Big Ambitions News

Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

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Hi friends,

this is the first regular devlog since the release of alpha 5 and as usual, we're starting with the Steam wishlist status: 19,396!


Work on the harbor area has started already but is still far from being finished. The next step will be adding shaders to the water to make it look a bit more "watery".

The use of the new buildings is not yet decided. It might be related to ships. We'll let you know once we can tell more about it.


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The next neighborhood added after the already existing Garment District will be Hell's Kitchen. Currently, it only consists of placeholder blocks and the team will now start converting them into actual buildings.

Once the buildings are finished we will be able to set up the final addresses for the rest of the already existing city.


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The next special building to be added to the city map will be a large furniture store inspired by a famous Swedish company. Its name in the game is still to be decided and is currently open for suggestions in our community forums.

Similar to the original, you might expect a labyrinth-like setup leading you from one room to the next. Buy everything you need for a cozy home, like a king-size bed, lamps, plants and whatever might be added later on.




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The gift shop will additionally get expensive gifts to sell and a rounded, decorative presentation shelf.


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A new modular kitchen will bring more options to your restaurants. Additions include a burger grill, pizza oven and a fryer for French fries.


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For faster transportation, subway stations will be added to the city. The entrances are already done by the 3D artists while Jonas is now busy implementing the stations.


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Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

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All these new additions will soon be ready to be tested by our gold supporters. See you in 2 weeks!

All the best,
Jonas & Daniel

Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

Hi friends,

it has been an exciting week after the release of alpha 5. We would like to thank all our gold supporters for playing this early development version and providing valuable feedback!

[h2]The Numbers 💯[/h2]
Let’s get to some numbers:
190 gold supporters have already been playing Big Ambitions. We could welcome 136 of them on our community platform and got in-game feedback from 98 players.

The average playing time is 4 hours and 9 minutes, quite a bit more than we expected considering the current development progress.



[h2]Hunting bugs 🐞[/h2]
Of course, all the new players lead to very busy days. Several bugs have been found already, some more serious than others, and the most important ones have already been addressed through updates. Having started with build 123 we’ve by now reached build 139.



[h2]Valuable feedback 💌[/h2]
We’re now starting to address the issues you’ve reported – not just the bugs but also improvements based on your feedback. It’s important for us that new players find their way into and through the game hassle-free and are guided properly by Uncle Fred while still keeping the excitement of discovering a few things by themselves.

[h2]Community Manager 👨‍💼[/h2]
Some of you might have noticed the name Gerwanese showing up on Github and Discord. His real name is Daniel and has been helping me handling testing and managing issues on GitHub.

Starting today, Daniel is now officially part of our team. He'll be handling these devlogs, testing, managing issues, helping alpha testers and much more.

Me and the rest of the team are super happy to have Daniel onboard. Some of you might have noticed we already have one Daniel, which of course will make Daniel become Daniel #2. Not to be confused with Paul #2!

We hope you'll all give Daniel a warm welcome 🙋‍♂️

[h2]Let the money flow 💰[/h2]
Currently, Big Ambitions only allows you to start four types of businesses: Gift shops, supermarkets, fast food restaurants and clothing stores. For the start, this was pretty good but after a recent revenue balancing (allowing players to actually earn money from their shops) you will soon yearn for new sources of income.

The jewelry store will bring a bit of bling-bling into the streets of New York. It will be accompanied by another new business type we won’t reveal yet.

[h2]The next train is about to depart 🚇[/h2]
A frequent request by our players was an easy way to get around without walking too far. What better could there be than the New York City Subway? Soon you will be able to get from A to B within no time! Please be aware however that carrying large boxes on subway trains is against the terms of transportation and will not be allowed.

[h2]Fill up those empty deserts 🏘️[/h2]
The empty area around 2nd Avenue between 1st and 4th Street will be filled with placeholder buildings. The buildings won’t have any use yet but will help to set up the final numbers for all houses in these streets already, so the current house numbers will be changed.



[h2]Expand your business 📈[/h2]
Our 3D artists were busy finishing new assets and we will soon add a pizza oven, hot dogs, burgers and french fries to your restaurants together with a modular kitchen where all of these can be prepared.

Gift shops will add expensive gifts to their product range and be allowed to place them on a decorative rounded shelf.

Your apartment on the other hand will get a proper king-sized bed for the successful young entrepreneur you are.

We hope to keep you busy with all these new options – please continue to leave feedback through the different channels and help us create the best Big Ambitions possible!

All the best,
Jonas

Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

Hi friends,

Let's start with a status of our wishlists: 18,501!

So the last 2 weeks have been nothing else but crazy. Especially the last 7 days, I've spent close to working 14 hours per day in order to get the alpha ready in time. Good news, it's ready, at least as ready as
it could be :-)



Today at 19:00 CEST, the 200+ gold supporters will receive an email containing their personal Steam playtest key, granting them direct access to the latest alpha build.

I and the rest of the team are super excited to see what you all think about what we've created so far. Obviously, the game is far from done, but the current version gives a clear idea of the concept and quality of the game.


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Until now, all passive tasks like working and sleeping would make the game run fast forward by changing the game’s internal time scale.. This forced the engine to render all assets and run all animations and a very high speed, causing low FPS and generally a bad experience.

This has now been changed with the time machine. Once you enable the machine, the rendering shuts down temporarily and time is fast-forwarded. This comes with a lot of benefits. Obviously, we’ll have a higher FPS, but another benefit is the option to control how long time it takes to fast forward. This allows me to adjust the time, so it never feels annoying. Nice!


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We have updated the drive-in store to now include a nice parking area. Please notice, you can only park legally in the designated parking spots.

The building itself has also been optimized to better fit into the harbor area. We hope you like it!


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In our Steam trailer, you might have noticed that the streets and avenues have patches and cracks all over. We have now extended these details to the rest of the city. At the same time, a few additional "decals" has been
added to increase variety.


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In this period, we continued working on the night scene of the game. We're still quite far from done, In this update we:

• Added lights to all vehicles
  
• Added lights to building signs
  
• Added street lamps to all streets and avenues
  

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Both male and female characters can now equip themselves with the cargo pants and hoodies that you saw earlier in our devlogs. It has been incredibly complex getting this modular clothing system up and running, but
we are now confident everything is working and we can speed up the process of adding new clothing.


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Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas

Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

Hi friends,

As a new tradition, let's start with a status of our wishlists: 17,562!

The last couple of weeks has been both good and bad. I've been struggling a little bit with productivity for various reasons. At the moment, I try to finish as many save game-breaking rewrites as possible before the alpha is out.
The good part is that I can finally set a release date for the alpha release (gold supporters): Friday, July 30th 19:00 CEST. I know, we're pushing the "release in July" statement, but
as always, a few new features ended up taking much more time to implement.



The notification system was until now a combination of various temporary boxes. We have now implemented a more generic system that's being used both for fullscreen apps and in-world.


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Oh boy, this is a big one! The S Class is finally here. It's our first exclusive vehicle in the game. Much faster, cooler and pricier. The vehicle is only available to Silver and Gold supporters.

We hope you like it!


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After months of hard work, the team finalized the harbor area this week. It's the last part of the neighborhood we call "Garment District". This is a big milestone, as we'll now take a break from working on
buildings and instead start adding more content like business types, furniture, vehicles, etc.

Make sure to check out the roadmap to see exactly what's coming.


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Daniel has been busy creating new building signs. Once we're all done, you'll be able to design everything from font type, letter color, and the color of the bulbs and neon.

At the same time, we also started working on the lighting for the nighttime version of the city. It will be one of those things we continue to improve on until release, but below you can get a hint of the vibe
we're targeting.


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So it finally happened. The female character has been added to the game. Next week we're gonna add more clothing options. After that, it's time to work on skin colors.


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Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas

Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

Hi friends,

I hope you're having a great Friday already!

First of all, I want to start with a status of our wishlists: 16,162!

That's more than 6,000 new wishes since the Steam page was announced. I'm super happy and proud of this number. It shows that we continue the growth and are slowly getting closer to our final goal: 50,000.
Thank you to all of you who clicked that little, but incredibly important, wishlist button ☺

Moving on. The last 2 weeks really haven't been the most exciting. We have been running on reduced team size, and personally, I've been doing 2 major rewrites in preparations for alpha 5.

I did consider pushing the devlog a week but decided to go with this smaller update. I hope you like it after all 😁



A major annoyance in Big Ambitions was parking. You were only allowed to exit your vehicle if it was legally parked on a designated parking spot.

This has now been introduced with the parking zone system. Whenever your vehicle is stationary the UI will show was parking zone you're in. Right now all legal zones are free, but later on, I'll introduce
paid parking.

The player can also decide to park illegally. The UI will indicate so. This comes with a risk of receiving a parking ticket ($125). You'll only receive one ticket per day.


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Big Ambitions has already been through quite a lot of pivots, as I learned which of my ideas worked and which didn’t. For every change and modification, the source code becomes worse and eventually, you just have to invest the time to rewrite it to better suit the new reality. Geeks like us like to call it technical debt.

For the last week, I’ve been doing nothing else but rewriting the system that handles stuff like furniture, products to sell, cash registers, cooking appliances, etc.

The trigger for this rewrite was the option to empty a shelf, in order to change what it contains.

This is finally possible. When emptying a shelf (or any other item containing products), you’ll now get a cardboard box containing the exact amount of products left.

While I was at it, I also slightly redesigned the overlays for products to buy, making it a bit easier to understand pricing and quantities.


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[h3]The backend[/h3]
The business and customer satisfaction have been a bit messed up, as it was only partially implemented.

I’ve finally been able to put it all together. Two major things were missing considering business satisfaction:

• Amount of customers wasn’t affected by customer satisfaction
  
• Customer satisfaction wasn’t affected by employee skills
  

Both things have now been included, making it much more lucrative to optimize your business.

[h3]The frontend[/h3]
At the same time, I found some time to add emotions to your customers. Sometimes customers will express their thoughts about your business. This is a great way to learn what to improve.


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The “item rewrite”, added more flexibility to the reserved businesses, meaning the places where you buy wholesale products, industrial appliances, etc.

In this update, businesses will now sell products in different quantities at different price indexes. Eventually, this will be specific to each savegame, meaning each business will sell products at different prices. Long story short: you can roam around the city and locate businesses selling the products you need at a lower price.


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Even tho our team size has been a bit reduced these last 2 weeks, the guys still got some stuff done. A few minutes ago Paul #1 send me these renders of one of the new harbor buildings and a new car!

The vehicle is your traditional (and boring some would say) cross-over family SUV. It comes with a great price tag and even better cargo size 😎

Some of you might find the next vehicle a bit more exciting. It’s the first exclusive vehicle (Silver and Gold packages): Mercedes S-Class.


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Originally posted by The Big Ambitions Team

We use the up-vote count below to measure how many of you read these devlogs. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by hitting the like 👍 button below, thanks! ❤

That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas