Corporation Mode has been received well, which we are incredibly happy about. But as it gets some playtime, more bugs emerge that we have not been aware of. So this update has focused on eradicating a lot of them.
The biggest problem has been withdeliveries where an error changed some floor assignments from storage to store. It should be fixed, but in saved games it may still be an issue. If there is a problem, try moving around the storage units such that they again are in a allowed location.
Loans also work properly again. In addition, loans, rents and wages are paid at the end of the day instead of various times dring the day.
Please tell us if anything else should show up. We will continue to focus on removing errors and sending out small updates.
Own Logos
It is now possible to add your own logos. Follow our guide here on Steam on how to create your own. Logos from old games will probably have changed. However, it is now also possible to change logos in the game. In Entrepreneur games, they can be changed inside the office, and in Corporation games you can change them through your concepts.
New Sales Interaction
We have updated the sales system to be clearer and more intuitive, which hopefully allows for better sales and more money.
New Storage System
Your office computer has a new system. Here you can choose how many items you want in stock. On the order screen, the system can then order up to this number. Nice and easy.
Tell us what you think needs to be updated and changed. Many of these things comes out of players' wishes, so don't hold back.
Happy sales out there!
Hotfix 0.7.1 is up
We received notifications of several issues with the game, to which we have released a hotfix. Thank you a lot :-)
Mainly: - You can transfer funds when your corporation is in negative - The unlimited concepts / store HQ actually allows for unlimited. - You can buy a store you have rented. - Buying a store only cost money if you actually get it.
and some other issues.
We are aware that loans are currently not deducted properly, but coudn't get it in for this update.
We will focus the next period on clearing bugs, and update as needed. So please let us know if you find more.
V 0.7.0 is here! Featuring Corporation mode and 2 new languages.
Dear Retailers
We are very exited to finally announce that update 0.7.0 is here! And it features two new large improvements to the game.
---- New languages ----
First of all, the game is now playable in two new languages: German and Danish. This is for testing out, and if the feedback is positive, we might expand to more languages in the future.
---- Corporation Mode ----
We have been working very hard to bring the complete new game mode to you: The Corporation Mode, but what did it end up with? Well, here you start off with no money, and must create the largest corporation in the city. And to do that, it will require a lot of hard work:
Contract Work:
To earn your first money, you must work for some of the other retailers in the city. Earn reputation with these companies, and land more lucrative deals.
PopUp Stores:
Some companies opens PopUp stores in the city. A store that is open for 10 days. The sales from these stores are saved, so see if you can beat your on record when the chance arrives the next time around.
When you have enough money, it is time for you to start your own company.
City Hall:
To do this, you must go to the city hall. Set up your company, and get your first office space. In the City Hall you can also get advice on how to deal with starting a new company.
HQ:
Your small cubicle will probably be your first HQ for your company. In time you will be able to buy your own building, and establish a larger headquarter. Your HQ decides how many stores and concepts you can have. (Currently the HQ is very basic, but it will be expanded in future patches, and have more functionalities)
Concepts:
In your HQ you can setup your various concepts. Concepts are the brands that your stores will belong to. So one concept might be of fashion clothing, and another of electronics. A good concept takes time to build. You can assign multiple stores to one concept, and build several chains of stores. The stores then work together, improving your concept faster.
Daily Managers:
If you are a success, and get to own several stores, you will need help. As you can't run all stores yourself, you will need to promote one from your team to be the Daily Manager who then runs your store in your absence. However that persons skills decide how much it will sell. So will you hire a cheap manager and save the wage cost, or go all out and hire the best there is? (In future patches this will expand with the possibility of having various concept managers also, such as an Area Manager, Sales Manager and so on, which will have various effects)
So can you balance out all of these things and become the King of Retail?
---- Other New Stuff ----
Staff Wages:
Your staff will now require new wage negotiations if their skills doesn't match the wage, or if they have been working for you for some time. To assist with this, we improved the negotiation flow to make it a bit more intuitive.
Staff Requests:
Other than wages, the staff will also let you know of other requests they have, such as the desire for taking a new course, or having a day off. How you respond is up to you, but don't promise something that you can't keep. We also added some other events for you to react to.
Staff Personalities:
You staff also have various personality traits. So the sales person you need, loses energy faster, but is very light-hearted. Will you hire this person, or find another.
We would very much like to hear comments and feedback regarding all of these new things here on the forums. Also feedback regarding bugs, and things you think should be balanced are also more than welcome.
We hope you enjoy the expansion :)
Progress on corporation mode
Dear Retailers It is time to give you some info on what will be by far the largest update from us so far.
So what is corporation mode?
In corporation mode you start off in a new city with no money in your pocket, and no reputation at all.
The Career Part
To get some money you will have to sign contracts with other companies to run their stores. These contracts will give you a daily wage, and also a bonus when completing the task at hand.
As you complete more jobs, your personal reputation with these companies will increase, allowing you to take contracts in better locations for higher wages.
Starting your corporation
When you have enough money, you can head to the city hall, and start your corporation.
Your corporation will be the center of it all. This is the "master" company which holds it all together.
A corporation will also need it's headquarters, but being completely new you might have to settle for renting an office space in the city hall.
...and make your first concept.
With your headquarters ready, you can make your first concept.
A concept is a unique brand, with it's own identity and targeting specific markets. So the concept is what your customers will see, and eventually come to know. However each concept starts small. You will need to develop it over time, to gradually expand it's reputation to the customers. Will you focus on becoming the expert in one category, or becoming adequate in several.
Depending on your HQ, your corporation can own lots of concepts. As each concept gets larger, it will require more management. So each concept will need various managers in the HQ to reach it's full potential. This being a sales managers, purchasing managers, and area managers among others.
Putting the concepts to use
Your concepts will of course need stores to be of use. So you have to find the lots you wish to place stores on. They will vary greatly in population and segment composition. So the celebrities might be nearer the stores at the beach, and the farmers near the rural areas. Off course the more attractive locations cost more. You can both rent and buy the lots around the city, with buying off course being the more expensive choice. However buying a lot allows you to build on it, expanding the store, whereas with a rental you will have to make do with what is.
When you have decided on a lot, you assign a concept to the store which is going to be built there, invest some of your hard earned money in it and then start playing.
When playing inside the store, the game works at you know it. However customers also now look at the reputations of your concept when deciding if they want to shop at your store.
Multi-store owner
When you have the money to expand, it is time to prepare for your next store. Before leaving, it is best that you hire a daily manager to your current store. This person will take care of your store while you are away at another. While at a store, the other stores will still earn (or cost) you money, and contribute to your concepts. From time to time you will have to check in at the store, to make sure that everything is running smoothly, or extend your stay to improve it further.
Big spender
When everything is on track, you will need to expand you HQ to allow for more concepts, and more stores. And hopefully you will get the big skyscraper, crush the competing stores and dominate the city.
Some notes on the develpoment
It has taken some time
We wanted to explaing why you havent received any updates from us in a while.
As we are only two persons making this game, and this being our first, things take time, and we still have a lot of learning to do. So making an update of this size by basically creating a new game on top of the existing is quite a mountainclimb for us, both in planning and executing. As we have learned on the way we are also beginnig to see that some of our earlier practices could have been done in a much better way. But as these practices has been used on the foundations of the game, we also have to spend some time "untangling" and improving this, to allow us to be faster and more efficient in the future.
So these are the main reasons of why this takes some time. But rest assured, we are and have been working hard every week to bring the content to you.
Why such a big update now
When we decided to make this, we weren't quite sure of how long it would take. However we felt that this was necessary to improve your experience.
Lots of you had already maxed out the game, and requested bigger stores. Increasing the sizes would only fix it for a small amount of time, as this would just be "more of the same". This also meant that our time was used making these hotfixes instead of progressing the game to where we plan it to go. And since you always would use up this content before we could add something new, we decided to go another direction.
So this is to give you a new experience, and a new challenge that went beyond of "just getting a big store", which hopefully will keep you entertained for longer. And when this is done, we will go back to improve the core game and adding more articles.
How long left
All of the core elements has been made, and we are now beginning to merge them together. When this is done, we start on adding some more content. The city map only consist of the small area, which will have to be expanded. The career part only contain the "mandatory" stores, and needs some more possibilities. The HQ can not be expanded to unlock more concepts. The city hall allows you to talk to NPC's, which work as a part of the tutorial, which also needs some work. Upon adding this, a bugfixing and balancing period starts, and when that is done, we are ready to release it to you.
So a very rough, and unpromised, estimate is 3-4 weeks of time.
We hope that this answers some of the questions you might have, ans you are as aways more than welcome to comment and bring ideas to the game :)
Work In Progress
We have received several messages from you asking about how far the updates are coming. And it has been quite some time since our last post, so here comes :-)
We are still working on a larger change to the game, allowing you to expand your business into opening several stores. We have almost gotten the basics to work, and after that we need to add some content giving it some playability. When this is done, it is about testing, bugfixing and balancing. It will most likely not be fully complete for the update, but will be accessible as a beta-version alowing you to play and give feedback on what you think of it.
So what have we made so far?
City Map
First of all, there is the City Map. This will show the available lots for rent, for purchase, or contract offers allowing you to earn some money working for other companies. The image shown is the only area at the moment, but will be expanded to a larger map of different population compositions and densities. Since these areas differ in customers, it will require you to pay more attention to which articles you purchase, and how you manage the area. This means you also can't afford the best of locations immediately, but you will have to earn money the lower populated areas before being able to open a store in the midtown.
New Areas
There will also be other areas to explore, and people to interact with. For instance the University which in time will contain much improved tutorials, and tips on how to play the game.
Or the city hall, where you must apply for new companies, or buying lots to build on.
These areas are only very basic at the moment, but will also improve in the future, along with new ones.
Personalities
Your staff now has received different personality traits. This means that they now have two positives and two negatives to them, meaning that you also need to take this into consideration when managing and hiring.
Wages & Negotiation
The staff are also now aware about being better at working at your store. So they will demand higher wages as time goes by. This also means that you can call up your staff for renegotiations, and even promotions to become the manager when you are away.
So this is what we have been up to for the last month. We don't know yet when it will be available for playing, but hopefully we have cleared the worst parts of the work. If this gives you any fun ideas on what could be possible to do in the game, please let us know about it.
Happy Retailing //The Devs
The work in progress.
It is time for a little notification telling you what we are working on ːsteamhappyː
Multiple Languages
(We don't know if the above actually makes sense to a german speaking person yet as it hasn't been validated)ːsteamhappyː
We have for long had a wish to translate the game to different languages. And after lot of battling with the engine, we might finally have found the solution on how to work with it.
This means we are beginning to translate the game into various languages.
Since this is uncharted territory for us we still have much to learn on how to work with this, and this is the reason we start off slowly by introducing 2 new languages.
The first will be German as this is the language spoken by the majority of our players. The second is Danish as this is our country of origin.
If everything goes well, and we can manage the extra workload, we will expand to more languages over time.
It should hopefully be ready already in the next update :)
City mode
We have also taken the baby steps in building City mode. This will be a quite big mode, and will in time probably replace the current modes. This will give you the opportunity to open chains of stores in different areas, allowing yout to build a huge empire.
We don't know yet if some of it will be available in the next patch, but we still wanted to show you that it is taking form.
Articles
The game still needs more articles. Although we havent made any yet, modern shoes will probably be added, expanding this category further.
More events
We are developing the event system, such that you are able to respond to some of the mails. This allows for more direct interaction with your employees and the world, as each answer has different consequenses and opportunities.
Other things might enter as we havent decided everything for the next update, so let us know what you would like to feature in game.
We are also of course still interested in knowing about bugs you might encounter during your playing experience, and we have added some subforums for bugreporting only.
Cheers
The devs
Version 0.6.0 is ready for you
Dear Retailers
A month has gone by since our last release, and we have now finished work on this one. So what does it contain?
New Articles
- Some of the shirts have been updated to better looking models.
- Several shoes has been added, and some replaced (There will be added more shoes over time, also replacing older models).
- A new category "Pants" has been added, containing a lot of these to sell.
Close for a day
It is now possible to keep closed for an entire day, allowing you to do whatever you feel like for an entire day. In the next patch there will also be an opportunity to request special deliveries, allowing you to order articles on this day also to give what you might need.
Better ordering
Ordering has received some upgrades. You can browse your previous orders, and also reorder what has been sold the same day. This should make it easier to manage the stock.
New storage items
The storage has received several units to choose from. Both to store your articles, and to receive deliveries on. This unfortunately means that the old units has been removed, impacting save games. However these will be refunded, and you will not lose any articles that was saved on thee units.
Balancing
It was getting too easy earning lots of money from day 1, so we have adjusted the game in several areas.
Reputation gains: It didn't take many days to receive full reputation in all areas. So the gains have been downscaled a bit for categories, and quite a lot for customer segments. So now you have to fight more in the beginnings to get customers into the store, using catalogues, forum posts and fetching them from the streets.
Reputation losses: The penalty for having customers leaving the store was basically so small that it didn't have any effect. This penalty has been increased such that these customers has an influence. So try and keep them all happy :)
Article saturations: It was possible to keep selling the same few articles over and over again each day. This is still possible, but now the customers will be less willing to buy these articles. So for maximum sale, it is needed to keep a large variety of articles, or to change out the assortment once in a while.
Other minor features
- Staff on registers going on break. It was quite annoying when staff went to break, if they manned the only register. Now, if they are the only one on register, they will allow the register open and just go on break. If there are others with an open register, they will finish their queue, and then head for break.
- Staff are better at restocking Staff didn't always fill out a display if a location wasn't completely empty. This has also been adjusted, and they should now be better at restocking.
- Staff can help with cleanup of boxes If there are boxes with articles on the ground, the staff can now also help unpack those, if they have unlocked the talent for it off course.
- Improvement of space requirements All inventory have had their space requirements updated, so there should not be any more annoying overlappings "cheating" you of valuable space.
- Even better AI movement The AI movement have been adjusted further, and should allow for even better moving among each other.
Bugs and bugs
As always many bugs has been removed, and new ones has most certainly entered. So we still need all of your help and feedback in spotting more of these when you encounter them :-)
And we are still very interested in listening to anything you might have to say of what is good, what can be better, and all your great ideas. We are especially interested in listening to what you feel the game need work on, if it's more articles, new features, balancing or something else.
We hope you enjoy our work
\\ The Devs
What we have been working on
Fellow retailers!
We wanted to show you a little more of what we have been working on :-)
More articles
Our previous post mentioned the addition of pants. We decided to not stop at that as we have also updated a few of the old (and ugly) shirts, to newer models. Finally we have created a new bunch of shoes ready for sale, as this also needed some attention. More shoes will also be added in the future.
Closing the store for an entire day
Many of you have requested the opportunity to close the store for an entire day to reorganize or whatever you feel like. So this has been added, along wing a quick button to give all your staff a day off if you want do to it by yourself. This will also replace the clocks, as this seems like a better solution.
Easier ordering
Some of you mentioned that ist is easy to forget to save an order just made. So from now on you will be able to see your 10 last orders from the ordering menu. It will also be possible to add all sold articles from the current day.
More storage items
We have noticed that many of you has huge storage rooms. This has also been a neglegted area since the startof the development. So we have added some more storage and delivery units which can carry extra items, at an increased cost of course.
With these changes we don't plan to add much more to this update, and will hopefully be able to bring it to you soon.
On the way!
Dear retailers!
We have been busy since last update with vacations and school projects.
But now that we are back and ready, we wanted to let you know what we are working on.
Pants
Our focus is on expanding the amount of articles even further. A lot of you desired that clothings should be finished up, before adding different categories.
That makes sense, so we are almost done with adding a lot of pants as a new category.
Redesigning store
A lot of you have also requested the possibiility to keep the store closed for an entire day, to be able to remodel without being interrupted by customers. So this will also be possible in the next update.
Also your staff can now help by unpacking boxes of articles standing around the store.
Thank you for the reports
Since we last checked and collected, which probably is 1½ month or so, we have received 700 reports via the in game reporting system. It contains a lot of good ideas, and things we need to look over. So thank you very much for letting us know what you think of the game :)
Bugs and improvements
Even though some bugs will still remain, as they require a larger time investment to fix, we have also removed a lot of bugs, as well as improved some minor things here and there.
We hope we are ready to upload the next update in a week's time.
All the best :-)
The developers
0.5.1 is out
Dear Retailers
We have released a new update.
Building
This update has been focusing primarily on fixing the Rebuild Store bug that could cause the game to crash. When we were add it, we also added a "Remove Lot" field, so you also can decrease you store in size. Also added a few lots to the area, allowing for building a bigger store.
Peripherals
We have written about a new category that would fit well in a computer store. Since it has only been a week since last update, we have only managed to add Mice to this. We decided to open up for it, allowing you to take a look. At the moment they use the same displays as the computers, but this category will be expanded upon off course.
Clothes
Since we also plan to expand the clothing category in near future, we thought we might clean up the old one first. So we have updated the looks of several shirts, and the remaining will also get an overhaul soon.
And since there were not too many of the more "fashionable" shirts, we also added a Polo-shirt pack.
