Dear Retailer #13: Building Wide before Tall

[p]Dear Retailers,[/p][p][/p][p]A huge thank you to everyone who jumped into the Macromanagement update with last month’s update. We’ve gotten enormous feedback from players on both Macromanagement’s Employee update and Rise to the Top’s building improvements.[/p][p]As we move into the next phase of development for King of Retail 2, I wanted to take a moment to talk about what’s coming up on the horizon and our focus for development through the end of 2025.[/p][p]My priorities over the next few weeks will be to strengthen our foundation: building better moment-to-moment interactions within our existing systems frameworks to improve how stores operate, add functionality to teams, and better define the role of the player at the enterprise level, managing multiple Concepts and Stores.[/p][p][/p][h2]Building Better: Expanding the Core[/h2][p]The next several patches will revolve around improving existing features—especially those that govern how your stores feel and function behind the scenes. That means:[/p]

• [p]More Products: We’ve held off on product updates with the Macromanagement update just because we had a huge feature push to worry about. With that out of the way, we’ve been hard at work designing additional products, which we plan to introduce in a coming update.
  
  Store Task Systems: We’ve laid the groundwork for teams, roles, and management, but now we’re taking that further. Employees have a fairly limited range of tasks to perform at the moment, which underutilizes the Employee system on a whole. One of our early additions will be looking at Store Cleaning, which will provide a new role and new interaction for Employees to take on as a task. Over time, we’ll be adding new tasks and behaviors to Employees.
  [/p]
• [p]Employee Evolution: At the moment, Employees do have fluctuating and changing attributes, mostly reflecting an individual’s change of habits over time. With the Employee Heirarchy system in place, we plan to add functionality
  [/p]
• [p]Technical Improvements: I also want to be conscious of the amount of technical debt that has accrued (and always keeps accruing) over the course of the last few months. Now that we’ve added some vertical features, this is an ideal time to work on improvements on UE5 integration directly and prepare the game for future additions.[/p]

[p]This is all part of a larger effort to make the experience of playing  King of Retail 2 feel more interconnected. Making your game loop more compelling, more seamless, and easier to engage with isn’t always the most exciting or flashy of things to update, but it’s very necessary that we build our foundations properly before we start striking new ground.[/p][p][/p][h2]Sharing your Designs: Workshop Functionality[/h2][p]We’re also looking into Steam Workshop functionality, and plan to roll out some initial integrations that will allow players to upload and share some custom creations across steam directly.[/p][p]Full Workshop functionality, as in the ability to create custom assets or mods, isn’t planned quite yet - that’s something we’d like to address closer to launch. But our Discord is already full of Store and Display designs from players which, while they can be shared, still must be done manually. [/p][p]I will have more updates on Workshop functionality as we explore how best to integrate it with King of Retail 2, but we plan to roll out Workshop support in stages to allow players to share their designs with other players.
[/p][h2]Performance, Quality of Life, and Player Feedback[/h2][p][/p][p]I know I say it a lot, but it always bears repeating:  your feedback matters—a lot more than you think.[/p][p]Performance improvements and quality-of-life refinements have become an ongoing priority for us. Every patch brings optimizations to help stores run smoother and faster, and we’ve been combing through your feedback to identify the small, everyday frustrations that we can iron out.[/p][p]So thank you to everyone who’s been submitting bug reports, sharing suggestions, and helping us test new builds. You’ve been instrumental in shaping King of Retail 2 into something stronger.
[/p][h2]Looking Ahead: Built Wide, Then Tall[/h2][p]Our next major milestone update, which we’re planning for early next year, will be the  next “vertical” step in King of Retail 2’s development. We want to build out our base before we get there, but we can also take a look ahead at what major plans we have in store.[/p][p]That update will focus on building out Headquarters, which exist in the game but provide limited functions (it’s mostly your administrative hub). Additional office spaces, functions, and more use of the multiple floors of HQ will all be built out to add more reason and purpose to sitting in the Big Chair.[/p][p]But for now, our mission is clear: build it wide before we build it tall.[/p][p]As always, you can catch me doing Livestreams every Friday on my Twitch Channel, where you can watch me work on King of Retail 2 and ask me any questions or send me your feedback or suggestions. And as always, make sure to join the Community Discord where you can find design ideas, report bugs, and follow the development of King of Retail 2.[/p][p]Join the King of Retail 2 Discord![/p][p]Follow KoR2 Dev on Twitch![/p][p][/p][p]Until next time, happy sales.[/p][p]
– Daniel[/p][p]
[/p]