"We are extremely happy to present the demo of Idol Manager, the idol business simulator that lets you run your own talent agency!
Use whatever means necessary to conquer the Japanese entertainment industry!"
"Idol Manager, developed by Russian indie game developer Glitch Pitch, is an idol game like no other. Not even Japan has seen anything like it.
As the producer of your own talent agency, recruit talented individuals, train them up, and form your very own idol group. Use any and all means available to you to climb to the top of the entertainment industry."
Develop talented idols, produce CD’s that come with exclusive tickets to hand-shake events, run your own official idol group café, the options are endless. What's more, you must also of manage the relationship between the members of your idol group. You also never know when one of your idols would find herself caught up in a scandal. It is completely up to you to navigate this slippery road to the top of the entertainment industry.
Demo details:
The demo will end after 6 in-game months pass, at which point you will be able to create a save file that can be continued in the full version.
Contains a tutorial scenario. Story progression will not be available in the demo.
A limited number of substories and random events will occur. You will not be able to enter a romantic relationship with the idols in the demo.
You cannot construct the following in the demo: costume room, medical room, theatre.
Idol Manager releases on 7/27! Make sure you give the demo a go before its full release!
The music sales chart updates every month with a ranking of the top-selling singles.
The charts aren't just there to stroke the egos of top performers; the rankings are also a valuable source of what sort of music is popular and trending. If you want to stay trendy, watch the musical chart to see what genres, lyrical themes, and choreography styles are currently popular. Trending genres are more likely to appeal to casual fans, while hardcore fans tend to have more esoteric tastes.
Styling
Think your idol needs a new look? You can now change their hairstyle or accessory using the newly-added styling feature. (Click the "scissors" menu icon on the bottom-right.)
Improvements
Added 10 new hairstyles and 4 new accessories. (Maybe you should try out the newly-added styling option to see if any of the new looks suit your tastes!)
Changes to singles
Each demographic now has a certain "soft cap" to how many copies of a single they can buy; after reaching the soft cap, gains for this demographic get exponentially smaller. (If you want to keep increasing sales after hitting market saturation with a certain demographic, you may want to diversify your target demographics and try to appeal to a wider audience.)
Misc improvements
Idol profiles now show idol's dating status based on what the player has learned about them
Updated doctor and manager sprites
Reduced the effect that Hype over 100% has on profits in bigger venues.
Added a tooltip that shows current day of the week when hovering over the date display in the bottom left
You can now use arrow keys and enter key to select dialogue options
Previously, there was just one "relationship" meter that governed your relationship with each idol. This has been split into three separate stats: "friendship," "influence," and "romance." Each starts at level 0, and can level up to level 5, or down to level -5.
Friendship is a measure of how much an idol generally likes you, similar to how the old relationship stat worked. Romance is a measure of romantic interest, and determines how willing an idol is to date or enter a relationship with you; it's affected by actions like flirting.
Influence
It's nice to be both liked and respected, but the two don't always go hand in hand. Influence is a separate meter which measures how indebted an idol feels to you: generally speaking, you gain influence with idols by doing favors for them, and you lose influence by asking idols to do favors for you. Similarly, uncovering compromising information about idols (and agreeing to keep it secret) will cause you to gain influence over them, but if they learn compromising information about you, it may cause you to lose influence over them.
If your influence level with an idol is positive, it means that you have influence over her; a negative value indicates that she has influence over you (and you probably owe her a favor if you want to get things back to normal). If an idol has influence over you, she cannot be fired!
The following events affect influence:
You will lose influence with an idol if she becomes injured
Fulfilling an idol's wish will cause you to gain influence with her
You gain a small amount of influence with any "pushed" idols each month
Your choices in certain substories and random events can also gain or lose influence (depending on the story or event) and affect other relationship stats.
Spending influence on favors
One of the benefits of gaining influence with an idol is the opportunity to spend that influence to ask her for favors. All of the following requests can be made of an idol if you have enough influence over her:
Forced breakup: You can tell an idol to dump her current boyfriend or girlfriend. The amount of influence required depends on several factors: if she's unhappy in her current relationship, she may be more willing to break up than if she likes her current partner. Additionally, if you have a "no restrictions" dating policy, it'll be harder to force an idol to break up. However, if you have a group policy which forbids dating, you can take this action without spending any influence.
Stop bullying: If you know that an idol is bullying another member of the group, you can use influence to force her to stop. If an idol is being bullied by a clique, telling the clique leader to stop the bullying will cause most of the other clique members to stop bullying as well (but you might still have a hanger-on who has to be persuaded separately from the clique leader). If you don't have enough influence with the clique leader to tell her to stop the bullying, you can tell the clique members individually to stop bullying: if you can separately influence half the group to stop bullying, the rest of the group will fall into line and stop bullying as well (regardless of how the clique leader feels).
Spying and blackmail: You can tell an idol to try to dig up dirt on another idol by rooting through her belongings or casually stalking her. If the spy is successful (random chance), you may gain influence over the idol she was spying on by uncovering evidence of misconduct, depending on how severe and potentially scandalous her misconduct is. An idol's willingness to spy for you is based on certain factors, such as her relationship with the target: idols will be less willing to spy on friends, and more willing to spy on their enemies. Idols who like you (either as a friend or as a romantic partner) will also be more willing to spy for you.
Improvements
New hairstyles and accessories
Three new accessories and 19 new hairstyles have been added. (More hairstyles will be added in future updates.) For the next update, we're planning on adding an option to change hairstyles and accessories.
Reworked salary system
The game now tracks how much money each idol earns for you. You can check this number in their profile or in the salaries popup. The bottom-right corner of the default view now also has a button to bring up the salaries popup.
An idol's desired salary is based on their current fame level, how much money they're currently earning for you, and how much you're paying other idols. (If an idol sees that her peers have high salaries, she may start to feel underpaid.)
Under the old system, idols with 9 or 10 fame would sometimes demand absurdly high salaries. The new system (which factors in how much money she's actually making for the company) should help to alleviate this problem.
Changes to single creation
Selecting a marketing strategy for your single is now optional. Choosing to produce a single with no marketing strategy removes the need to have a business manager work on the project before it can be released.
Marketing strategies that are tied to a ticket or other physical item bundled with the CD (e.g. handshake events) have a scaling cost that is based on the number of CDs being produced, while marketing strategies that aren't tied to the physical product (e.g. fake scandal) have a fixed cost. (This was always the intended behavior, but small changes have been made to make this more consistent.)
Miscellaneous
You can now drag and drop tasks into an office when the staffer is working on a business proposal. The staffer will resume working on it after completing the task.
Checkbox buttons in context menus are now green when selected
Separate checkboxes for auto physical and mental stamina recovery
Separate checkboxes for auto injury and depression treatment
Added "Info" button with a tooltip that shows related active tasks when creating a new single, show, or special event, and during elections
"Details" widget now also shows how many special events are waiting for your action
You can now sort idols in the "Formation" popup
You can now change the cast, host and title of a running show
You can now reorder songs in the New Concert popup
You can now edit the set list of a concert in production
Added a warning icon with a tooltip on singles, shows and concerts in production where a participating idol was automatically removed or replaced due to injury or graduation
Updated Unity to the latest version, which should improve performance for some players
Bug fixes
Fixed: Idols on hiatus were still getting into conflicts
Fixed: Pressing 1, 2 or 3 in the New Concert popup unpaused the game
Fixed: Wrong position of one of the portraits in the birthday event
Fixed: Wrong word order in dialogue for Single wishes
Fixed: Graduation could cause a time freeze
Fixed: Tasks widget showed tasks of graduated idols
Fixed: Settings popup only worked in the main menu
Fixed: No more 9,999/10,000 sales
Fixed: Issues with mentorship dialogue
Localization: Auto resized text in a few places where overflowing was an issue
Localization: Fixed text that was untranslatable (some buttons, tooltips, context menus, etc)
Hey! I'm Max, the designer and programmer of Idol Manager. Thank you for your interest in our game!
If you've been following the development of Idol Manager, you could notice that we've made a lot of progress last year. Most of the game systems are implemented, and, if all goes well, we hope to start a closed alpha test in the first half of this year.
We have been developing Idol Manager as a hobby project, working in our free time and commissioning art and music assets. Unfortunately, it won't be possible for us to fully realize our vision of the game like this. We're facing two options right now: either reducing the scope and cutting features, or seeking additional funding to not compromise on the quality of the game. This is why we decided to run a Kickstarter campaign.
We will still be partially funding the game, but your help will allow us to create a lot more exciting events, substories and other content for you to discover.
If you're excited for Idol Manager, please consider backing us on Kickstarter to help us create the best game we can!
