Weed Shop 3 News

Ho ho ho! Happy holidays everyone!

2020 has been a challenging year, to say the least, but we're still alive and still working on Weed Shop 3. It seems like only yesterday we were planning on releasing the alpha just in time for Christmas, 2019 and here we are a year later, still nowhere close to a final release ːsteamfacepalmː

We do have some good news, tho. We've submitted Weed Shop 3 to the Steam Winter Game Festival, and, if everything falls into place, we'll have a free playable demo out for the duration of the event.

Thanks for sticking with us through this year of delays and excuses. We really appreciate all the support and encouragement we've received, especially during times when it seemed like the game would never get done ːws_damanː

Hope you guys have a *INSERT YOUR OWN WEED PUN HERE* Christmas and we'll see you in 2021!

What's up guys! It's been a hot minute since our last update and those of you still following Weed Shop 3 deserve some answers on why it's not released yet and WTF we wasted the whole Summer on.

The development process for Weed Shop 3 was a lot more challenging than anything we've done so far. Our ambitions for the third installment were unrealistic for a 2-person indie team and with the Kickstarter campaign bombing in a spectacular fashion, we had to scale down our initial plans and basically develop the game from scratch again.

In late Spring we started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and optimistically announced a public alpha release for the Summer. That turned out to be way too premature as well. The closed alpha feedback was brutal, with performance and UI being the major complaints. We were trying to address those concerns before the public alpha, however, the rewrites ended up being more time consuming than anticipated. That together with COVID and legal issues that completely stalled the development cycle a couple of times is why we once again missed the release date... Oh and as if the whole 2020 shitshow wasn't enough, a couple of our websites got hacked just days ago ːws_damanː

Ok, so you probably didn't come here to read our sob story or listen to a bunch of asshole excuses and just wanna know if Weed Shop 3 is coming out. The short answer is we don't know for sure... We've got enough runway for another couple of months during which we're planning to finish the essential gameplay required to publish the game as EA. If everything goes according to plan, we'll get in touch with those of you who reached out to help alpha test a little sooner. If we experience any more major setbacks and run out of cash, or drugs or both, then it might be the end of the greatest weed game that never was ːws_peaceː

By the way, regarding the lack of dev logs, while those seemed like a good idea at first, we'd end up wasting way too much time each week trying to get them done, time which we decided would be better spent on getting the game finished. From now on, we'll be posting updates when we got something important to share, but it won't be a weekly thing, so if you got any questions or whatever just ping @almostchris on Discord.

Stay tuned!

Today we'd like to introduce the customers of Weed Shop 3:



Ok, so while the names are still a work in progress, there will be new potential customer groups to cater your business to. Each customer group will have its own standards, respect, and will seek specific strains and product types. Your shop's decor will also play a big role in what kind of customers walk through the door (we'll have more info on that in future updates).

The more affluent customer groups will tend to spend more cash but will require higher quality weed and more effort on your part to acquire, while the brokeass customers will hit your store up more frequently but also present a higher risk factor when it comes to actually paying for shit.

BTW if you'd like to be in the game as one of the customers don't forget to join our Discord server https://discord.gg/mW6pfy5 as we'll have plenty of opportunities for our users to get in on the action next month.

Hey guys, today we're going to share some insights on the development of one of the most important aspects of the game - the weed plants.

The plant system was probably one of the biggest issues in WS3 development so far. Having decent looking weed plants that didn't melt your GPU when planted in large quantities was the main challenge. It took us multiple rewrites and months of testing to find the sweet spot between visual appearance and performance.

In the end, we've decided to forego the procedural plant system used in the previous Weed Shop games and manually design each strain. While being an extremely tedious and time-consuming process, it allowed us to drastically improve the game's FPS and make the weed a little less shitty-looking:

What's up, guys!
You know what it is so let's just do this...

Weed Shop 3's single plant growing mechanics will be quite similar to the rest of the Weed Shop series- get a pot, plant a seed and water, water, water... you know, that whole thing.
However, you won't be required to own a setup in order to start growing as you'll be able to free-place your pots wherever you like.

Using setups will have its perks though. You'll be able to batch plant, water, and harvest all the plants per setup. All the setups will come with attachable components that will further improve your harvest's yield, quality, and grow times.

With the more advanced setups, you'll also have the option to fine-tune the growing environment such as light cycles, humidity, nutrient mixes, etc. in order to get the best results with custom designer strains.

Here's a peek at what the best setup in the game is going to look like:



Yeah, we really outdid ourselves this time ːws_damanː
On a serious note, let us know what you think and keep the suggestions coming!