In yesterday's "Progress update" community post I mentioned that there's a HUD remake in the works for Update #29. As of today its implementation is finished, so I can show what it looks like to you guys.
Compared to the previous HUD, that's quite the contrast in looks and intuitiveness, isn't it?
The new HUD will feature tooltips for player stats in the top part, and all the functionality you know in the bottom part of it.
You might also have noticed there's a new bar aside from Funds and Reputation in the top part that wasn't present on the previous HUD. I'll let you speculate on what that is. ;)
Once I'm done adjusting the Scenarios to the new HUD (which shouldn't take long), I'll get on with making sure the new Piracy mechanic is balanced well, and then this update will become available on the 'develop' branch. I estimate that you'll be able to try it out in no more than 1.5 weeks. As always keep in mind that estimations are just that: estimations. The real time until it's available might differ either way.
Thanks for reading!
Progress report #20
Hey all! It has been some time since the upcoming content has been announced and I'd like to give you all an update on what's happening.
The Piracy mechanic is almost finished, right now all I need to do with it is add some more dialogue related to it and make sure that the balancing is not off. Like mentioned in "What's next? #6" this gameplay mechanic will add more difficulty to the late game side of things, and will be barely felt when just starting out with a low reputation level.
Aside from that there is also a HUD remake in the works. This is a big one since it's going to make navigating the HUD itself a lot more intuitive. Let's be honest, the current HUD is not exactly pretty nor intuitive. So with the HUD remake this will be fixed.
This update will soon be available on the 'develop' branch, and I'll make another "Progress update" post to let you know when it goes live. Your feedback will be appreciated regarding the new Piracy mechanic, as well as any bugs you find with the new stuff!
Thanks for reading!
What's next? #6
Hey everyone!
It has been a while since I last made one of these posts. There are two reasons why development of post-release content for Game Dev Studio seemingly stopped:
1. The game sales had become really weak, and I couldn't invest more money into it since I'd be working at a loss.
2. I had run out of ideas for additional content.
With that said, as time passed by, both problems were solved. Recently the sales have picked up greatly, allowing me to work on content updates again, and with a fresh head I have some new ideas for the game. With that said, here's what you can look forward to in terms of new content:
#1 - Piracy. An issue in real life, and a soon-to-be issue in one of the upcoming updates for Game Dev Studio. The severity of the piracy rate for your games will depend on how well you treat your customers. If you fill your games with microtransactions or make bad games and sell them at a high price (or a combination of both!), then people will become increasingly displeased. The more displeased your customers are, the higher the piracy rates are going to be. This is a gameplay mechanic that will add extra challenge mostly to the late game side of things and be kept at a minimum in early game, since I am aware that a lot of people find the game difficult despite the addition of the "very easy" difficulty and the timescale adjustment.
#2 - Random events. This area of the game is something I didn't put much thought into, because I wanted the game to have deep gameplay mechanics rather than superficial, fluff type content. In hindsight that wasn't such a good idea, as having very few randomly occuring events (regardless of whether they bring a benefit or something bad) can make the game get stale and boring after some time. I will be looking into adding more of these to spice up the gameplay.
#3 - Additional stage for the tutorial. People have been expressing the fact that they don't understand what certain employee stats do. This new tutorial stage will be dedicated to acquainting players with employee stats such as attributes, skills, traits, etc.
#4 - Digital store fronts. Inspired by recent events in the game industry, I will try to add digital store fronts to the game. I say "try" because I want to make sure that this gameplay mechanic is interesting and provides depth to the game, as is the case with every other gameplay mechanic that I've added to the game so far. This feature falls under a big "if", meaning that if I can't come up with interesting gameplay mechanics then I won't add it.
Phew, with that written down I am quite eager to get back into developing more content for Game Dev Studio, and I hope that once it is released you will have as much fun playing with these new features as I will have developing them!
If you have ideas for random events that could be added to the game, feel free to share them in the comments or in the Discussions of Game Dev Studio!
Thanks for reading!
Update #28
Hello! This update adjusts a couple of things within the game and fixes a few issues.
- Stylizing, Parkour, and Machine Learning were not used anywhere for Genre-Theme combination Quality point contribution, now they do
- the interest selection during character creation now shows the amount of tasks the knowledge provided by the interest contributes to increasing the Quality point gain from
- fixed incorrect display of the theme-genre combos knowledge given by interests (some genre-theme combos would be skipped over entirely) in the character creation menu
- fixed the "Goals & deadlines" HUD element remaining after changing the resolution/window mode
- fixed game crash that occured when cancelling an in-dev platform while employees could talk about some occurence related to it
- fixed platform specialists never freeing up from their busy state
- optimized event handling, resulting in slightly lower memory usage, and slightly better performance when a lot of things are happening at the same time (most often when playing with the x5 speed multiplier)
- minor optimizations done to lighting compute
- minor optimizations done to main logic loop
I would like to thank the people that have reported bugs fixed in this update.
If you come across any bugs or crashes, make sure to report them in the Steam discussions thread.
Thanks for reading!
One Year Anniversary!
Hey everyone!
It has been a year since release of Game Dev Studio, and wow, what a journey this was! Countless patches have been released, 27 of which have been documented, but a lot more that were simple bugfixes weren't announced. Many features were added to the game (some of which were what the community asked for), many quality of life improvements were added, and many bugs were fixed.
With that said, let's take a look at what the biggest changes were over the course of the year mentioned in the updates:
added the ability to take a loan
added the 'Comfort' drive affector and objects related to it
added the ability to sell engine licenses
added MMO project type
added Platform Creation and a new campaign 'Console Domination' for this feature
added a new tutorial, split up into 3 parts, so that players can easily replay any part they didn't understand fully
added female employees
added Achievements
added Workshop support
added Annual Game Awards
added sub-genres
French and Russian localizations were added
German localization by community member Westman was added
118 various bugfixes
and a ton of quality-of-life improvements
When I put all the additions in a list like this, it doesn't seem like a lot, but you have to remember that I'm just one person working on this game, and some features bring hours of extra gameplay! All the new gameplay mechanics provide Game Dev Studio with even more depth and longevity, all for the same price that the game launched at!
I would like to thank all the people that were active in the community, suggesting new features, reporting bugs, and generally providing their feedback on all sorts of things. Without you this wouldn't have been possible!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing Game Dev Studio!
Tycoon Starter Pack!
Hey all!
I'm happy to announce that Game Dev Studio is now part of a bundle named 'Tycoon Starter Pack'. It contains 3 games: Diner Bros, Train Valley 2, and of course Game Dev Studio! The bundle is currently 20% off, so if you (or your friend) were to looking for a bunch of new tycoon and management games to try out (or to gift to a friend) and save some money in the process, then check it out!
Hello! This small update fixes a crash that can occur during the tutorial, and adjusts the LuaJIT compiler to allow for slightly better performance.
- fixed a crash that occured during the tutorial's office expansion step if the player tried to move any object
- adjusted LuaJIT compiler settings to allow for better performance
Hello! This small update adds display selection to the options menu.
- added display selection to the options menu; if the monitor used for the game differs from the one before, make sure to choose the right one in the options menu after this update is downloaded on your end (version 1.0.6.10)
Hello! This update fixes a couple of gameplay related issues.
- fixed selling a bookshelf not removing its contribution to the skill experience gain until reloading the game or the savefile
- fixed genre selection button not closing on click when no subgenres are present
- (MODDING) fixed a crash that occured when removing a wall in the prefab editor
Hello! This update fixes a couple of issues pointed out by the community.
- fixed some visual glitches with some of the female hair styles
- fixed the interview question about a new sequel being applied to expansion packs
- MMO DDOS and database corruption chances lowered
- (Linux) added several necessary libraries that are not necessarily bundled with a fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.04
