Walk of Life News

[p]It's been a little over four months since we released Walk of Life into Early Access and we're incredibly thankful for the reception that we've gotten. The game is sitting comfortably at a Very Positive review rating, but we're nowhere close to stop improving on it yet!

When we launched, we put out a roadmap of the features we wanted to implement for the game's full release. It's about time we ticked off some of the boxes to mark our progress for all to see. There are also several new features we decided to add to the roadmap as we feel they'd make the game even better.[/p][p][/p][p]Let's do a quick rundown of the things we've marked as done:[/p]

• [p]Job Perks: We've added perks to every workplace in the game, giving them a distinct feel and allowing players to develop certain strategies depending on where they work.[/p]
• [p]Education Redux: The education system received a bit of a facelift, and players are now given rewards in the form of diploma traits for completing a tier of education.[/p]
• [p]The Stock Market: The Stock Market finally made it in, for all you with a gambling investing mindset.[/p]
• [p]Game Modes: We've added a PVP game mode for the more competitive players as well as difficulty modes for those seeking an easier expeirence or added punishment.[/p]

[p]So, what have we added to the roadmap that we felt was missing?[/p]

• [p]Mod Support: We really want to see what alterations the community can make to our game, so we feel mod support is needed.[/p]
• [p]Fishing Update: Fishing as a game system feels very raw, so you can expect some changes to make it more viable and engaging.[/p]
• [p]Pet Update: We want to add more pets to the game and add some depth to the pet system to make it more interesting.[/p]
• [p]Secret Missions: Many players from No Time to Relax sorely miss this feature, so we're working on adding it back with a few twists.[/p]
• [p]Bots in Online: There have been loud cries for this, and we promise that we're working on it! [/p]

[p]And what's left from the original roadmap that's still in the oven?[/p]

• [p]Unique Items and Furniture: We want to introduce unique items that have an impact on the game. More on that soon![/p]
• [p]Pawn Store Overhaul: We hope to make the pawn store a more exciting place to visit, full of surprises and a rotating inventory.[/p]
• [p]Safety and Security: Staving off robbers and muggers during the crime wave and raccoon raids is fairly boring right now, and we want to add more options to protect your home as well as your wallet.[/p]
• [p]Map Layouts: Shuffling the locations on the map and rearranging the roads can lead to interesting gameplay differences.[/p]

[p]Finally, there's the promise of a New Map.

[/p][p]The team is hard at work at a new map, which will not only be visually different from Calicornia, but also introduce new gameplay features! The new map is influenced by various Asian cities, and we're currently trying to find a good name for it. That's where we need your help. [/p][p]Head on over to our Discord server and take part in the Discussion to help us come up with a name for the new map! You can also leave us a suggestion in the comments right here. [/p]

[p]Guess who's back? It's us! And we have a new content update for you lovelies! As usual, we'll have an exhaustive list of changes at the bottom, but here are some of the highlights.[/p][h2]PVP Options In the Park[/h2][p][/p][p]Direct player interaction has been sorely missing from the game until now. We've implemented several options for you to mess with your fellow players by meddling with the game state. These options will only be active if you enable competitive mode during game setup, so you peace loving ninnies don't have to worry about your friends ruining your plans.[/p][p][/p][h2]New Role: The Drifter[/h2][p]The Drifter is a mysterious stranger, disappearing as quickly as they showed up, but not before turning their workplace around! The Drifter is all about, well, drifting between jobs, working for short spurts of time before having enough and moving on to a new job. The Drifter also has the added benefit of retaining job perks for a short time after moving on to a new job. Give this new role a whirl![/p][p][/p][h2]Multiple Bots! Bot difficulties![/h2][p]You read that right! You may now enable multiple bots when playing local games and tune their difficulty to your liking. Unfortunately, the bots are still having issues during online play, so they will remain local for a while longer, but we are working to get these things onto internet games as soon as possible![/p][p][/p][h2]Game Difficulty[/h2][p][/p][p]You can now tune the overall difficulty of your game to three different settings: easy, medium, and hard! Very original names, we came up with them ourselves. The difficulty setting will affect many different factors, including rent, salary, attribute gains and losses, and more that will make the game easier or harder to play.[/p][p][/p][h2]New Global Event: Tourist Invasion[/h2][p][/p][p]A cruise ship full of annoying tourists has landed in Calicornia! During this event, the tourist horde will go sightseeing, occupying a new location every round and locking it. Why would the tourists be so interested in Moo Moo Mart? Who knows?[/p][p][/p][h2]Four New Avatars![/h2][p][/p][p]That's almost five new avatars! Wowza![/p][p][/p][p]There's a bunch of other changes that you can read about in the changelog. [/p][h2]Version 0.45.0[/h2]

• [p]Added a new role, the Drifter, check it out and let us know what you think![/p]
• [p]Added 4 new Avatars (that's a 36% increase, wow).[/p]
• [p]PVP Mode is now available for players who've tasted blood, and want more![/p]
• [p]You can now choose from 3 difficulty settings (easy, normal and hard).[/p]
• [p]Also added a Bot difficulty settings (set per bot).[/p]
• [p]You can now have more than one bot in Local Games.[/p]
• [p]Completely overhauled the Character Sheet.[/p]
• [p]Don't feel like paying your rent? Well now you get evicted and get to live in the Park. It´s the great outdoors, minus the great.[/p]
• [p]New Global Event: Tourist Invasion. All lines are full and there's no parking while tourists rule the streets.[/p]
• [p]Swapped out the NPC Landlady in the Fancy Apartment for a new one.[/p]
• [p]Timer for Reports and Role Selection added.[/p]
• [p]When receiving Quests from VexCorp you no longer get the same Quest twice (unless you finish all of them, which would be quite impressive).[/p]
• [p]Bots have been upgraded with a new Br4v3ry module and will now attempt Easy and Medium Quests in VexCorp.[/p]
• [p]Job Salaries have been tweaked.[/p]
• [p]Role related Score is now shown correctly in the score screen (it was rewarded under other categories before).[/p]
• [p]Bunch of Score screen fixes and tweaks (big and small).[/p]
• [p]A whole lot of new Quests! I would tell you how many, but nobody told me...[/p]
• [p]VexCorp jobs now reward you with access to the Teleportation Chamber over at VexCorp.[/p]
• [p]A lot of bugfixes concerning rejoining online games.[/p]
• [p]Barry would drain way too much Happiness after being voted as Mayor. This has been lessened.[/p]
• [p]Effects for the Heatwave Global Event and Blimps for the other Global Events have been added back in after being removed for some optimization.[/p]
• [p]The Adventurer's role bar has been updated for increased clarity.[/p]
• [p]Education traits tweaked.[/p]
• [p]And like always, a lot of other minor tweaks and bugfixes.[/p]

[p]All aboard! This is the last blog before the next update![/p][p]The crew is busy at work getting everything shipshape for the next update which will be dropping later this week. Clear your schedules! Here are a few tuning features you can expect to be able to fiddle with in the patch![/p][h2]Longer Games[/h2][p][/p][p]We know some of you have been (quite audibly) wishing for the option to play longer games. While marathon mode is still a whole marathon away, you will now have the option to create 40 and 50 round games. We expect these will mostly be played by people enjoying the single player experience, but to those of you that have been looking forward to 6-player 50 round games, we'll see you in 2027.[/p][p]Keep in mind that the 40 and 50 round games are not going to be balanced at all to begin with, as we are still tuning things for the standard 20 and 30 round games.[/p][h2]Bot Difficulty Settings[/h2][p]Our bots have gone through quite a ride. Starting off at a paint-eating intelligence that offended even our newest players, they rapidly developed into supercomputers programmed for one purpose only: walking life. This wasn't especially welcoming for new players as they usually got absolutely trounced by the AI.[/p][p]We have now implemented three different bot difficulties for you to choose from, depending on how big of a challenge you're looking for. Keep in mind that bots in online are still not here, but we are working hard to get them into the game in a future update![/p][h2]Game Difficulty[/h2][h2][/h2][p]Finally, we have also heard complaints from players that either find our game too easy after a couple of playthroughs and others that find it too hard, especially for newer players. To tackle this, we have added three difficulty settings for the games themselves: party mode, normal, and difficult.[/p][p]These difficulties will hit game systems such as salary, rent, stress, and attribute bonuses/loss. Expect the overall experience to be more chill or more gruelling, depending on your preference. Speaking of rent, there will be consequences more grave than having your furniture pawned, but we'll leave you to discover those yourselves when the update goes live![/p][p]Bon voyage![/p][p][/p]

[p]Yohoho![/p][p]The next update is still in the oven and starting to smell really nice. We’re excited for players to get their hands on the Drifter role and enjoy some of the UI improvements we talked about in the most recent dev blog. However, that’s not the only thing we have in store for you![/p][p][/p][p]A lack of player interaction is a common complaint we’ve received from players who enjoyed ruining each other’s day in No Time to Relax. We’ve been working on an optional system that introduces a slew of new options, allowing you to throw a spanner into the works and disrupt the plans of your fellow players.[/p][p][/p][p]When PVP mode is enabled during game setup, players will accumulate PVP Sausages over time. No questions, please.[/p][p]PVP Sausages can be brought to the raccoons in the Park, where they are used as currency for the four PVP actions available at launch.[/p][h2]Send Goose[/h2][p][/p][p]You may have had an unfortunate encounter with the infamous and ill-tempered goose during a life event, but now you’ll have the chance to use it for your own purposes! The Send Goose option is a new and updated version of the Lock Building action from No Time to Relax, with a bit of a twist. When the action is used, a targeted location is immediately locked and remains unaccessable until the beginning of your next turn.[/p][p]The goose may only lock one location at a time. If another player has sent the goose to block a location you desperately need access to, you can spend your own currency to move the goose elsewhere. To get the most out of the goose, you should wait until the target player has spent all of their PVP Sausages and is unable to pay the goose to move again.[/p][h2]Tarot Reading[/h2][p][/p][p]What do the fates have in store for you? The Tarot Reading option forces all players to draw a unique report card at the beginning of their next turn, including the player who initiated the action. Most of these are pretty bad, with a select few having positive effects.[/p][p]The Tarot Reading introduces a bit of chaos into the game, and multiple Tarot Reading actions can stack, so a lot of players using this action can really swing the game into unexpected directions. We recommend using the Tarot Reading action when you're behind and have little to lose.[/p][h2]Impose Curfew & Raccoon Raid[/h2][p][/p][p]These last two options share some similarities. Imposing a Curfew will enable a mini-global event for 2 rounds where every player must end their turn by going to sleep or be forced to pay a fine the round after. [/p][p]Initiating a Racoon Raid will similarly enable an event functionally identical to the crime wave event, but obviously orchestrated by the racoons. [/p][p]What make these actions fun is that the player initating these actions will receive a cut for all the cash stolen from other players during these events. If your fellow players don't watch out, you'll walk away with a lot of their hard-earned cash!
[/p][p]Keep in mind that these are just the first PVP actions available as we want to test the waters a bit. As things settle down, we hope to implement more wacky ways to mess with each other and turn Walk of Life into a truly interactive game.[/p][p]That's it for now. See you in the next blog![/p]

[p]Happy new year![/p][p]The gang at Porcelain Fortress is back in the development mines, hard at work on the next update which will be hitting your game later this month. As we mentioned in the previous dev blog, we are working on a bunch of stuff, but one that we didn't really talk about was clarity. [/p][p]There's still a bunch of not-so-intuitive stuff in our game and we're working on making things more clear, especially for newer players. Our inventory was an incredibly well hidden feature until we added the role specific backpacks to the interface, and now we're overhauling the character sheet to be better looking as well as more informative.[/p][p][/p][p]Behold! This is the new character sheet (along with a brand new player avatar!) where you will find everything you need to know about your equipment, your traits as well as the role you're playing. Depicted here is the unreleased Drifter role, along with a short description of how the role functions.[/p][p][/p][p]The Drifter is the mysterious stranger who shows up at the workplace, turns things around, and then vanishes as quickly as they arrived. The role rewards the player for working for short spurts at a job before getting fed up and wanting to find a new one. As an added bonus, after getting fed up with a job, the perks from that job will linger for a while, allowing the Drifter to have multiple job perks at the same time. Neato![/p][p]But back to the character sheet![/p][p]Your equipment will cover your transportation method and clothing, while items will be stuff such as fish and lottery tickets which take up space in your inventory. The various traits you accumulate throughout the game will show up on the right along with a description for each of them.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Many people have found scoring to be a little confusing in their first games, so we've added a tab to the character sheet where you will find a handy score guideline, detailing the ways you can get score throughout the game. Fishing and Stocks have made their way under the 'Other' section next to the Pets, but it's unlikely we'll sort scoring out for those systems for the next update.[/p][p]That's it for now! LATERS.[/p]