Blooming Business: Casino News

[h2]Ask our creative director your questions![/h2]

We recently organized a stream on Twitch with our creative director. You can watch the stream replay (in French) or ask all your questions here if you want to know more! You will learn more about this not well known game job, and the approach we had for our first game.

We regularly organize streams on our Twitch account and share our game post-mortem, the development process, behind-the-scenes, etc. Note that we usually stream in English but sometimes do it in French.

We will highlight the other important game dev jobs shortly.

[h2]Quick question, respond in the comment section below![/h2]

1: Do you watch game dev streams on Twitch❔
2: Do you follow our account❔

We would be very interested to know if you follow our Twitch account, and if not, we are genuinely interested in why (do not watch game dev streams, do not use Twitch, did not know we have an account, not interested in our Twitch content, etc.). Let us know in the comment section.

[h2]Game will be discounted for a week during Steam Fest[/h2]

Enjoy a new game discount and start building the casino empire of your dreams!
From the 14th of October at 7:00 pm French time to the 21st of October at 7:00 pm, the game will be on sale.

Dear Owners,

We have just released a small patch to address a bug sometimes preventing players from completing an objective in the "Where the Catwalk ends" mission.

Special thanks to the player who pointed out the issue on our community discord !

The Homo Ludens Team

[h2]We have reduced the base price of the game![/h2]

Since we are back as publishers now for our game, we’ve decided to permanently decrease the price of the base game.

Dear players, Blooming Business: Casino was released over a year ago now! It’s been quite a journey to release a first game as a small indie dev studio, we’ve learned a ton and we’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible thanks to your feedback and our understanding of the Steam community expectations.

It has been quite a thinking process (to be honest ever since the development of the game!). At Homo Ludens, we think it is fairer to revise Blooming Business: Casino’s selling price and reduce it. It's very challenging to identify the correct price point for a game, taking into account the game content, development costs, Steam and publishers fees, and of course the current consumer purchasing power.

To sum it up, the game price will move from 24,99€ to 19,99€ (for France). We’ve of course revised all pricing for all countries to reflect this decision.

[h2]Happy Summer Sales![/h2]

We’re happy to have a more affordable game that will be even more affordable during the current sales. The game is at 50% off during the whole Summer Sales!

[h2]Buy? Wait for Sales? Never touch?[/h2]

What’s the deal with those mixed reviews?



Having a mixed review score on Steam had a huge impact on our sales and therefore what we could do to support the game. Seeing mixed reviews can prevent interested players from giving a chance (buying) to our game. We’ve tried from the beginning to respond to your feedback by working on the game and patching the game 7 times since the release. We’ve managed to practically come back to a positive review score, but we’re still lacking a few.
We would like to take this opportunity to respond to some of the most illustrative feedback we received and give you more insights on what we did to improve the game and why we have this score based on our understanding.

A hardcore sim or a cozy management game?



We’ve received a lot of reviews talking about the difficulty of the game and the fact that it’s too easy/ impossible to lose in the game. Indeed, we didn’t want to make a hardcore economic sim game. We wanted to offer a more relaxing and accessible tycoon. How you choose to be profitable, and specialize your casino to respond to the VIPs and client types expectations is yours to set, and there are a lot of different ways as you progress in the campaign. You can focus on building the most profitable business, a luxurious casino, or try to be an exemplary manager to name but a few examples.
We also chose to develop the narrative of the game with strong VIP characters, a lot of backstory. We put love and passion behind all the writing of the game, from the VIP personalities to the Client type specificities, to the campaign missions, and even the item description and level names! A lot of you appreciated it!

We understand that some of you would expect and prefer a more challenging simulation experience, and it has been one of our priorities to work on the game to address some of the feedback we received.

• We’ve changed some aspects of the game. First, we worked a lot on the campaign’s mission-winning conditions, balancing, to make it more challenging. Throughout the 11 campaign missions’ levels, we’ve eased the mission flow clarity and adapted missions that were too easy or too difficult.
  
• Then, we increased the difficulty of the Sandbox difficult modes to have a more diverse experience when you choose the “Hardcore”.
  
• We’ve also added more failing conditions, you can now get a loan in Sandbox mode, and failing to repay it leads to a game over.
  
• Ultimately, we want you to remember Blooming Business: Casino is above all a relaxing management game. The demo is here to tell you if it's for you or not.

[h2]We're working on something new! Stay tuned![/h2]

Follow our social media to stay up to date!
🎲 Discord
🎲 X/ Twitter
🎲 TikTok

[h2]Anniversary sales and new item for first year owners[/h2]

Dear players,

Our first game, Blooming Business: Casino, celebrates its first anniversary! For this occasion, the game will be 50% off from the 25th of May to the 1st of June.

We will also grant one exclusive item: the Elephant Fountain to whoever has purchased the game before the 1st of June at 12:55 French time!



It’s still a great pleasure to organize seasonal events with free items and patch the game based on your feedback!

[h2]Throwback to one year of live ops support[/h2]

• 9 Updates in total (3 major updates and 6 patches) since the release of the game
  
• Steam workshop with 4 dev-made mods, and a total of 450 subscriptions!
  
• New game feature: "Hide Wall" feature
  
• Increased Sandbox mode difficulty
  
• 11 new items (free seasonal items: Halloween, Winter season, Lunar New year)
  
• 3175 bugfixes
  
• and tons of improvement

While there are still some remaining bugs, there was a lot of original feedback that came from issues from the way missions were designed and the balancing was set. We’ve rewrite missions, changed the ways some worked, improved the conditions from success conditions to happen. It responded to a lot of the complaints you made and greatly improved the progression in the campaign.
We wrote a guide to help you with the top campaign pain points. You can access the guide and gameplay tips here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1388580/guides/

[h2]We’re now our own publisher[/h2]

We’ve launched the game with the support of Curve Games who has helped us through the last year of development, through the financing, the development and marketing effort to make this game exist to the world. Curve Games has stopped supporting the game for months now. But we still supported it and with the change of publisher we’re happy to finally be able to bring new updates, fixes, and improvements to the game. We will do our best to continue to improve the game and fix potential new feedback, but with a little less regularity.

[h2]What the future holds[/h2]

It’s more difficult for us to support Blooming Business: Casino for obvious financial reasons, but we still are committed to patch the game whenever necessary based on your feedback. We still have a few projects and ideas in mind, so stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks!

We organize monthly streams on our Twitch account to share more information about our learnings as an indie dev studio.

Also, if you want to learn more about our future projects, you can follow us on X or on our community Discord where we will chat about all our projects.

Thank you again for your continuous support!
The Homo Ludens team

Hey there owners!

We’ve listened to your feedback… And you’ve been asking for a way to manage the walls inside your casinos for a while!



That time has come: you can now remove the inside walls by either clicking the button on the lower left or pressing H, and the walls will lower themselves so you can have a bigger view of your Casino. Wether you use it for good (decorating and checking everything runs smoothly) or evil (spying on your employees and customers) is up to you!



And since we didn't want to give you just this one good news, we've also added an easter item so you can bring the Holiday spirit to your casinos if you feel like it. It will be available starting this Easter Monday and for a whole week!



Have fun managing and decorating, and feel free to leave us more feedback here or on our social media :)