Mall Craze News

Hi everyone!
Mall Craze is participating in June's Next Fest and I would like to invite you to the official Mall Craze livestream, where I'll be streaming gameplay of the latest Demo!

See you on Wednesday!

Hello everyone!
Yet another 2 months have passed since my last update on the state of Mall Craze, and there is quite a number of new screenshots that I feel are really worth sharing. Just a quick reminder before I move on - since January this year, I'm rewriting the whole game in Unreal Engine 5 and C++, so If you've been following the development for some time now, a lot of these features mentioned today will be falimiar to you.


This is the last screenshot that I shared with you in March. It shows a system where 2 different shops can share a single wall.



Since then, I've been working mainly on these 4 things - Customization, Lighting, Shops and Products.


Visual customization is an important pillar of Mall Craze. If you've played the current demo (that is still build on Unreal Engine 4 and does not represent the current state of the game), you may recognize these two windows:



The first one is for customization of objects outside of shops, while the second one is for customization of objects such as shop entrances, windows, and so on. There is also a third window for customization of products.

As you can see, this works (in a sense that it does what it's supposed to do), but it's not really user friendly. It is basically the same thing only done in 3 different places (that are all accessed differently as well). Not only am I rewriting the game as it was, but I'm also trying to improve things that can be improved. My main goal for customization was to unify the customization process.

Let's look at what I came up with:



Do you want to change a specific color of an object, let's say - a color of the floor? Or do you want to change the complete style of the wall? This is now the place where you'll be doing all of that. No matter if it's a wall, product, or a bench. A lot of things are improved, and customization is now much faster and easier.

The main difference is that you can now change not only the color of the material, but the whole material itself. Namely these paremeters: Color, Roughness, Specular, Metalic and Emission.

Where can this be used? A nice example can be a ceiling where you increase the Emissive parameter and BOOM! You now have a ceiling light!



Pay close attention to other screenshots in this update, because you can see the new materials in action in almost every single one.

Honorable mentions:

• Create your own colors using Hue, Saturation, and Value
  
• Use recently created colors
  
• Easily copy whole materials between individual materials or different objects
  
• Paint similar objects with the same materials and design (bucket paint implementation now improved)
  

Specifically - Volumetric Fog (or as I would call it, the "Look cool" button). There isn't much to talk about, so I will just let the screenshots speak for themselves.




I also added the 4 current shops (and their respective products) into the game. Those 4 shops are Electro, Clothes, Music, and Sports shop. I've also made some small changes to the way the products are build, but I will cover that in the future.



Now, this is the time that I've been waiting for the most in this update. What does it look like when I combine all these newly added things together? :)



To wrap this update up, let's compare the graphics of the current demo to what's coming in June:



It was nice taking a break to write this update, but June is right around the corner and I should head back to Unreal to do some more work :)

Have a great day everyone!
- Milan, developer

Hello everyone!
A couple of months have passed and it's time for yet another update on Mall Craze!


As I mentioned in previous updates, I'm now rewriting the whole game in a new engine - Unreal Engine 5. I am also rewriting the game from Blueprints to C++. I went through all the reasons in previous updates, and today I would like to focus mainly on the progress I've made over the last couple of months.

Basically remaking the whole game from the grounds up is not an easy task, and only by doing it I realised how much work it actually is. The first few months were the hardest as I was transitioning to C++ and I was laying down the game's code foundations.

It was hard for me to come up with some structure or a theme for this update, so I've decided to just walk you through some screenshots as I'm slowly building up the game once again.

[h2]January[/h2]
I mentioned the need to transition from Blueprints to C++ for the first time in May 2022, but I actually started to work on this new version only in January this year. Most of the time in between was spent with me re-learning C++, getting familiar with Unreal's C++ quirks and working on the Demo.

January 12. This is the first screenshot from Unreal Engine 5 version of Mall Craze. This scene was generated from a save file where I randomly generated positions of 10'000 trees. This time I added a first version of save/load system right away. Can't make the same mistake twice :)


January 14. Added a few more models into the game to test a new rendering feature - Global Illumination. You know what? Let's talk about this topic straight away.


[h2]Graphical Improvements[/h2]
Switching to UE5 brings a great opportunity to further improve on game's visuals. One such improvement is Unreal's new Global Illumination and Reflection system called Lumen. I think that I don't have to explain reflections, but Global Illumination (GI) in a nutshell - GI adds more realistic lighting by calculating light as it is bouncing from surface to surface, illuminating and coloring places not directly accessible by light.

These two improvements brought the whole scene to life and it is something that I will be implementing into the game from now on.

March 1. Global Illumination and Reflections in action.


[h2]Shop and Mall building mechanics[/h2]
If you played the pre-alpha demo. you probably found out that the way you build shop walls, entrances and windows is different from the way you build mall walls, entrances and windows. I was pretty happy with the current iteration of shop building (and according to your feedback, most of you were too), but the way you build mall walls, entrances and windows was lackluster at best.

This will change. The way you build mall will now share most of it's mechanics from the way you build shops. Meaning that you will "draw" the area to build walls, and entrances and windows will now automatically snap to those walls.

March 14. Me trying to make wall corner pieces spawn at the correct place.


March 14. Shops can now share walls with each other with less graphical glitches.
Each color represents a different shop.



When will you be able to try out this new version? My main goal is to bring this version at least to the same level of content/features as the old one before the next Steam Next Fest, which takes place in June. That's roughly 3 months from today. Until then, there is still a lot of things to do, so I should get back to it right away! :)

Thank you everyone for your support, and take care!
- Milan, developer

Hello everyone!

Well .. I've heard that you've all been nice this year. So I've picked up a phone and called my good old friend Santa to ask him if he can come up with some nice present for everybody. At first, he said "Maybe we can give everyone a brand new sports car? That would make everyone happy, right?", but I was like "Naaah, we need something more!". And more is here! Which sort of sounds like "mall is here" :)


With the shopping season in full force, it is now the perfect time to give you yet another dose of it! Now in virtual form. A couple of weeks ago, I've decided that it could be a cool idea to take the older version of the game, update it a little, and release it as a small demo here on Steam (there is a newer version in the development using Unreal Engine 5 and C++. Check out older announcements for more info).

And here it is!

[h2]What is in this demo?[/h2]
There are 3 main gameplay pillars in Mall Craze:

1. Build
   
2. Customize
   
3. Manage
   

In this Pre-Alpha Demo, only Build and Customize are present. There is very little of Management in this demo.
Besides this, the Save and Load function is also not working properly at this moment (the very reason why new version of the game is in the making)

That being said, let's actually cover ...
[h2]What's actually possible in this demo![/h2]
In this demo, you'll be able to build 4 different shop types, each with it's own unique products.
Besides that, you'll also be able to build almost 30 decoration and utility pieces.
Some key functions were also finished for this demo, the most important being the possibility to build up to 3 floors + roof.
Then, everthing you see in the game is customizable in terms of color, and some things can even have different looks (pavement, walls, entrances, ...)

This demo is still build upon a Pre-Alpha version of the game. Some bugs and glithces are present, as well as missing features.


This is most likely the last announcement in this year.
Because of that, let me wish you ALL a Merry Christmas, and I also wish you the best for the next year!

Thank you everyone for your support, and take care!
- Milan, developer

Hello everyone!

In the last update, I mentioned that the Next Steam Update will be about the future of Mall Craze. You already read the title and saw the thumbnail, so now you might guess that the capital letters in “Next Steam Update” were not a typo. And you’re right - it was a small hint :)



New shop type and character models form the last update are all fine, but what good of a use do they have if you can't actually play the game, right? A couple of weeks ago, Mall Craze had it's 3rd anniversary of being in the development. I'm not really sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing :). Believe it or not, at the very beginning, this was supposed to be a small personal project. 6 months maybe. In and out, quick adventure. That changed fairly quickly, as I expanded the game more and more.

Ok, what am I still blabbering about … you want to know the release date! Here it is!



Mall Craze will release on September 19th, 2023 as an Early Access title.

I've decided to mark this release as an Early Access because I had to be honest. Developing the game into the complete state as I envision it, will take a long time. A time that you could actually play the game in Early Access.

I've picked the September 2023 mainly because I believe that at that time, the game will be "Early Access ready", and will contain a good amount of content that you can enjoy. The game was supposed to launch Q4 this year, but that was before I had to make some big decisions earlier this year (more on this later in this update). A decision that was mandatory in order continue the development.



I've mentioned numerous times (mainly on Discord) that I would like to participate in some of the upcoming Steam Next Fest. An event where, for a small period of time, you can play games that have not been released yet.

I now have a concrete goal, and that is that Mall Craze will appear in the 2nd Next Fest of 2023. The second Next Fest might be held sometime around June, as it was this year. Please don't confuse this with the upcoming Next Fest that might be held sometime around February 2023.



The reason that there were few (read "no") updates since January is simple. Well, the reason is simple. The solution, a bit less, but definitely not impossible. You may know from other sources that I was developing Mall Craze using Unreal Engine's visual scripting language called Blueprints. This system is amazing, and I absolutely love it! So far, it was perfect for 99% of things that I've tried to do with it.

But here goes the remaining 1%. No need to add, that this 1% is very crucial to the overal game. I would even say critical. What is it then? Those of you who tried the Alpha version (Kickstarter backers) may already know what was missing in that version - the ability to Save Game.

Mall Craze is and will be a fairly large game in terms of the amount of information that is reguired to be stored in your saves. The default Blueprint's solution is not really ideal for this amount and complexity of data, as it does not provide the ability to save games any other way than binary file format. This could potentially lead to problems in the future, where I plan to expand the game even after release. Or even in rare cases, where save games might go corrupt. Resurrecting these kinds of saves would be very difficult.
It also makes it a bit more difficult to potentially mod the game.

So what's the solution?

[h2]Blueprints vs C++[/h2]

There are 2 main ways you can develop games in Unreal Engine: Blueprints and C++ (or a combination of both). Because I couldn’t see a good solution to this problem using Blueprints, I was looking for the solution using C++, and the solutions it provided were ideal to continue the development.

[h2]Unreal Engine 5[/h2]

With the decision mentioned above, there was really no major reason to stick to Unreal Engine 4 at that point.

Going forward, Mall Craze will be developed in Unreal Engine 5. This also means that Mall Craze, at least on paper for now, will be able to support new major features introduced in UE5, and also features that are not yet known at this point. One of these features could be, for example, Unreal's new global illumination and reflection system called Lumen. As simplistic as Mall Craze's graphics may be, I believe it can still greatly profit from this feature.

[h2]Going forward[/h2]

The switch from Blueprints to C++ is a huge undertaking. Mostly because I decided not to only port the game, but basically rewrite it from the ground up. That alone takes a huge amount of time, but all of that is balanced with improvements to the game. In a way, I'm sort of making Mall Craze 2 without ever releasing the original game ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just to give you a small glimpse of some improvements to the core gameplay. In the original Blueprints version of Mall Craze, one placable object = one product you can sell. That was easy to implement, but later on proved to be a difficult obstacle to overcome without rewriting half of the entire game. What will be possible now, is that one product table/wall will be able to hold multiple products, and you will be able to set prices and see statistics independently.

I'm really looking forward to start sharing screenshots and videos from this new version with you!

Thank you everyone for your support, and take care! :)
- Milan, Developer