January progress update
Hey everyone, it's update time!
So I spent a few weeks on holiday over the Christmas period so I don't have a huge amount of progress to show but I have a number of things to share.
In addition to a thousand little bug fixes, I've made a few additions to keep things spicy.
Sickness
Customers have a chance to become sick after eating at the Cafe based on the skill of your cook, if this happens they are much more likely to write a bad review which may affect future business.
Random Events
There is now a low chance of random events happening that may significantly affect gameplay. One example of this is heatwaves. In the event of a random heatwave occuring you can expect a whole lot of customers wanting to swim. Just make sure you have large enough pools for them!
Patrolling
Lifeguards & Janitors can now be assigned patrol areas. This is especially useful for lifeguards to allocate them to specific pools, drowning customers is very bad for business!
Employee Welfare
Every employee has their own individual wage based on their abilities. Over time, as your employees get better at their jobs they may request a pay increase. It's up to you whether or not to grant them this. But be warned, if an employee becomes unhappy with their job over time, they may quit.
Translation
The biggest thing I've been working on this month is a better method of translating the game into other languages. Previously I had just coded all the text directly into the game, thousands of lines of text & dialog. I've written a system to get the games text from .txt files in the game folder. Line by line I've been going through the games code, finding text and linking it to lines in .txt documents. So all that is needed to translate the game now is translating the english text in the .txt files to any other language, vastly simplifying the process. There's still a lot of work left to do on this & I have no official translations lined up at the moment but once this framework is fully in place, translating the game into a particular language will be as simple as sending a translator the dialog text files. This also allows the possibility of fan translations.
And finally,
Some time hopefully next month I'm planning a closed beta. Not a very big one, probably only 15-20 people. When it's ready I'll make a post here asking for volunteer beta testers. If you're interested in participating in this and are willing to provide good feedback and bug reports, subscribe to this forum so you get notified when I make the post.
Home stretch my dudes!
So I spent a few weeks on holiday over the Christmas period so I don't have a huge amount of progress to show but I have a number of things to share.
In addition to a thousand little bug fixes, I've made a few additions to keep things spicy.
Sickness
Customers have a chance to become sick after eating at the Cafe based on the skill of your cook, if this happens they are much more likely to write a bad review which may affect future business.
Random Events
There is now a low chance of random events happening that may significantly affect gameplay. One example of this is heatwaves. In the event of a random heatwave occuring you can expect a whole lot of customers wanting to swim. Just make sure you have large enough pools for them!
Patrolling
Lifeguards & Janitors can now be assigned patrol areas. This is especially useful for lifeguards to allocate them to specific pools, drowning customers is very bad for business!
Employee Welfare
Every employee has their own individual wage based on their abilities. Over time, as your employees get better at their jobs they may request a pay increase. It's up to you whether or not to grant them this. But be warned, if an employee becomes unhappy with their job over time, they may quit.
Translation
The biggest thing I've been working on this month is a better method of translating the game into other languages. Previously I had just coded all the text directly into the game, thousands of lines of text & dialog. I've written a system to get the games text from .txt files in the game folder. Line by line I've been going through the games code, finding text and linking it to lines in .txt documents. So all that is needed to translate the game now is translating the english text in the .txt files to any other language, vastly simplifying the process. There's still a lot of work left to do on this & I have no official translations lined up at the moment but once this framework is fully in place, translating the game into a particular language will be as simple as sending a translator the dialog text files. This also allows the possibility of fan translations.
And finally,
Some time hopefully next month I'm planning a closed beta. Not a very big one, probably only 15-20 people. When it's ready I'll make a post here asking for volunteer beta testers. If you're interested in participating in this and are willing to provide good feedback and bug reports, subscribe to this forum so you get notified when I make the post.
Home stretch my dudes!