Dear retailers!
A new month has passed by, meaning it is time to give a new update of the world of King of Retail. Things are still progressing at a steady pace, with many new things happening this month as well.




We had another contest this month, and the topic was making the best electronics store in the original King of Retail. Our winners of this month are:




It was very fun to see the versatility of the old poster system being put to good use again, as well as just getting to see some well made stores in the original King of Retail. Since all my focus is on the new game, it is rare i get to see the old game. A nice feeling of nostalgia for me, as well as a good reminder of the roots of the new game.

Thanks a lot for all of your submissions, it never becomes boring watching your submissions and your great stores.




This month we will be returning to King of Retail 2.
We were wondering how the future of supermarkets will look like. Nut just in the near future, but very far away. Once humankind has colonised the moon, they will still need to buy their futuristic food.
We assume stores never gets old, and home deliveries is merely a passing thing, so to prepare, we will need you to design:


This month we will look at the following:
- They will need to have access to lots of variation, so a lot of variety in the assortment will be valued high.
- In a future of lights and led, we imagine lots of lights everywhere. Be creative with the display designer. It should still be pleasant to shop in, so a good balance of futuristic lights and regular interior is very optimal.

Good luck and have fun :)




King of Retail is a very UI heavy game.
Up until now i have been doing all that design on my own. And there are varied opinions on the quality of my skills, which i am fully aware of. :D It is a hard to learn, but an area of game productions that is very important to get right.
So for some time i have been looking to find a UI designer to help with that part of the game.
I have talked with a lot, tried a few, and finally found one who does very promising work, and who also is a pleasure to work with as well.

He will over time overhaul the entire UI, and of course help with future screens as well.
Over the last month we have been compiling a general theme i tried it out on different screens, and here are some of the results:

I personally feel it is a great improvement.
It gives the game a more modern look, without being boring, while the layouts will make things easier to use, and look more organised to look at.

I am really looking forward to when all the game looks like this, and hope you are as well.




Another task i have undertaken this month is to start looking for a marketing agency.
As you now, we have chosen to handle the game 100% by ourselves, and work without publishing agencies.
That means more tasks on our hand, and one of these is to do some proper advertising for the game.

The launch into early access is VERY important to the future of any game. And since King of Retail started as a university project, we did MANY things wrong on the launch of that game. I can reveal on the big launch day, we sold around 5 copies, and it only when down from there. Luckily we didn't have high expectations, and always planned to keep on working no matter how it went.

The initial success of the game can purely be attributed to the streamer "Paluten", who was the first streamer to put it on the map by playing the game and affecting the sales after launch. Without him putting it on the map, Without him, it was not guaranteed that King of Retail and King of Retail 2 would have made it to this point.
So basically we were very lucky with the first game. I of course hope he also played it that much because it was a good game, attributing a part of it to the success.

This time around i try to learn from my experience, and do a proper launch, so the luck is more in our own hands.
But marketing isn't easy and we only have one shot for getting a proper launch next year.

We have taken some courses to learn the fundamentals, but came to the conclusion that doing this ourselves, going through the learning curve and do the mistakes that comes with it maybe isn't the best solution on the one chance we have with the game.

So instead we think it is better to leave this to people who do it for a living. That also frees up a lot of my time to do the things i am good at, which is working on the actual game itself.

It will be interesting to see what happens off of this, and hopefully give King of Retail 2 the best terms to make the best game possibly for you to enjoy :)




Despite the time usage on all the things above, i have of course still managed to work on the actual game itself. I started to work on the possibility of buying more property and expanding a store.

For that i improved sequence that happens when you acquire new property. This might be a bit redundant when the UI will be changed at some point anyway, but until that point we still need something that works properly for you to use.

But this new change mean you can now buy the completely empty land plots on the map, and either build a store there, or connect it to an adjacent store. So finally you can spend your hard earned money on making your stores bigger. And currently there are to limits to the size of the store, so those of you who want to do that, can go crazy.

The above is however mostly menu interactions as it is just plot management. You also need to be able to actually change your store. This is where the new "Build Mode" comes in, and during your evenings you now have the possibility to switch between Store and Build mode.

For now i am making good progress with the first part where you can build the outer structure. You can place walls one by one and shape the actual building itself. You can create overhangs, tunnels, walkways, insets, multiple floors and many other things. I try to keep it as free as possible to not limit your creativity when constructing the building.

When you have the shape of the building, you can freely customise the elements in the walls.
Scale windows to the shape and size as you want, and then place it wherever you want in the wall. Entrances are not limited to one pr. building, so make multiple entrances and exits, to guide your customers more in their shopping.

Painting has also been moved to this mode, and you can now paint both inner and outer walls, as well as all elements in them..

Already as this unfinished point you have the ability to create truly unique buildings, so i am really looking forward to see what it will end up with when all possibilities have been added.




We have also added a few articles to the game. Some fruits and vegetables have been prepared, adding a new "department" in the game.

We are also looking into setting up our own little 3D scanning area. As some things are very complicated and time consuming to model and make realistic, it might be easier to scan instead.
So why not kill two birds with one stone and use things easily obtained from everyday life.
Then we can also eat lots of different cakes with a clean conscience as we need them in the game as well :D

On top of vegetables, we have also just started planning and preparing the clothing category. So soon the game will receive a lot of new articles for you to sell.

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Thanks for following along so far. That was all i had to say for now.

If you haven't already, then

[discord.com]Feedback, ideas, comments are very welcome in there, and much appreciated.

I will return to do some more game making
And until next time, have a great sale

Kind regards
Daniel

Dear Retailers!

A month has gone by, and it is time for an update. Both as in actually releasing an update to our alpha, as well as our little blog to tell you what is going on. So let's get to it.



In last update we planned to start working on expansions and decorations. That is still our plan, however the feedback from the community indicated that some small things needed to be changed. Since starting a new long implementation period means these changes would not be active for a while, we chose to do a Quality of Life month which means a month of focusing on smaller implementations and upgrades instead.


What many have been asking for for a while was the ability to change opening hours, which i can understand. There is nothing more frustrating then having to close with a store full of customers. So that is now a possibility.

You can also close the store for a whole day. Right now it doesn't make sense, but in the future when you can properly run multiple stores, you would most likely want that possibility as well.


Then i decided to give the Manager's computer an overhaul, and i hope the micromanagers out there will like the new options.



The first one to mention is the sales statistics. Now you can compare your different categories with each other, on different levels. Select a day interval, and choose your categories, and you can now compare them directly with each other day by day.


You can also analyse the traffic in your store. See which customers who arrives at which time of which day, and plan your opening hours and assortment accordingly.


The screen showing all article details are now accessible from the computer as well. You can also now see the actual sales history of the article, meaning you now have all the time in the world to analyze each article in the tiniest of detail, allowing you to maximize the sales of your store to the fullest.


Too many customers got lost already in the first days because of how the the cash register was handled. So changes have been made to address this.
Customers now overall wait a longer time in the queue, and the article processing speed has been increased significantly, meaning you can process more customers, allowing you to earn more money.

Customers also start heading for the registers an hour before the store closes, meaning not losing out on all these people who actually would like to buy something just because the store closes.
These numbers most likely still need tweaking, so feedback on this is still very welcome.



It will be a while before the HQ really gets into play and get some massive update, as it is more important to round off the actual store part of the game first. However there was a bug where the HQ floor used the same material as the floor in the corner of your store. One of these small curiosities that shows bugs can come in all shapes and sizes.
So when fixing this bug, i also allowed for the possibility of painting the floors at your HQ as well.


Given how the expansion part will work, it is necessary to have a world grid to align walls and such on. This has been added so it also shows when you place your inventory, you can also adjust the grid size which you can then snap things to, making it much easier to align things in nice, perfect lines.


Regarding articles we are as always pushing hard to add new stuff to the game. The article process can be a bit complex, which is why we sometimes have articles ready that doesn't make it to a game in a specific update.

When adding articles, first we need to decide on a collection of items, and how many it should consist of. The hard part of this is to hit the sweet spot.
No category should be more or less important than another in the game. So we try to aim for an equal number of articles in each.

Then we have to decide how many unique meshes and textures it has to consist of. For each new unique mesh / texture, the work time on this specific article increases massively. So it is about figuring a good variety/speed ratio.
Supermarket items are in this regard a bit tricky in general, as it is a lot of texture work and less of modelling. It is hard to design a proper looking label. People takes educations in this stuff to do this professionally, and we kind of have to "assembly line" the process, as we need MANY of them. Also to create the individual article in a group, it means designing a new label with new texts images etc..
Compared to this when we start making clothes, we can model one t-shirt, and give it different colours and voila, a new article line in a short time.

When modelling and texturing has been done, then we have to get them ready to add them to the game. We need to optimise textures and create the actual materials. Materials are the surfaces you see in the actual game. If you look at a surface, it is not only a colour. It also have a property for how smooth it is, the level of metallicity, the bumps that simulate high's and low's, and many other things

These are usually defined by textures, but can also be tweaked with different kind of maths.

After setting up materials, we need to prepare their behavior. It it a hanging item, and from where do they hang. Is it a shelf item that is stacking, and how much do they stack. Should they have random positions and rotations to give them a natural placed look, and so on.

When this has been adjusted, we can finally parameterize them, which means adding price range, quality type, supplier, customer need offset etc. and add them to their respective lists so they show up properly in the game.
So each and every article need to go through all these steps to be able to work properly in the game


In this update, you will have new types of juices, beer can and soda cans. We also started the production of cleaning items, which will be the major additions over the next updates.

Here is an images of some of the things that will be added :)


With this update is released, we will now start on these new big features, i will explain a bit about what you can expect from them.


Currently you can rent and buy property open new stores.
With this implementation, you get certain advantages when buying property (There should be some kind of bonus to spend this amount of money).
One of them is that if you buy property adjacent to an existing store, you can merge them together, allowing for an even bigger store.
So with this as well as the possibility to increase the numbers of floors vertically your stores can end up being MASSIVE.


With these new huge properties, just having a huge building on there might be a bit boring. So the plan is to give you a whole new level of possibilities.

First of all you will be allowed to define the shape of your store, meaning you can place outer walls as you see fit,
In this outer structure you will then be able to place (multiple) entrances and exits, windows and various decorations as you see fit, allowing you to make each building rather unique.

Then you also be able to add other elements to the outer area of the store. Some of these items will boosi your store. For instance maybe a parking lot that increases overall traffic? A bus stop? A playground? A franchised restaurant/cafe? A gas station? Any other ideas? You can also place signs, billboards and various decorations here as well to spice up the looks and attractiveness.


Inside the store you will be able to place various elements, and even create your own designs. You will have access to various shapes you can combine, change and place as you seem fit. That means custom walls, walls with different doors, pillars, overhang elements, etc. etc. Allowing for total control and customisation of your store.
I also plan to make a designer for this to you can experiment, save and share your constructions with each other.
I also plan to add other different decorations as well. Plants, benches, chairs and what not, should also be possible.


I have allocated around 3 months of time for this, so how much of the above that will be part of this sprint, and how much that will be saved for later on i don't know, but my plan is to allow for all of this at some point.
I also plan to allow for a poster system like in KoR1. However i know that this feature in itself is quite heavy to make, so it will not be a part of this decorations update.




We also hosted our monthly contest, and this month the focus was on creating the best looking bakery. We had a record high of participants and submissions, making it hard to determine the winners, also considering that people are starting to use the display designer in many new and creative ways. It is used for making walls, lamps, tables and chairs, which even i had not imagined.

And personally i always like to see people push the boundaries of the game to their fullest.

But on to the winners.


The winner of this months contest is "GodGutten" with "William's Bakery"

A nice clean looking bakery, with various types of displays to showcase the bakery. The spacing between the elements is perfect. It does not feel too crowded, nor too compact. It also features various drinks sections to compliment the store, as you would expect in real life as well.

It is a simple store but well executed, which is hard when you try and keep it simplistic.

The keen eye will also notice the back wall is actually the backside of huge displays, so a creative way to limit the size of your store.

Here are some images of an award winning store:


On second place we have "Sparks" with Sparks Midnight Bakery.

A more spaceous bakery, that is sure ti give some energy to those going midnight shopping. It features long good looking rows of various bakery items, and with the evening sunlight shining directly on the bread, makes it look REALLY delicious.

Here the display designer has really been pushed to the limits.
Again the shape of the store is made of displays, and it also features café elements, where tables, chairs and nice decorative elements, that fits well into the energizing midnight vibe, also are made of custom displays. Each aisle of bakery is also fitted with a special lamp as well.

Here are some images:


On third place we have "HeyHannes" Baguetting Better.

A more classic looking type of morning service bakery. Here we have the large counter where customers come up to the counter and gets served by the clerks, where they have to ask for one of the delicious types of bread.

So it is a smaller store, featuring one long line of articles, as well as an adjacent café section where the customers can go and eat in peace.

This store also has spent time on creating a good looking storage area, which adds to the overall score.

Here are some images:


For our next contest we will take a look back, and make a challenge in the original King of Retail instead. So to try something new, we would like people to create the coolest gaming store that they can. Importing things to consider is making a coherent theme, store layout and article presentation. Using the poster system for ultimate customisation, will also be noticed.

So you can

[discord.com]and join in on the chance to win a Steam gift card.




Our community is also helping translate the game into many different languages, which i am very very appreciateive of. This is a constant ongoing word, as new translations arrive or change with each update. So if you would like to give a hand with translating King of Retail 2, you can do that on

Localizor[www.localizor.com]

This is how the translation is going so farr:

That was all i had to say for now.

Feedback, ideas, bug reports and all these things are as always very welcome.
Now I will return to my cave and continue on making the best game possible for you to enjoy.

So until next time, i wish you a happy sale.
Cheers
Daniel