Hey there!

I hope you all had a great week! I’ve had a semi-efficient week. Lots of work done, but also a lot of refactoring and rewriting existing code made the progress feel a bit slow. That’s just how it is some times 🙂

Email and devlog frequency

In my last email I asked “How often do you want to receive these emails?”. The results ended up with 65% voting for weekly updates and 32% for monthly. To make everyone happy, including myself, I’ll be sharing updates on average every 2nd week. I write average to add some flexibility in case I got something exciting to share and don’t want to wait another week 😄

Dynamic shelves

Until now you would have to buy one specific type of shelf to hold one specific type of products. I quickly found that to be a stupid solution, so instead I’ve been working on a “dynamic shelf” that can hold a limited set of product types. In the videos below you’ll see the same shelf being used for holding both gifts (in the gift shop) and wheels (in the auto repair shop).

The Auto Repair Shop 🔧

The Auto Repair Shop is yet another business type you’ll be able to start. The business will mostly be seen in less popular areas with lower real estate prices, as you’ll need a lot of space. It’s also worth to mention that only buildings with a Drive In Bay will be able to host an Auto Repair Shop.

Only employees and players with the Mechanic education will be able to work here. In Alpha 1 customers will only need wheel changes, but this will of course be extended later on.

I’ve been putting a lot of hours into optimizing the existing code to support the new needs of this business type. Technically the employee-type is identical to the ones used in the fast food restaurant. This is an important part of my strategy to be able to reuse as much code as possible, in order to extend the amount of different business types.

The Gift Shop 🎁

I can’t have a New York business game without making it possible to run the popular Gift Shops (I <3 NY). The implementation was very straight forward, as it’s identical to the supermarkets. Customers come in, walk around and eventually grabs a few items and pay at the register.

The New York Taxi Cab 🚕

Similar to the Gift Shops, there’s also no way around the famous New York Taxi Cabs. You’ll both be able to work as a driver, but also run your own taxi company. The implementation hasn’t started yet, but our 3D artist is already done with the first vehicle:

That’s all for this week. I’ll have another update ready in 2 weeks.

Thank you for reading! 👍

All the best,
Jonas