Winkeltje: The Little Shop News

Hey Shopkeepers,

With our release yesterday, we are absolutely amazed at the reception you guys have given us. Thank you so much for all the conversation, feedback and bug reports! We plan to improve and expand Winkeltje for as long as we can, and your input is vital in these efforts.

Here at Sassybot, we feel that transparency is important. As our players, you deserve to know what’s going on, what we’re doing with your feedback and how we will use it to make the game better. That is why, right now, we’d like to take a moment to tell you about the things we currently have in development for Winkeltje!

There are a few things we have in the pipeline, so we’ll go through them one by one!


Scenarios are something that we have had planned for a while, and they’re finally coming. Scenarios are best described as ‘challenges’. They will consist of many of the things you have been asking for, such as different difficulty levels, different map sizes, and more focused shop types. For example, you might find a scenario where things are more expensive than usual, increasing difficulty. Or you might come across one where you start with a forge, and you take on the role of a blacksmith.


We have heard you, some prices don’t make sense. Farming isn’t worth it, and much more. We are currently hard at work to rebalance everything, from prices, to rewards for crafting and farming, and even the order in which you unlock new items (and furniture) for selling! Overall, we hope this will improve your experience playing Winkeltje.


The UI has been changed many times so far in an effort to improve clarity to you, as well as the ease with which you can do things. We are currently (re)designing a lot of the UI element, to improve this further. A big part of this will also be the backend, so it will be easier for us to expand and change it in the future!


Wall mounted furniture is on its way. Think of shelves you can put items on, or paintings you can put up to push your appeal just a bit higher again! This will create a lot of new options for you in how you design your shops, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you do with it.


You guys have been amazing in reporting a lot of bugs that slipped through our testing. A large part of our time for the near future will be focussed on fixing these as soon as we can. Some things are easy, some are hard, but we’ll get them fixed thanks to you! Making sure the game is playable is our number one priority, so please look forward to these fixes.

Finally, we’d like to thank you again for purchasing, playing, and talking about Winkeltje. It’s thanks to all of you that we can keep working on the game.

I do have to mention one last thing. These are things we have in development, but with everything happening (bug reports coming in, etc.) it’s currently not possible to give a release date for these features. Some will come sooner than others though, so keep an eye on the discord (and steam) to stay informed!

Winkeltje has come a long way since it was first announced on November 14th, 2018. With the help and dedication of an awesome growing community we have been able to add new features, fix issues, and support more languages than we thought was possible. Moving forward we are dedicated to work on new features, add more content, and support more languages to make Winkeltje the shopkeeping game that is here to stay.

To start with this, we have the day one patch. Check out the patch notes below!

Highlights

• 4 new counters.
  
• Added 4 carpets.
  
• Improved controller support.
  
• Added support for Latin American Spanish!
  
• Customers should no longer be able to buy things from outside the store.
  
• Traders screen has been reworked!
  

Content

• Added 4 new counters, so they can always fit your store!
  
• Added 4 carpets, so you can fill up the floors!
  
• Added running animation!
  

Bug Fixes

• Sprint now checks if the player is overburdened.
  
• Customers should no longer be able to buy things from outside the store.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented seasons from visually transitioning.
  
• An issue causing notifications to not show sometimes has been resolved.
  
• Selection labels should now fit better with the object.
  

Improvements

• Added a description for the trash bin.
  
• Improved clarity of descriptions for farming.
  
• improved controller support:
  
  • Controller: Left bumper is now sprinting
    
  • Controller: Cloning furniture moved to left bumper
    
  • Controller: Snapping furniture moved to right bumper
    
• Customers should request less raw resources.
  
• Added description to unique objects (counters) to clarify that you can only have 1 at a time.
  
• Farming has been re-balanced.
  
• Added thresholds to doors.
  
• Menu description has been given more space for multi-line descriptions
  
• Traders will now show a % discount instead of a number.
  

Winkeltje has been updated from v2616 to v2662!

For a list of changes, see the list below.
For a full list of every change to the game, please head to Discord and see the #change-logs channel: https://discord.gg/ZSMEenk

New: Player sprinting (Left Shift).
Events: Reduced the duration of the recession and economic boom events.
Fix: Game Over state now correctly sends you to the main menu.
Fix: Debt objective now correctly ends after a year.
Fix: Fixed an issue that prevented placing items with a controller during the tutorial.
Fix: Fences now correctly block the navmesh preventing customers from walking around your shop.
Fix: Skipping intro animation with controller no longer presses the first button in the menu.
Fix: Cursor would jump to the middle of the grid when hoving the mouse on the edge of the grid.
Fix: Moved saving prompt animation pop-up as it was overlapping other UI in some languages.
Fix: Skipping the intro text using a controller should no longer accept or cancel the tutorial confirmation prompt.
Fix: Access points were incorrectly marked as valid.
Fix: Game would soft lock if you would restart the game before finishing the last tutorial step.
Fix: Displays behind doors were not accessible due to a recent change. This should work once again.
Fix: Switching to controller while the item slots of a display are open should now close the slots and default to the legacy display interaction.
Fix: Multiple issues with walls not correctly settings the (in)valid state of objects when clipping through walls.
Fix: Quickly selling furniture after it was bought caused an error.
Fix: Recent change caused item slots to dissapear when switching between mouse & keyboard.
Fix: The UI layout for objectives and events did not place menu entries below eachother and were stacked as a result.
Text: Leaving the shop to the main menu was not using the intended text.
Item: Resized the Axe to fit in all displays.
Controls: Replaced PC prompt graphics.
Controls: Replaced Xbox One prompt graphics.
Controls: Replaced PS4 graphics.
Controls: Added Xbox 360 prompt graphic.
Structure: Updated the doorway wall piece model and adjusted rotation in the Kit4 window prefab for proper texture tiling.
Improvement: Trader will now never be the first customer of the day.
Improvement: The tutorial should now disable the buttons in the options radial instead of hiding them.
Improvement: Wall masking should now be snappier, a bit smaller, and the animation has been improved.
Improvement: Player obscurance by entrance, archway or door should now correctly trigger the wall masking feature.
Improvement: Furniture labels should (in most cases) no longer cover the item slots.
Farming: Harvesting now has a 50% chance of giving you the seeds back.

Hey fellow shopkeepers!
During development, most of our attention is focused on making the game better. With countless social media platforms page it becomes hard for us to stay aware of what is happening where. While we do check Steam community from time to time, it might happen that messages here simply slip through the cracks. That is why we have decided to build and manage the Winkeltje community on Discord. Hope to see you there soon!

Join Discord now!