Rec Center Tycoon News

Hey everyone, it's update time!

Not a huge one this time, mostly just fixing new bugs introduced with the latest major patch as well as some older ones.

Also a number of framework upgrades, a tonne of project cleanup like deleting old scripts, organising code & assets to make things smoother the upcoming game engine port.

[h3]Here's the full changelog:[/h3]
Gameplay & Engine Changes:
- The Mess system has been completely overhauled in preparation for upcoming porting.
The end result will look the same but should increase performance & decrease stutter for large Rec Centers.

- The Employee Binding system has been re-built from scratch & should (hopefully) now be bug free
As part of this, cooks can no longer be bound to specific cafe counters, however they can now be bound to Cafeteria & Event zones

- Lifeguard AI has had many significant changes & fixes
- Children now create 25% less mess
- Pausing & Unpausing now maintains selected game speed rather than reverting to 1x

Minor changes & bug fixes:
- Various new customer & employee emotes added
- Resume traits now show tooltips upon mouse-over
- Store Shelf recolored to make it more distinct from Stock Shelf
- Fixed some visual bugs with the Store Shelf incorrectly appearing empty
- Fixed bug preventing 'Infirmary' tech from unlocking
- Fixed numerous bugs related to placing objects
- Fixed bug causing nurses to ignore drowners rescued manually
- More framework changes in preparation for porting to new engine
- Minor performance improvements
- Additional minor bug fixes & changes


[h3]So what's coming up?[/h3]
Not at lot to share at the moment but there's some changes to the way reviews & memberships work on the way.
I'll have more info on the major upcoming features & changes soon.

Also if you have any ideas for challenging/interesting Steam achievements let me know via email or in the comments below!

Hey everyone it’s finally time for the next major update!

It's been a long while since the last one!
Adding the nurse, infirmary, injuries & new techs turned out to be a far bigger task than I had imagined.
The good news is that as a result of the wait, this update is by the biggest so far by a wide margin!
There are almost too many changes to list here so I'll go over the most important ones.

Something to note:
Since this update adds & changes so many things, there's an increased likelihood of running into bugs over the next few days. Should you encounter any, make sure you send me an email to [email protected] so I can get them fixed asap.

The main highlights of this update are:

[h2]New Additions:[/h2]

- New Zone: Infirmary
- New Objects: First Aid Terminal, Medical Cabinet, Medical Bed
- New Research Techs: Infirmary & Liability Waver

- New Mechanic: Injuries
Be on your toes because injuries may now occur in your Rec Center!
Injuries range from minor up to critical & can happen for a variety of reasons.
While injuries are not completely preventable, you can reduce their frequency with with well maintained equipment, good cooks/lifeguards & a clean Rec Center.
Not all equipment is equally dangerous, for example you can expect to see more injuries coming from a squat rack than from an exercise bike.
When a customer is injured, they will lose a chunk of HP.
Based on the severity of the injury, their HP will begin to slowly recover or decay over time. The worse the injury, their faster their HP will decay.
Medical attention will slow the decay, with good enough medical support, the decay rate will invert to a recovery rate, preventing eventual death.
There are a variety of things that affect a customers decay/recovery rate. Things like being in a Medical Bed or chair or having no mess nearby. Even just having a nurse nearby can slightly boost recovery speed!
If you don't believe you can save a customer in time, you can call an ambulance & a paramedic will come collect them (for a fee), otherwise there are a few additional ways to deal with injuries:

- New Profession: Nurse
Nurses are a little different than other employees & their payrate is 50% higher than the standard.
While they can work regular hours, they can also be called in from home to come in for an emergency (for an additional hourly cost).
Also, if a patient is critically injured & can no longer walk, the nurse will carry them to the infirmary & ensure they get the help they need.

- New Manager Techs: Basic First Aid & Standard First Aid
These techs allow you to manually provide a small level of first aid support for injured customers.
This is particularly useful if there's no nurse working or to help clear up the infirmary if it's getting overloaded.
But be aware, bandaging may be enough for some injuries but bandaging a critically injured customer might only just buy them a little more time.

- New Statistics Tab: Injury Log
This new tab records a variety of details about any & all injuries that occur in the Rec Center, this includes drownings & food poisoning from the Cafe.
The Injury Log is only viewable after unlocking the 'Infirmary' tech.
Here's a screenshot of the Injury Log:


[h2]Changes to Employees:[/h2]

- Traits Overhaul:
Many employee traits have been reworked, for example:
Employees with Low Expectations will now never request payrises & employees with High Expectations will request raises frequently.
- Traits: Reliable & Unreliable renamed to Dependable & Undependable
- Employee traits now display descriptive tooltips upon mouse-over
- Employees also now have increased odds of having multiple traits.

- New Employee Traits:
- Night Owl, Loves working really late into the night
- Early Bird, Enjoys waking up bright & early
Employees with these traits CAN work any hours, however they are best utilised during their most productive hours.
You can make a Night Owl work mornings, but don't expect them to be overly happy about it, it might also reflect in their performance.

- Working Overtime:
The nurse & lifeguard now have options to allow them to work overtime if they think it's necessary.
For example, if a lifeguards Overtime option is checked, when their shift ends, they can make the decision to stay back to keep watch over the pool if there are no other lifeguards on duty & there are swimmers nearby.
The nurse has similar options for working overtime.


- New Stat: Productivity
The Productivity stat determines how fast an employee works. It doesn't affect their movement speed rather it affects how fast they complete tasks.
Productivity is affected by many different variables, such as stamina, job satisfaction & happiness.
Traits also play a very big roll in productivity. Eg. An employee with the 'Dependable' trait that is happy & loves their job will work much faster than an unhappy 'Night Owl' forced to work a morning shift.

- Lifeguard wages are now 10% higher than regular employees
- The stats boost gained from the Poaching tech has been slightly nerfed

[h2]Changes to Customers:[/h2]

- New Customer Trait: Clumsy
Customers with this have an increased chance of injuring themselves while using equipment.

- Slightly reduced odds of customers cancelling membership
- Customers now take slightly longer to drown & have a slightly reduced chance of drowning
- Regular customers can now be forbidden from using Classrooms again
- Increased customer mood boost from being near a TV by 15%

[h2]Changes to Manager:[/h2]

- Fatigue now affects manager movement speed (50% slower at max).
- The Manager now provides a small happiness boost to nearby customers (Based on the charisma stat).
- You can now use your manager to manually pick up & move customers that have been severely injured & can no longer walk.
- Manager techs now have a separate tab in the Research menu.

[h2]Smaller Changes:[/h2]

- Sound Engine Overhaul:
The way sound effects play has been rewritten. Sound effects now sound a little less jarring & stereo speaker support has been added.
Sound volume also transitions better now when zooming in & out.

- Time Flow Changes
The flow of time has been changed to prevent rounding oddities causing some in-game minutes to be slightly longer or shorter than others.#As a result, time now flows an unnoticeable 3% slower.

- Minimum Stock Threshold:
Similar to equipment repairing, it's now possible to set a percentage on any objects that use stock, like Vending Machines.
If you set the minimum stock threshold to 70%, your employees or manager will only attempt to restock the object once it falls below this number.

- Zones now have their names displayed on the map
- Added & improved various tooltips
- Many new customer & employee emotes have been added

[h3]Bug fixes:[/h3]
There are effectively too many bug fixes & changes to list but I'll go over some of the notable ones:
- Fixed major cause of NPCs getting stuck or running on the spot
- Mess should no longer mistakenly drop inside walls or objects
- Added additional measures to prevent anything from accidentally being placed out of bounds
- It's no longer possible to build tiles over tiles of the same type
- Customers now judge their environment correctly at 4x game speed
- Compassion stat now shows the correct value
- Managers can no longer manually interact with things while paused
- Rust Protection tech now correctly reduces dura decay by 50%
- Fixed some NPC pathing issues
- Fixed possible crash when trying to destroy out of bounds things
- Fixed bug that can cause Janitors to get stuck at the mailbox
- Fixed bug causing employees to to get stuck when their shift ends
- Fixed additional causes for NPCs to get stuck in place
- Fixed crash when trying to place certain objects out of bounds
- Customers at the Cafe will correctly turn away when stock runs out
- Small performance improvements & fixes to stuttering
- Countless additional minor improvements & bug fixes


[h2]What's next:[/h2]

Due to time restraints I decided to hold off on overhauling the customer review system, so that's high on my priorities right now.

In addition to that I've been planning a built-in help guide to explain how many in-game systems work.

Also, some time in the near future I'm going to have to port the game over to the latest version of the game engine so I plan to slowly make some framework changes to make the task easier.

I have a long list of small changes & additions planned but I haven't fully settled on what the next major feature will be. I'd love to hear some suggestions!

Also if you have any good ideas for challenging Steam Achievements I'd love to hear those too!

Lastly,

As this is a very major patch that changes a great deal of things, there will almost certainly be some undiscovered bugs lurking around. Should you encounter any, please email me at [email protected] so I can squish them!

I hope you enjoy! :)

Hello everyone!

I want to give a progress update on how patch 0.5.0 is coming along.
There's quite a lot to do this patch so it's still a little while away but I've made a lot of great progress so far and I want to give a small sample of a few of the new upcoming additions.

I mentioned in my previous update that a new profession is coming, that profession is the Nurse.

[h3]Nurse[/h3]
The Nurse is a new employee whose job it is to keep everyone healthy & safe. They benefit most from the Cleanliness stat and the Caring (now renamed to Compassion) stat. A nurse that's also a fast walker may be particularly useful too as they might need to rush to the aid of someone after an injury.
The nurse will come with a new zone: the First Aid Room, along with a few new objects like the Medical Bed & Medical Cabinet.
There are now various types of injuries that can now occur around your Rec Center which I'll get into shortly.
The Nurse' role is to provide medical treatment to any customers that get injured or become sick from food poisoning. Also the nurse may be required to help carry customers to the Medical Bed if their injuries are very severe.
You don't need a rotation of nurses working every hour that your Rec Center is open however.
A single nurse can be hired to work regular, busy hours & also remain on 'On Call' during their off time if you need them to come in for an emergency (for a modest price).

[h3]Injuries[/h3]
So as I mentioned earlier, in addition to drowning & food poisoning, injuries are now a possibility.
After all, a Gym can be a dangerous place with lots of heavy objects being lifted.
The chance of a customer being injured while using equipment scales with the durability.
For example:
A customer using a Squat Rack at 95% durability will have a very low chance of injury compared to using a Squat Rack at 60% durability.
Not only will a lower durability increase the chance of an injury, but it may also affect the severity of an injury.
Most injuries are minor and the customer will bring themselves to the First Aid Room for quick treatment but severe injuries can leave customers unable to move and will require the nurse to come to them. If left unattended for long enough, a severely injured customer can die. However, in a well maintained Rec Center severe injures should be very rare.
Equipment repair costs have also been adjusted to make frequent repairing a little less cost effective.
So overall you will spend more on repairs if your Builder is repairing equipment that's already at a high durability.
This means the player must choose between spending more money to keep durability always high or save money by letting durability get a bit lower before repairing but increasing the risk of customer injury.
It's up to you to pick the right balance!

There will also be a new 'injury/death' log accessible at the Nurse Desk that records any injuries or deaths (and their causes) that occur in your Rec Center to help you weed out any dangers.

I'm also working on expanding the Customer Review system which I'll talk more about in the next update.

Anyway that's a quick taste of some of the changes coming in the major patch.
I'm looking forward to receiving feedback and hearing your thoughts on these additions in the comments below! :)

Hey everyone it's time for an update.

I'm still hard at work on the next major update (0.5.0) which will include the Reviews overhaul & a new profession amongst other things.
This is a slightly smaller update which adds a few frequently requested features and a host of bug fixes & performance increases.

[h3]Here's a quick overview of what this patch contains:[/h3]

Task Priorities:
You are now able to change your managers, builders & janitors task priorities.
If you're sick of your Janitors prioritising watering plants over cleaning mess or builders leaving repairing equipment until last, you can now easily change task priorities by clicking the up or down arrow next to a task as shown in this screenshot:

Also in this screenshot you can see an example of the next addition:

Builder Repair Threshold:
If you click on a builder you'll see a percentage next to their "Repair" option. Changing this will determine what equipment quality will trigger them to go & repair it.
A higher number (over 80%) will cause them to repair things much more often, so you will have higher quality equipment at the cost of having less time for other tasks.

Timed Switches:
Power Switches can now be set to automatically turn on & off at specific times.
Allowing more cost savvy players to easily switch off power to rooms they're not using.

Membership Mood Bonuses:
In this patch I've reworked the way bonuses & penalties work with Members & Premium Members.
An example of this is that Premium Members & Members will gain happiness 10% faster if in a zone that excludes casuals, however Premium Members will gain happiness 20% faster in a zone that excludes both casuals and regular members.
Conversely, there are also minor penalties such as Premium Members gaining happiness 10% slower while in zones that allow casuals.
These bonuses & penalties are low enough that they can be ignored without serious impact on your Rec Center but are a good option to provide a better experience for your members which may lead to better reviews.

These mood changes only apply to Pool, Gym, Cafeteria, Entertainment & Bathroom zones.

Performance Optimisation:
Before this patch, every floor tile, pool tile & wall were drawn individually by the GPU. In a large Rec Center this would cause up to 1000 calls for drawing.
In this patch I've recoded the way ALL wall/floor tiles are handled so that every tile & wall is drawn on a single big surface overlayed on the screen & only updated when a new tile/wall is added/removed.
The end result should be invisible to the player but give 30-50% overall performance increase, especially in late-game with a big Rec Center.

This is by far the largest single performance increase the game has had to date.

[h3]Here's a list of the full-ingame changelog:[/h3]

- Priorities:
You are now able to change your managers, builders & janitors task priorities.
Simply target your manager or employee & mouse over their tasks & click to shift tasks up or down.

- Optimisation:
The way all floor tiles, walls & pools work has been completely rewritten. Rather than being drawn as individual tiles, they are now all drawn to a single large surface, drastically improving performance for very large Rec Centers.

- Membership Mood Changes:
There are some changes to the way Members & Premium Members handle their mood bonuses while in certain zones. Any time a member gains or loses mood, there is a bonus or penalty based on where they are.
For example, a Premium Member will gain happyness 20% faster while in a Premium-Member exclusive zone.
These mood bonuses only apply to Pool, Gym, Cafeteria, Entertainment & Bathroom zones.

- You can now set the Builder employees' minimum repair threshold
- Switches can now be set to automatically turn on & off at specific times
- A separate toggle for Ambiance has been added to the options menu
- Added utility menu overlay to make cables easier to see

Minor changes & bug fixes:
- Lifeguards with the 'Sharp Eye' trait now have a larger rescue range
- Rebalanced Childcare review scores
- Reduced the chance of customers drowning a by a small amount
- Scaffold limit increased from 1500 to 2000
- Opening the electricity grid should no longer cause an fps stutter
- Reduced stutter in late-game when building/destroying cables & walls
- Volume of water sound effects lowered by 50%
- Members now correctly gain a mood bonus if in member-only zones
- Janitors will no longer try to put stock in unassigned shop shelves
- Fixed crash related to childcare
- Fixed bug causing employees to wander & not do their job
- Fixed some bugs related to lifeguards & drowning
- Fixed some issues with sound volume not affecting all sounds
- Fixed bug causing customers to get stuck on the running track
- Fixed some visual bugs with Purchases & Profit not adding up right
- Many smaller changes & bug fixes

Final note:
I've still got a bit of work to do on the review overhaul & new profession (amongst new additions).
But I've layed out my plans & am making good progress!

[h3]Edit: I've temporarily reverted back to patch 0.4.1 as this latest update is causing frequent crashes for a number of users, I'll re-post the new update as soon as I fix the issue, sorry for any inconveniences this may have caused.[/h3]

Hey everyone it’s time for another update!

It’s been a little while since the last one due to eye surgery putting me out of work for a few weeks but everything is back to normal and I hope to resume my regular monthly major updates.

[h3]The main highlights of this update are:[/h3]

Statistics collection:
Over the last month I’ve completely rewritten the way almost all background stats are collected & handled, greatly expanding the players ability to view info about their Rec Center.
Before this patch, stats were collected on a per day basis, after the day had ended, the information was lost. Now, all stats are collected and sorted in a giant 2d array that grows each in-game day & information is never lost.

Graphs:
Since stats for previous days are now collected & saved, I was able to revamp the Finance menu & tabs and add way to view over-time progress graphs. Now you can view long term growth & changes for many different stats about your Rec Center.

You can see a few examples here:

Keep in mind that since the stat collection begins with this update, you won’t be able to view stats on days played before upgrading to this patch. If starting from a fresh new game all stats will be collected as normal.

Menu optimisation:
I mentioned in my most recent update there were a few large performance hogs in the form of menus, specifically the Research & Staff menus. In my own internal tests framerates could drop from 1300fps~ to 600 when up, giving an almost 60% drop in performance. This could be really taxing on lower end hardware. So I’ve completely recoded these menus from the ground up, they look almost exactly the same but now they have effectively no impact on performance at all.

[h3]The full patch notes for this update are:[/h3]

- Statistics collection:
The way background data is collected & saved has been completely overhauled allowing for better and more versatile stat collection.
As of this update, many new stats about your Rec Center will be collected & be viewable to the player. For example, amount of daily swimmers, your star rating over time, membership signups per day and far more.
This paves the way for future features & allows for the the next additon:

- Graphs:
The finance & statistics tabs have been overhauled giving more detail and allowing the player to display graphs of daily growth for many different statistics.
For example, if you want to see your electricity bill or your membership growth over the last 5 days or last 50 days, now you can!

- Research, Staff & Finance menus recoded from the ground up to give vastly improved performance.

Balance changes:
- Bank loan interest rates reduced by around 15% making them a more friendly option in the early-game (This only applies to new loans, pre-existing ones will be unchanged)
- Maximum possible simultaneous customers increased
- Customers will now spend slightly less time in your Rec Center
- Fridges now lose stock over time when disconnected from power
- Slightly reduced chance of swimmers drowning

Minor changes & bug fixes:
- Fixed bug causing Shop Shelves to not save their type & stock
- Improvements made to load screen
- All 'tech unlock' progress stats now save correctly
- Lifeguards can no longer sit down when assigned to patrol a zone
- Cookers are no longer usable without electricity
- Customers no longer teleport out of pools upon loading a game
- Patrol areas now place correctly over objects
- Computer income is now correctly included with entertainment income
- Employees will now occasionally emote when they need to
- Manager can no longer be controlled while they are carrying an object
- Fixed many more NPC directional & positioning issues
- Fixed bug causing children to possibly spawn upon loading a save
- Fixed crash caused by invalid customer animation
- Fixed bug allowing for the same employee to be hired more than once
- Fixed crash relating to incorrect stock amounts
- Many small performance optimisations, adjustments & bug fixes

[h3]What's coming next patch:[/h3]

Reviews Overhaul
This is actually something I planned to include in this update but didn't get around to, mainly because the statistics overhaul & graphs implemention took significantly longer than I expected to implement correctly. So it's now a high priority for the next upcoming patch.
Here's the current plan: I want to overhaul the way customer reviews work by expanding the info you receive from each review.
For example, instead of just giving an overall rating out of 5 stars, you'll receive an out of 5 rating on other things too like cleanliness, value for money, how much stuff there is to do & how crowded the place is etc.. let me know if you have any thoughts & ideas on this.

New Profession
It's been a long while since I've added a new profession and while I haven't yet decided exactly which one, I have rough plans outlined for a few such as a Nurse, Security Guard or even Masseuse. Personal Trainers that your customers can hire is an idea I've toyed with too.

Additional Performance Optimisation
As part of each update now I want to spend a bit of time improving the core of the game, there are literally hundreds of ways to do this and there's always things that can be improved upon.

As usual these plans are subject to change but let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions that may improve or expand upon these plans.
Thank you for your patience & I hope you enjoy! :)