There's not an update this week, but I thought it would be fun to show you something we're working on! The Shopkeeper will soon have some new duds and you'll be able to customize their head, face and clothes.
Here's one I made earlier:
I think we may need to make that T-shirt a reality!
I'd also like to take some time to say, if you've not yet reviewed Shoppe keep and really enjoy the game, do consider posting a review, it really helps us out in development and allows us to reach new players :) Thanks guys!
Update 7th April - Decorations, Rebindable Keys, Tutorials And Racing Cars
Good day fellow shop keepers! Today’s update touches on some performance updates, rebindable keys and some new tutorials.
One of the features of this update that will play a big role is a new type of furniture set called decorations. This new furniture type does not hold any items, but in fact increases the pricing tolerance of your customers. It is scientific fact that customers will be more inclined to part with their cash when presented with an attractive visual stimuli.
In other news, At 8.15 P.M GMT tonight, Higher Eclectic Ground's sim racing team Eclectic Motorsport will take to Phoenix International Raceway for the fourth round of the iRacing British Sim Racers Touring Cars.
You can watch the race live at 8.15 P.M GMT by clicking the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8IVOMZoDlE
Full changelog below, as usual, if you have any bugs, let us know!
-Added decorations
-Talking to customers allowed only in Shop Keep mode
-Performance updates
-UI still receiving slight visual changes
-Holding Left Control and pressing Left mouse button will set an already imprinted display spot into an Any slot which bots will place items even in imprint mode
-Imprinted Slots change color to Blue, while non imprinted ones or imprinted as "Any" will be standard green.
-Slashing or selecting combat mode is unavailabel if talking to a customer or interacting with the bot or champion
-Rogue Tier 2 slot came back
-Rebindable keys in Main Menu
-Tutorials!
Exciting New Feature
I know what you’re thinking, the development of Shoppe Keep has been failing to truly capture the number one requested feature across the entirety of the games industry. Something that is looking to change the way we play games
That’s right, Virtual Reality. But not in the way that you may be used to. Development of Shoppe Keep began as a humble project within the retail environment. We wanted to create a shopping simulator that helped managers of real world stores prepare themselves for the harsh duty of retail management.
We found that these simulated tests were incapable of creating a realistic environment with cause and effect. Managers would make impulse decisions and then when their virtual shop began losing money, they were asked to stop playing and immediately hand in their resignation.
Much like how George Lucas awaited for computer animation to match his vision, of Star Wars Episode 1, so to have we waited for something to match our ambitions.
As you may have seen in the screenshot, we have included a dollar price to each item. This is a replacement for the current gold economy and the current exchange rate is:
10 gold = $1.00
All items will be priced accordingly, so health potions will cost $1.00 and a frozen staff would cost close to $30. Upon a successful stock order, funds will be debited from your real life account to pay for the virtual items.
Before this is implemented, we’ll be setting up a website to collect the addresses of all players so that we can send them a complimentary Shoppe Keep Pro Controller (Patent Pending) which will read your Debit or credit card. Check out our prototype below:
We know that you’ll agree that this is the next stage of Virtual reality and we feel that using real world money blends the virtual and real world in an awesome shop keeping experience
Update: Good spot some of you! Yes this is an april fools joke. We will not be charging money per ordered item :)... Regarding VR, that was also a april fools joke... But look what Valve sent us:
Hotfix - 31st of March 2016
Hi everyone!
Just a quick announcement today, we have just issued a hot fix that address some issues and has made a few changes.
-Talking to customers allowed only in Shop Keep mode
-Performance updates
-UI still receiving slight visual changes
-Holding Left Control and pressing Left mouse button will set an already imprinted display spot into an Any slot which bots will place items even in imprint mode
-Imprinted Slots change color to Blue, while non imprinted ones or imprinted as "Any" will be standard green.
-Slashing or selecting combat mode is unavailabel if talking to a customer or interacting with the bot or champion
As usual if anyone has any issues, do let us know!
Trading Cards Live, Bots Remember Item Placement, House In Town Under Construction And More!
Ladies and gentleman, today's update includes a variety of adjustments and refinements that will be sure to whet the appetite of any aspiring shop keeper.
The gobliness engineer has once again began dissecting the Helper bots brains and has given them a new trait, memory… You can now program bots to tell them exactly what item to stock on each area. To do this, you need to hold the shift key when looking at a shelf, this should tell you what item has been imprinted. Holding shift and then left clicking while holding a particular item will then imprint that item on the shelf, meaning if you imprint an engineering book, the helper bot will only ever place an engineering book in that space. In order to turn on imprint mode, press F on the helper bot and select the star at the bottom of the window next to the text imprint mode. If imprint mode is turned off, your bots will place items randomly wherever there is space.
The image above is a bit tricky to see, but if you hold left shift while looking at an empty shelf and holding an item, all will become clear!
As a note, when using an older save file, bots might be outdated, so they will need a software update which requires you to either remove them from their dock or removing the dock itself which will automatically put a bot in your inventory together with all the items that particular bot dock had.
Like statistics? Well, we’ve added a pedestal in the back room that can be used to check more detailed statistics for your shop, this includes details like the current items on display in your shop, as well as details on what items you have sold and your expenses. This will be a valuable window for those who want to make sure that their Shoppe is running as economically efficient as possible.
Some old save files will not have working statistics. So we recommend that once a save is loaded, you go into the delete statistics button in the UI. This will refresh the statistics. If you want to start a new round of statistics you can do that with delete. But have no far, the numbers are being saved into a save file and soon you will be able to load up and check out old/archived/discarded statistic runs
Pants disappearing? Well, worry not, that’s been fixed. Do I need to say any more than that or provide further context? No, let’s leave it at that. Check the screenshot below:
The Garden area has had a tiny bit of renovation as the Shoppe Keeper as installed a work in progress river. Note that drinking from the river may cause a selection of side effects including but not limited to:
“Drowsiness, stomach pains, blurred vision, foul breath, dizziness, sensitive armpits, exaggerated hand movements, back pain, a strong urge to rap, nausea, boils, heightened attraction to barbarians and a skin rash in the shape of a koala building an outhouse.”
The Crafting menu has had a rework too, once you discover a recipe the cauldron will now remember the recipe, so all you need to do now is provide the cauldron with the key objects and then with a click of a button, that item will be crafted!
In our last blog post we mentioned some statistical details regarding how many items were sold in a small space of time. This data only shared what items were sold and does not record any details on Steam ID, IP, location or any names. It only tracks items sold. We had some players who were concerned with this and so we have added an opt in option in the main menu. If you click to opt in, your items sold stats will be shared. The reason that this was created was to test a possible feature that would be shaped by online players, perhaps working towards an online global economy and demand system. But that is a discussion for another day!
Some more work has been done on the champion, if you provide the champion with either a health potion or a mana potion they will now be given additional buffs! A champion will use the health potion once their HP reaches 20% to regain some health. While a Mana potion works where if damage he is dealing is less than 50% of his maximum damage, then the damage output will be maxed for the next hit.
Please note that if the champion is not in a situation that requires them to use a potion, all potions at the end of the adventure will be discarded. Potions must be treated as a temporary buff for a single adventure.
And as we continue to update, a building in town has decided to undergo some construction. What will open here? Well, who knows! But stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks
If you come across any Bugs or issues, do let us know in the forums! If we spot anything particularly nasty, we’ll aim to hotfix it as fast as possible!
Additionally, alongside this update trading cards are now live! Along with the various profile backgrounds, badges and emoticons! :hpotion:
We’d also like to take this opportunity to say that the game has just had over 1,000 reviews and we are still at 86% positive. We think this is amazing and are very pleased that we’ve made 860 players share a positive review on Steam. As for the 140 other people, we hope that as we evolve the game we can turn those thumbs down into a thumbs up! Of course, if you’ve yet to leave a review and would like to recommend the game to others, a short thumbs up review helps new people find out and even experience the game too. Thankyou!
Changelog:
Fixed disappearing pants
Customer sticking issues worked on
Bot margin starts at 110% on a new placed bot
Fixed Placement fx lingering after last item is placed
For the time being items crafted in the cauldron drop inside your inventory
New Customer UI
Possibility to check customer equipment
kPoint skill point buying saves shop preventing exploit
Any physics items on the floor or being spawned are ignored by customers so will not be knocked around or even pushed in walls or under the ground
When replacing items that the champion already had the old one will be placed in the players inventory
Roof specialist was called to plug holes in the roof so the rain wont come in
WIP River added in the garden
Additional 2 planters added
Customers will offer a single item that they "looted", better geared customers will offer better items (Looted items are items that you as the shopkeeper can not order but gain in other ways such as the champion, trash cans, rogue chests and such)
The champion adventures each have a champion level treshold, meaning that if the champion is equal or higher level than the treshold that adventure will take just 1 Minute instead of the default 5 Minutes.
The champion now receives health potions and mana potions as additional buffs, all potions are used up after an adventure if they are or are not used.
A single health potion will be used by the champion once his health reaches 20% to regain some lost health
A single mana potion will be used by the champion if damage he is dealing is less than 50% of his maximum damage, then the damage output will be maxed for the next hit.
Increased colliders for item placement on objects
Adjusted customer feet
OSX Mouse lock fixes
Anti Aliasing gives a bigger impact
Bots listen to orders if they flew away and the panel did not close yet
Changing champion name, saves the shop
A bunch of statistics added that can be reached in the back room via the rotating order scroll. (Might have issues with old saves, so everyone is advised to load up their save, check if anything is missing in the shop or inventory, then go to the scroll, and press Delete Info on the summary scroll, then save the game, this will refresh your save file with the new required information)
Players can now see what kind of items and their amount is on display around the shop, how many of each furniture they have built, a detail Expense and Income statistic tracking and much more.
New Grinder blades
Items that fall under the ground for whatever reason be it bugs or glitches will be destroyed as not to cause issues to Helper Bot's who are trying to retrieve said item
Under construction building being built for future updates
Dirt collision updated
Shop ground collider adjusted
Putting in items into the cauldron without opening the UI has been removed
Grinder storage increased from 20 to 40 for all materials
New Crafting UI, Easier to use UI for figuring out recipes, once a recipe is found it will be unlocked for your shopkeeper in all save files, given that you have the required materials, crafting will require pressing a single button on an unlocked recipe and the item goes straight into the players inventory
Main menu has an option to Opt in to let us gather how many items were sold, no personal information is recorded, just each sale of an item.
Bot Panel now has a toggle on the bottom of the UI to toggle on/off bots imprint mode.
When having an item in your hands target a display and holding left shift press left mouse button to place that item, once placed it will imprint itself into that exact spot, bots on restock mode and imprint toggled on, will search for spaces that have their inventory items imprinted, bringing organisation to your shop.
Hold Left Shift while holding an item that can be placed in a display spot to see if anything is imprinted into that spot
Floor mat degradation lowered
Floor mats clean feet once per customer, increasing their durability
Started making new Dirt Textures (WIP)
Dirt accumulation rate modified
Groundwork done for rebindable keys and controller support (Please report if any buttons or axis that worked previously is no longer functioning, something might have been forgotten)
Destroying a bot dock now gives back the bot to you
New Left/Right mouse button images
New customer UI menu - allows players to buy items from customers
Edit:
Hi everyone, we have had a lot of things added in this update and I left something out! When you talk to customers now, you can check thier current inventory, you may be able to find yourself a bargain and purchase an item directly from the customer.
Update Incoming For Early Next Week
We wanted to just update you all on some progress for Shoppe Keep. There is no update this week due to the Easter holidays, however we have one that we’ll be looking to release on Tuesday which contains a few new features like being able to buy items off customers when talking to them and some adjustments to the champion including how potions work when outfitting your champion with mana or health potions. More details on this additions will shared on Tuesday!
We have also been working on a few other things including….
We will be looking to make trading cards live in the future along with emoticons, badges and profile images. When this goes live we’ll make another announcement!
Arvydas has also been working on localisation, this means that you’ll soon have a selection of languages to choose from when playing Shoppe Keep. We hope this allows more players than ever before to play the game. This has taken quite a bit of time, but it’s something very important that we must do!
Over the last week, we’ve also been tinkering with some stats. This means that we can track global sales of each individual item, for those who enjoy numbers we can reveal that in less than a week, globally Shoppe keep players have sold over 800,000 items.
That's all for today. We hope you all enjoy the Easter holidays and we'll be back Tuesday!
Update Now live - Helper Bots, Mirrors and Sex Changes
Good day merchants! A new shoppe Keep update has just gone live which includes a variety of fixes, some new features and a smashing new mirror in the player house to totally check yourself out.
First, the helper bots have received a massive upgrade to make them 300% more helpful. No longer should they refuse to acknowledge your orders or refuse to stock items. A gobliness engineer has been spending the last couple of weeks tinkering with the brain of these mechanical minions to make sure that they are an optimized object picking, thieve zapping restocking machine. They will now pick up five items at a time and when restocking they will no longer only stock the top item in their inventory, they will now cycle through items in their inventory to check if there is a space for it. Check them out in action below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5HAiY9KLHI
The Helper bot no longer requires fuel, oh no! Due to recent labor laws, these machines now are entitled to a minimum hourly wage. Depending on the job they are set, they will be paid a standard hourly rate which will be deducted from your finances. Thankfully, you can check your outgoings and incomings in the gold per minute section of the order scrolls stat area.
Are you struggling to answer the all-important question “Who am I?” well, look no further than your own player house and use the mirror to get a good look at yourself.Strut your stuff, pull some poses and look dapper!
Feel like this external vessel is not a true representation of your inner self, well simply go to the options menu and you will be able to change that too! Introducing the Female Shoppe Keeper!
It is normally quite dangerous to go outside at night. The town can be quite vicious after hours so it’s best not to keep your shoppe door open during these times. But I understand, you want to visit your house and chill after a long day at work. Thankfully in the back room there is a trap door that will take you straight to your house. You can avoid all sorts of nasty creatures that scour the town at night.
The next few updates will include a bit of new customer interaction logic, crafting overhaul and more!
A new hotfix is to go live very soon that fixes an issue for players who like to close menus with the Escape key.
A full changelog for this update can be found below:
Changelog 18/03/2016
Player has received a unique Shop Keeper skin and can now choose to play as a Female Shop Keeper
When holding an item you can now press ‘5’ to inspect it
Helper Bots received an upgrade to their outdated MK II control module forged by some old farts back in the day into an awesome MK III by a goblin engineer the shopkeeper commissioned earlier
Helper Bots pick up a max of 5 items at a time to bring back to the Bot dock
Helper Bots loop through all items so they won’t just only try to stock the first item in their inventory
If a Helper Bot’s dock is destroyed all items in it will be transferred to the shopkeeper
When landing, the Bots will correctly rotate to face the Bot docks’ facing direction
You can interact with the Bot only when he is not flying
Helper Bots will drain gold every minute depending on what they are doing, the gold drain is added up every minute to the statistics window together with Gold per minute gain
Fuel has been removed from the order list and its recipe removed as well, any leftover fuel should be dropped into the grinder for a bonus bone material (Just because Arvydas is nice)
New helper bot texture to commemorate new AI and to help him be more visible in the background
Performance upgrades to customer and bot logic
Code for personal chest has been rewritten and should perform better
New Tier 3 Rogue set, these items can only be found…
Phaseable door added to the player house
Beautiful mirror added to the player house
New Grill Model
New Grinder Texture
Trying to move further than the skill window scrolls will loop you back to the other side
Barbarians will dress up a bit in winter
Painting in the back room randomly changes on startup
All the rest of achievement trophies added to the personal house
Unique trash and boss loot from all Champion adventures
More filtering for the ever-growing item list, filter by either type or tier / engineering / farming or mix them together!
Secret useless feature added
1 new recipe
Pants/belts/boots and shoulders added to tiered armor sets for mages
New Seasonal potions
Trap doors added to the personal house and back room for easy access between the town/personal house/back room no matter if the doors are closed or open
Player starts in his personal house now
Future Broom unique sounds
Loads of new item/object placement and retract sounds added
Added information when placing furniture that tells you what it can hold
Icons will now be displayed when scrolling through items in your inventory to show which object can display them
New plate models
The current day and season are now displayed on the Quest board in the back room
When grinding objects, the grinding output is displayed in the middle of the screen
Save file screenshot modification
Refreshed main menu
Slight UI updates to the Main Menu and skill pane
Pathing fixed on the trees outside
Buttons to load different shop saves and browse customers
Shop save file displayed in shop menu
Tells you that you can open the shop with ‘E’ when looking at the door
kPoint gain option is now in the My Shoppe Panel
“Are you sure?” check added to resetting progress option
“Shop has been saved” text is more visible
Various bug fixes
New Update Now LIve - Helper Bots, Fixes and Changes
Helper Bots have received a big upgrade in this update! The MK III Helper Bots have a new silver sheen and can far outperform the MK II’s.
Bots no longer require fuel to run, instead they will drain some gold each minute depending on their state. The Bot’s logic has been improved and they can now pick up 5 items at a time. When restocking they will no longer only try to restock the top item in their inventory, instead they will loop through all items to try to restock them. Finally, when landing on their dock, they will even make sure they are facing in the right direction so as not to spoil the shop’s aesthetics.
Check out the new Bots in action below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5HAiY9KLHI
A selection of other changes and fixes have also been included in this update, the full changelog is below:
Changelog 18/03/2016
Player has received a unique Shop Keeper skin and can now choose to play as a Female Shop Keeper
When holding an item you can now press ‘5’ to inspect it
Helper Bots received an upgrade to their outdated MK II control module forged by some old farts back in the day into an awesome MK III by a goblin engineer the shopkeeper commissioned earlier
Helper Bots pick up a max of 5 items at a time to bring back to the Bot dock
Helper Bots loop through all items so they won’t just only try to stock the first item in their inventory
If a Helper Bot’s dock is destroyed all items in it will be transferred to the shopkeeper
When landing, the Bots will correctly rotate to face the Bot docks’ facing direction
You can interact with the Bot only when he is not flying
Helper Bots will drain gold every minute depending on what they are doing, the gold drain is added up every minute to the statistics window together with Gold per minute gain
Fuel has been removed from the order list and its recipe removed as well, any leftover fuel should be dropped into the grinder for a bonus bone material (Just because Arvydas is nice)
New helper bot texture to commemorate new AI and to help him be more visible in the background
Performance upgrades to customer and bot logic
Code for personal chest has been rewritten and should perform better
New Tier 3 Rogue set, these items can only be found…
Phaseable door added to the player house
Beautiful mirror added to the player house
New Grill Model
New Grinder Texture
Trying to move further than the skill window scrolls will loop you back to the other side
Barbarians will dress up a bit in winter
Painting in the back room randomly changes on startup
All the rest of achievement trophies added to the personal house
Unique trash and boss loot from all Champion adventures
More filtering for the ever-growing item list, filter by either type or tier / engineering / farming or mix them together!
Secret useless feature added
1 new recipe
Pants/belts/boots and shoulders added to tiered armor sets for mages
New Seasonal potions
Trap doors added to the personal house and back room for easy access between the town/personal house/back room no matter if the doors are closed or open
Player starts in his personal house now
Future Broom unique sounds
Loads of new item/object placement and retract sounds added
Added information when placing furniture that tells you what it can hold
Icons will now be displayed when scrolling through items in your inventory to show which object can display them
New plate models
The current day and season are now displayed on the Quest board in the back room
When grinding objects, the grinding output is displayed in the middle of the screen
Save file screenshot modification
Refreshed main menu
Slight UI updates to the Main Menu and skill pane
Pathing fixed on the trees outside
Buttons to load different shop saves and browse customers
Shop save file displayed in shop menu
Tells you that you can open the shop with ‘E’ when looking at the door
kPoint gain option is now in the My Shoppe Panel
“Are you sure?” check added to resetting progress option
“Shop has been saved” text is more visible
Various bug fixes
We hope you enjoy the update, let us know if you have any issues.
We Need You! Join the Bug Blaster Brigade
We are cracking down on bugs over the next few weeks and I want the communities help to nail down issues that you've found. We're after the most severe issues and will be doing everything we can to eliminate as many bugs as possible.
Today, we are enlisting for the BBB (Bug Blaster Brigade), if you spot a bug, let us know by commenting in the official BBB forum post below:
Since the games launch in August 2015, we've had over 250 builds of Shoppe Keep, of course, many of these were not made public and were used for internal testing.
Our QA sheet now also has nearly 500 completed fixes/ changes and suggestions since the game launched in August 2015.
Now, we want to eliminate the biggest bug culprits and we really want to spend just a little while focusing on issues. So please visit the link above, get involved and join the Bug Blaster Brigade.
All the best,
Chris
New Update Live: Champion Classes, New Customer AI, Meet Us At The PC Gamer Weekender
Hello everyone!
Today’s update features some changes to the champion system, customers have had their brains undergo a little tweaking to make them just a little more intelligent and a few more bug fixes!
First, let’s talk about the new champion system. When selecting a champion you can also now select its class.
The class that you select impacts what kind of items they will be able to wear and what sort of bonus they’ll receive when they embark on quests. Below is a list of the benefits each champion can receive based on class
(Warriors will deal +5% more damage than previously)
(Druids will receive +5% more HP gain than previously)
(Rogues have a 5% chance to evade a full attack)
(Mages will receive +5% more XP than previously)
Alongside these class specific bonuses, the adventure text also has a selection of new lines based on which class your champion is set to.
You’ll also now be able to choose the sex of your champion as well.
We have also been doing some performance enhancements on the customers. We have had reports that customers would stick or would walk away when another customer has bought a similar item. We have fixed this issue so customers now have a little more sense and don’t storm out. Check out the video below to see the new customer path finding in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXqgFL3YaAc
As a note, we have also been playing around with customer spawn per minutes. We have decreased the amount of customers spawned per minute from 100 to 50. Combined with the above fix of customers, this should have no impact on the revenue you gain, instead it should mean you get more valuable customers in the long run. If a Shoppe is doing great and hits its SPM, You should still expect on a daily basis around 750 customers + a barbarian raid. Reducing the amount of customers helps with AI path finding but also increases performance. We believe that this is the best decision for the game.
And finally, Shoppe Keep will be exhibiting at a gaming show in the UK this weekend called the PC Gamer Weekender. Details below:
http://weekender.pcgamer.com/
If you are attending, you can come and say hi to me and the developer of Shoppe Keep, Arvydas Žemaitis. If you give us your Steam details at the show we’ll give you a special item for use in Shoppe Keep.
As usual, if there are any issues, do let us know! I’d also like to say thank you to the players who have been helping us in the preview forum too, you’ve been an awesome help.
ChangeLog:
-Fixed an issue where customers would get stuck/ leave the shoppe if another customer buys an item they are after
-In the Order scroll menu, players can now exchange gold for K points
-In the Order Scroll menu, there is a gold per minute counter that tells you how much gold you’re making every minute in game.
-Old and New champions now open a champion creator, choose sex, class and name for your champion (Gear should be retained)
-Champions can equip only their class specific items, keep that in mind when creating a champion (Old gear will transfer on the new style champion no matter what class items he had HAX)
-Champions get buffs from whatever class they are
(Warriors will deal +5% more damage than previously)
(Druids will receive +5% more HP gain than previously)
(Rogues have a 5% chance to evade a full attack)
(Mages will receive +5% more XP than previously)
-New class specific champion quest log lines
-Upgraded Champion UI
-Champion name change costs 200,000 Gold
-Trash cans reset to 0 after loading a save file
-Performance upgrade to pathfinding customers on busy shops
-Additional QA fixes/changes
