Rec Center Tycoon News

Hey everyone, it's update time!

I want to talk a bit about what I've been doing and what's planned in the near future.

Over the last month I've been focusing quite a bit on performance optimising, mostly rewriting intensive background processes and GUI elements.
I'm happy to say that between patch 0.2.0 & this latest patch 0.2.2, average framerates have increased by about 20-25%, making the game run better on lower end hardware, there is still plenty of optimisation to be done however!

I haven't been overly active this last month because I took a bit of a break over the christmas period but I'm now back in full swing.
I've uploaded a new patch today that adds a few new pieces of gym equipment, adds a few new emotes, some new options & changes to customer AI during events, in addition to fixing a few major bugs and crashes.

The full list of patch notes is available on the title screen in-game.

So what's coming next?

Firstly, more optimisation!
The framerate can take a significant hit during late-game when you have a lot of customers & things going on. There is still a lot that can be done to speed the game up.

Also I'm planning more work on events. A better system for event reviews, more variety & ways to customise them etc.

Food quality is also planned to go along with the event updates. A highly skilled cook at the moment just increases cooking speed, but soon cooking skill will also affect the quality of food being served at the cafe & buffet. As you might imagine, this can lead to things like better/worse reviews or customers getting sick.

2 new 'Techs' will also be added to the research tree in the next major patch that will unlock some spicy new additions.

Thank you for your patience! ^.^

Hey everyone, it's update time!

Just a quick one this time.
So I had a big update that I had been planning to release today that fixes a few major issues & many small ones, overhauls the save system to make saves transferrable between PCs and includes some new equipment and a new zone.

However A few days ago I noticed the game engines compiler wasn't working. I could test the game but I couldn't compile it into a version that I can upload to steam.

I spent the last few days doing everything I could to try & fix it. The good news is I've got it working now but it did set me back a few days worth of dev time so I need to push back the update a little longer.

I should have the full update out by next week.
Thanks for your patience! :)

Hey guys!
I'm about overdue for an update so I want to let you know about what my plans are for the next couple weeks.

In addition to normal routine bug fixes & Quality of Life improvements, I'm planning 2 major changes.

I apologise in advance if these get a little technical.

The first thing I want to talk about is the way saving/loading works.
There's a major issue with the way the save system works that I only discovered the day before release. Save files can only be loaded on the PC that they were saved on.

This happens because of an odd quirk of the game engine I'm using. There's a great little built in function to securely save grids to a data file that my game uses. Unfortunately what the documentation didn't mention is that these files an only be opened on the PC that saved them.

Meaning things like Cloud Saving is impossible and you can't copy saves from one PC to another. This is a huge issue for me too since I can't have users send me their saved files to help diagnose bugs.

My top priority is to not break current saves. So i'm planning to fix this in such a way that it will be invisible to users and all their saves will continue functioning as normal.

Once this is fixed, transfering saves from one PC to another will be possible.


The second major change is with an issue that causes a fairly big performance slowdown on large Rec Centers & having a lot of 'building plans' up at once.
The issue is that pre-built plans like walls, tiles & pools are very performance intensive.
Each unfinished wall/tile is about as performance intensive as a customer or piece of equipment.
Building a somewhat small 10 by 10 room creates 100x 'building plan' objects & has the same performance impact as an additional 100 customers in your Rec Center.
So if you're building a large 30 by 20 room, you're adding 600 objects to your Rec Center which causes a lot of slowdown until they're built.

I did this originally just because it was much simpler & faster to implement, without considering the performance impact it might have on mid-low range PCs or when you're trying to build very large amounts of walls/floors at once.

In the next week or so I'm going to overhaul the way this works, so that a pre-built floor will have the same performance impact as a regular floor tile.
This will result in a massive performance increase for many users.


I know both of these things aren't particularly interesting features but they're both extremely necessary changes that need to be done.
Having the game run smoothly for everyone who plays is my top priority right now.

Thank you for your patience!

Hey everyone, we're about to enter the second week since release so it's time for a little progress update.

This week, I'm going to overhaul the way zones work.
This has been a much requested upgrade as the current method of placing zones is pretty janky & limited.
For example, it's not really possible to have a zone that functions as a customer swimming pool & a swim class.

It's possible to overlay different zone types on top of each other which can cause many bugs & problems.

But the biggest downside is they are strictly limited to squares/rectangles, this is because they work on a coordinates system. With the current method, each zone uses 4 variables to determine its size & location. 2 variables determine the x/y positions on the map & 2 determine the width & height of the zone. This is why they are forced into rectangles and why it will be no quick, simple task to upgrade it.

So I'm basically going to start from scratch on the whole zone system and make it work based on a single giant grid.

There are huge benefits to this, not only will zones have the possibly to take any shape imaginable, it will be much simpler to expand upon it in the future & be less prone to bugs.

I'm also going to add the ability to give your zones custom names, so they won't all have to be named boring things like Classroom 2.

Zones will also work a little differently, instead of placing a bunch of different zone types, you'll now place a single generic zone type, then customise it how you like.

This won't be a quick update, I'll need to change the way events, classes & anything that uses zones works.
So this coming week probably won't get the same daily bug fix updates as the last 2 weeks since I'll need to change a whole lot of things to accommodate the new zone system.

My aim is to keep current saved games compatible once I roll out this big update however all your current zones will disappear & you'll need to remake them in the new system.

So, short of finding any game-breaking bugs, there won't be 'daily updates' for a little while until this is finished.

If you have any suggestions or requests in regards to the 'zones overhaul', leave a comment on this post & I'll take a look at any ideas.

Here's a mock-up of how the new zone selection may work:

Hey everyone!

It's been a full week now since EA launch & it's been a super busy week!

I had a goal of releasing at least 1 patch every day, fixing as many issues as I could, which I've managed to stick to pretty well.

There is still a lot to be done however, so for at least another few weeks there won't really be any big new features being added.
I plan to stick to the patch-per-day thing until the bug reports start to dry up.

I knew there would be a whole lot of undiagnosed bugs which would affect many players during the launch weeks, despite this the feedback has been amazing.
I want to thank everyone who has written a review (even the negative ones, they were all justified too!), I've read every single one & they helped a great deal with the stress that comes with launching a project you've spent years working on, into the public.

For the first 5 days after release I was basically waking up & started fixing bug reports until I went to bed.
I'm going to take the weekend off & relax for a couple days, so if I don't respond to any posts for a few days, don't worry! I'll try to get to them all after the weekend.

Thank you all for your support!