmas, I gave you my Pixelated Pickaxe 🎵
🎵 but the very next day you gave it away 🎵
Firebase Remote Config uses various types of Data as specified in Google privacy policy.
AdMob by Google (Mobile users only)
This is our ads provider, we need it to show ads on our mobile games and let you try Dealer’s Life Lite for free.
Google Admob uses cookies and unique device identifiers for advertising (Google Advertiser ID or IDFA, for example).
As per GDPR this is considered a “personal information” and this usage must be disclosed. We also added details on how to prevent its usage on both Google Play and App Store store descriptions.
The PC version does not have ads so of course this topic does not apply to PC players.
Google Analytics for Firebase (Mobile users only)
This is our analytics provider and, for those of you who don’t know how analytics work, they help track specific actions in the game for statistical purposes. In the early phase of Dealer’s Life development these were really important in helping us discover bugs or bad behaviors (especially connected to procedural generation) in the game.
Here are two examples that show how we use them:
an event when a player has no special encounters available which help discover possible situations where the procedural generation for special encounters has “blocking” conditions that prevent the generation.
an event that counts each game lost and each game won, which helped us keep the game balanced. In fact, if we saw too many games lost after an update, we were sure that we had changed something that made the game more difficult and this triggered a global balance check on our side.
Each event is of course completely anonymous meaning that we don’t know who has triggered the event but we just know what happened (i.e.: someone won the game).
Google Analytics for Firebase uses cookies, unique device identifiers for advertising (Google Advertiser ID or IDFA, for example) and Usage Data,
as specified in Google privacy policy.
This topic does not apply to PC players: the PC version does not have analytics as Google Firebase does not support PC builds, which is unfortunate because, as we said above, they really can be helpful in balancing the game, but we decided to work on other game-related tasks rather than find a new analytics provider.
Other services
Google Play Games, Apple Game Center and Steam have their own privacy policies, if you want to know more be sure to read them on their websites.
In conclusion
We don’t receive any real personal information about our players, we just use these tools to develop the game and provide the best level of quality possible for all our players.
As always, if you have any question or concern feel free to ask and we’ll gladly answer as soon as possible.
Your friendly indie devs,
Abyte Entertainment
Dealer’s Life 1.16 update: Portuguese, QoL improvements and much more!
Good day to you, Great Dealers out there!
We just released version 1.16 of Dealer’s Life and there is really a lot to talk about but before we begin with the usual listing of all the improvements of this update we would like to give a huge thank you to every Content Creator and every Streamer that are playing and enjoying our game.
It is so awesome to see how much love is coming from Youtube and Twitch, an incredible amount of playthrough videos keeps coming since our release on Steam and this is simply amazing!
We would love to name and thank every single one of you guys making videos but we don’t want to forget anyone, so we will just encourage every Great Dealer reading this article to search for Dealer's Life on Youtube and Dealer's Life on Twitch and watch lots of playthrough videos!
We watched them all and, even if in many cases we couldn’t understand the language, they were all so awesome and funny to watch! Go check them out and you’ll find great videos in English, German, Czech, Turkish, Danish, Portuguese, Polish and many other languages! Let’s mobilitate and show as much love as we can to these guys, they really deserve it: watch their videos, follow their channels and give them a lot of likes! ❤
Let’s now get back to our new release.
V. 1.16
Portuguese localization!
Custom mouse pointer
Better visualization for weekly expenses in the "My shop" notebook section
Improved game flow when locking/unlocking items and when assigning tasks to employees
"Do not show this tip again" set by default on Tutorial Tips
Weekly save game backup (still please don’t force quit abruptly the game while playing!)
Minor text fixes (especially in German)
Bug fixes
For the joy of our Portuguese speaking players we finally completed the Portuguese localization for the game!
We hope this improvement can bring more enjoyment to all Portuguese players that are not familiar with foreign languages! Of course if you should find any issue with the new localization do not hesitate to let us know and we will fix it as soon as possible!
Moving on, while we were watching all those wonderful Dealer’s Life playthrough videos we thought that something had to be made to better highlight the mouse pointer, just to make the watcher more aware of the action performed by the streamer, so we introduced a nice customized mouse pointer in the PC version of the game. The new pointer is now bigger and much more visible than the standard pointer, we hope this helps you having a clearer idea of where the mouse is pointing at any given time. Let us know if you like it!
Speaking about the next change, we would like to thank our great Steam Community for giving us a lot of smart feedback about quality of life improvements for the game!
Following our players feedback we decided to analyze the game flow and tried to understand if some passages could be improved in order to make the gaming experience more straightforward.
First of all we improved weekly expenses visualization by moving them in the "My shop" notebook section: here we show the amount that will be paid at the end of the week as well as details on how much your shop and your employees cost.
Then we removed a popup window that was shown after assigning a task on an item since it didn’t provide any essential data.
In addition, the popup window that appears after locking an item has been converted into a tutorial tip that will be shown the first time an item is locked.
And finally, talking about tutorial tips, we decided to change the default value of the checkbox that dismisses them so that now all tutorial tips will show up only once unless you decide to unckeck the checkbox.
We also listened to the few of you that had some issues with the saved game. Even if you are very few we still think that losing progress of a long game should be avoided at all costs so we did our best by introducing a backup save.
Since the game automatically saves its progress quite often during the gameplay, if for any reason your game is shut down while saving, the result can be a corrupted saved game that can’t be loaded any more. Unfortunately we really can’t do anything about it (as all the icons with the “Do not shutdown while saving” warning explain in most games), but in this new release we will provide you a special backup that will be updated weekly. Should your saved game become corrupted, the game will automatically load the backup save and you’ll be able to continue from there. Of course you could lose a couple of days of gameplay but we know it is better to lose a few days than an entire game! :D
We also gave some more love to existing localizations and, thanks to the help of some of our most passionate Great Dealers, we managed to fix many typos, especially in German!
Lastly, remember that we also introduced a whole set of Steam Trading Cards! We already talked about them but if you missed that announcement you can find all the details here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/982270/announcements/detail/1791775741707886090
That’s all for this update!
We hope you’ll like all these improvements! As usual more is coming with the following releases (yes, Steam Achievements! And we are working on some big surprises too!), so stay tuned, don't forget to check our Roadmap and keep up the good deals!
Your friendly indie devs,
Abyte Entertainment
Dealer's Life has now Steam Trading Cards!
Hello and welcome to all Great Dealers out there!
We're very happy to announce that you can now collect Steam Trading Cards and craft badges for Dealer’s Life! ːdlgiftː
You will automatically earn these cards while negotiating for countless items and paving your way to success to become the best Dealer out there!
Collect all the 8 cards to unlock badges, emoticons and backgrounds and express your feelings (especially your love for ːdldollarː ) through them! ːdlsuitcaseː
Here's the complete list of what we have added:
8 trading cards
5 regular badges and 1 foil badge
6 profile backgrounds
6 emoticons
Time to collect them all! ːdleggː
Keep up the good deals and stay tuned, the new 1.16 update will soon be ready for Beta!
Your friendly indiedevs,
Abyte Entertainment
Dealer’s Life updated: version 1.15 – New items and many improvements!
Hello and welcome to all Great Dealers out there!
Today we’re back with another great update, the first one after the PC release that you guys made unforgettable thanks to all your fantastic reviews and playthroughs that every day pop up from around the world!
You are so awesome guys, we will never thank you enough for all your love and support! <3
Back to the update, today we released version 1.15 of Dealer’s Life!
V. 1.15
New Item Pack #9 - Ready to furnish your house? Look for more than 25 brand new items, from TV sets to collectible toasters!
New animation when examining the rarest items!
Add estimated price in auction sale result description
[German] Fix on personality generation text
[German] Fix on auction sale generated message
Minor text fixes/changes
In this update you will find a brand new item pack related to houseware and furniture! This time we focused more on houseware and introduced 25+ new items spacing from fridges and dishwashers to lamps and stereo systems!
We really hope you’ll like them all but of course you’ve got to find them so... Let the hunt begin! ːlunar2019grinningpigː
Of course we’re not finished with items yet!
More of them will come in the following releases and we would love to know what kind of items you would like to see in our game! If you have a great idea about a specific item and you want to share your thoughts with us, come to our Public Roadmap or to our Steam Community and let us know! We will love to evaluate your suggestions!
Moving on, with this release we also introduced some visual changes on the item’s details screen, adding a little and lovely animation for particularly rare items.
We really would like to give some more love to this section of the game so this is just the first improvement, new enhancements will probably come soon within the following releases.
Let’s now talk about what you suggested! As usual, we care a lot about your feedback and always do our best to evaluate your ideas in order to put them into the game if possible!
This time we considered a smart suggestion from a Great Dealer on our Steam Community and we introduced the estimated price of the item you sold on auction in the “sale auction outcome” window. In this way you’ll have a much clearer idea not only about how much you gained from the auction but also about how the auction went in relation your item’s estimated value.
Any auction could bring a good as well as a bad result: if you sell an item on auction it will always be sold but you really cannot be sure of how much you will make out of it. If you’re lucky you will get a generous bidder that could pay your item much more than its value, but on the other hand you could also end up selling your treasure to a group of greedy bidders that would pay you a lot less.
You can’t really control or predict this behaviour so don’t be so confident when selling your most valuable item on auction!
This update also includes some small fixes on localizations: we took some time to find and correct them in various languages (many thanks for the ones some of you reported!), we hope these will improve the overall experience of your gameplay! If you find any other fix for your language do not hesitate to report them to us and we’ll correct them as soon as possible!
Finally, we would like to announce that we just opened to public our new Beta Test channels both for Steam and iOS users, so anyone can opt-in and try out new content before it will be publicly released!
How can you do it you say? Well, on this card on our Roadmap you’ll find all the info you need to know in order to participate to any of our Beta programs on Google Play, Steam and iOS!
For Steam players we also wrote an handy guide.
That’s all for this update, we really hope you enjoyed the reading! More great news will come soon (anybody said Steam Achievements…?) so stay tuned and keep up the good deals!
Your friendly indiedevs,
Abyte Entertainment
Two weeks after the Steam release...
Hello everyone!
Two weeks have passed since our Steam release and we got so overwhelmed from all the things to do that we weren’t able to prepare a proper post-release announcement!
So… Let’s do it right away!
We worked very hard on our game for more than two years and its release on Steam was a big milestone. As always, such a big moment can bring fears and doubts which ultimately can cover all the positive things of such an accomplishment.
But every negative thought vanished as soon as we hit the big green release button and saw how much you all liked our game!
We are very happy for such a positive feedback and we would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all your nice messages, for all the good reviews, for all the feedback and for all the screenshots and videos that you posted!
Speaking about screenshots, you accepted the challenge and uploaded lots of them in the Steam Community Hub! Be sure to like and comment your favorite ones to let us know who should win the race for the best screenshot!
And, speaking about videos, we are very thankful to all the creators that took the time to record a video, or even a series: we had a great time watching them play our game, even if we couldn’t understand a single word for any language different from English and Italian, it was great to see them surprised, find references, make jokes, mimic our characters and ultimately have fun! <3
If you haven't done it yet, check them out on the Steam Community Hub and on YouTube, you'll find dozens of videos in many languages, with German and English being the most common!
Enough with the release, now let's talk about our next update!
First of all, we completed the new Item Pack #9 which adds more than 25 new Houseware items to look for and buy!
With these items we have now completed all the item packs we had planned, so now it's your time to let us hear your voice and let us know what you’d like to see in the game! Post your ideas here or on the “Item Requests” card on the Roadmap, we'll keep track of the most desired items when we'll plan our next item pack!
Speaking of planning, you'll soon see a lot of movement on the Roadmap! We are checking all the tasks, both ours and community requested ones, in order to reevaluate them and plan the next releases for the following months!
As per today, in the new 1.15 update we will surely include:
The new Item Pack #9
Minor text fixes (thank you for reporting them!)
We are also already working on:
A new graphical improvement on the screen where you examine a customer’s item
Steam integrations: mentioned in our last announcement, with this you’ll be able to unlock our 45 achievements on Steam!
Portuguese localization: approximately at 15%, hopefully completed for the end of the month.
Some dedicated PC improvements (such as keyboard controls)
And then after completing the full reevaluation we’ll surely start working on something else!
Some of these tasks (e.g.: Steam integration or Portuguese localization) will need a special testing phase, so we will also check how to properly provide Beta releases on Steam. Which means that, if you like, you’ll soon be able to opt-in the Beta program and then be able to test our latest releases before everyone else! Of course we’ll also make a dedicated announcement on this and keep you updated on what you’ll be able to test in Beta!
Last, but not least, many of you noticed that Dealer’s Life price on Steam is particularly low, some of you were even scared a bit as usually a low price means a low-quality product.
Well, we obviously appreciate praises about the low price, but here’s the truth: this is the first game we develop and we had a lot of difficulties deciding a price tag. We know that DL is a high-quality product and we know we could have asked for more (on mobile we have been updating it every month for two years now) but being in doubt we decided to be "better safe than sorry".
Again, this may just be us two thinking in a different way than the "market standard", same as we did with IAPs that everyone probably would have included in a game like ours (energy bars, time to wait for customers and deals, and so on...).
Also, we managed to have a chat with a couple of experienced devs during these very frantic post-release days and decided to consider the possibility of raising the price after some updates, which in case will be announced in advance with no surprises.
In conclusion, we’d like to keep updating the game for free, with no IAPs and even no DLCs, evaluating a price increase in some updates. If this keeps going well we will show that there is an alternative which makes everyone happy: you, our players, will keep playing an updated game, we will be supported and we will have the financial stability to be able to update this game and then start developing a new one!
So… keep supporting our game and our decisions, spread the word on social platforms, share the game to your friends and tell us what you think!
That’s all for now, thanks to all the Great Dealers out there and keep up the good deals!
Your friendly indiedevs,
Abyte Entertainment
Dealer's Life is out now!
Hello everyone!
Today, almost two years after our first early access release on Android, we are pleased to announce that Dealer's Life is finally available on Steam!
We decided to help all new Dealers and create a guide, so if you want some helpful tips on how to become the best Dealer out there you can find them here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1640583205
Speaking of development, as we said in our previous announcement we are already working on:
Steam integrations, meaning that soon you’ll be able to unlock our 45 achievements here on Steam!
A new set of 25+ items to be included in the item procedural generation (code name: “Houseware & Furniture Pack #3”)
Portuguese localization
Some dedicated PC improvements (such as keyboard controls)
In the meantime, let us know how you feel about the game! If you are having a good time, don't forget to spread the word and share the game, it can greatly help us in this very important phase of our journey!
And of course the race for the best screenshot is on! Feel free to upload your most expensive item, your funniest customer name or the newspaper article that made you laugh the most! ːsteamhappyː
Speaking of references and funny articles, we are also always very interested in everything regarding new funny quotes and references to include in our game, as well as new ideas to discuss together and in case develop! Feel free to contact us here or on our Public Roadmap where we track all tasks and requests.
Keep up the good deals and stay tuned!
Your friendly indiedevs,
Abyte Entertainment
Dealer’s Life release approaching!
Hello everyone and welcome to our first Steam announcement!
First of all, let us introduce ourselves!
We are Abyte Entertainment, a two-man indie team founded by Tanek and Fiz, two italian developers with more than 10 years of experience in business projects, from web to e-commerce platforms, and 30 years as gamers. In 2016 we decided to capitalize our experience and follow a new path, designing and creating our first video game: Dealer’s Life.
Our focus is to create great quality video games by developing deep and detailed mechanics and we think we managed to achieve it in Dealer’s Life through an extremely advanced negotiation engine, procedural generation of items and customers, special characters with multiple choices dialogues and random events!
Dealer's Life history
Some of you might already know us because Dealer’s Life is available on mobile devices on Google Play and App Store.
Those of you who followed us since our mobile release and all our updates know that one of our commitments is to avoid implementing “widely (ab)used” business models (AKA “In-App Purchases”, or IAPs).
We challenged the fact that all these mechanics are included by default in all simulation games, we thought about energy bars to refill, time to wait and loot boxes and we said “thanks, but no thanks”. So we decided to develop a Premium game that could be fully enjoyed by our players at their pace, when and how they want.
This stance towards our players also means that we decided to keep on releasing new content for free each month during all these two years since our very first Early Access release on Android, adding new items, new mechanics and listening to feedback from our players!
And now?
So, enough with us and with our game’s history, I know you are wondering: what about now and the Steam release?
Well, on January 31st we are releasing DL on Steam after all these months of development as a “full game” but, as always, we won’t stop working on it!
Our next tasks
We are already working on:
Steam integrations, meaning that soon you’ll be able to unlock our 45 achievements here on Steam!
You may have noticed the links in each of these tasks... that’s right, we have a Public Roadmap where you can track our progress (and see previews!), check all the planned tasks and releases and discuss them with us!
Are you ready to open your shop and become the best pawn broker out there?
Feel free to let us know what you think here in the comments or on our Public Roadmap!
