Hi friends,

I hope you’re having a great Friday already!

First of all, I want to start with a status of our wishlists: 16,162!

That’s more than 6,000 new wishes since the Steam page was announced. I’m super happy and proud of this number. It shows that we continue the growth and are slowly getting closer to our final goal: 50,000. Thank you to all of you who clicked that little, but incredibly important, wishlist button ☺

Moving on. The last 2 weeks really haven’t been the most exciting. We have been running on reduced team size, and personally, I’ve been doing 2 major rewrites in preparations for alpha 5.

I did consider pushing the devlog a week but decided to go with this smaller update. I hope you like it after all 😁

New parking system 🅿️

A major annoyance in Big Ambitions was parking. You were only allowed to exit your vehicle if it was legally parked on a designated parking spot.

This has now been introduced with the parking zone system. Whenever your vehicle is stationary the UI will show was parking zone you’re in. Right now all legal zones are free, but later on, I’ll introduce paid parking.

The player can also decide to park illegally. The UI will indicate so. This comes with a risk of receiving a parking ticket ($125). You’ll only receive one ticket per day.

Item backend rewrite and some UI ⚙️

Big Ambitions has already been through quite a lot of pivots, as I learned which of my ideas worked and which didn’t. For every change and modification, the source code becomes worse and eventually, you just have to invest the time to rewrite it to better suit the new reality. Geeks like us like to call it technical debt.

For the last week, I’ve been doing nothing else but rewriting the system that handles stuff like furniture, products to sell, cash registers, cooking appliances, etc.

The trigger for this rewrite was the option to empty a shelf, in order to change what it contains.

This is finally possible. When emptying a shelf (or any other item containing products), you’ll now get a cardboard box containing the exact amount of products left.

While I was at it, I also slightly redesigned the overlays for products to buy, making it a bit easier to understand pricing and quantities.

The Customer Satisfaction Update 🥴

The backend

The business and customer satisfaction has been a bit messed up, as it was only partially implemented.

I’ve finally been able to put it all together. Two major things were missing considering business satisfaction:

• Amount of customers wasn’t affected by customer satisfaction
• Customer satisfaction wasn’t affected by employee skills

Both things have now been included, making it much more lucrative to optimize your business.

The frontend

At the same time, I found some time to add emotions to your customers. Sometimes customers will express their thoughts about your business. This is a great way to learn what to improve.

Price indexes on reserved businesses 🔖

The “item rewrite”, added more flexibility to the reserved businesses, meaning the places where you buy wholesale products, industrial appliances, etc.

In this update, businesses will now sell products in different quantities at different price indexes. Eventually, this will be specific to each savegame, meaning each business will sell products at different prices. Long story short: you can roam around the city and locate businesses selling the products you need at a lower price.

A few new buildings and a new car 🆕

Even tho our team size has been a bit reduced these last 2 weeks, the guys still got some stuff done. A few minutes ago Paul #1 send me these renders of one of the new harbor buildings and a new car!

The vehicle is your traditional (and boring some would say) cross-over family SUV. It comes with a great price tag and even better cargo size 😎

Some of you might find the next vehicle a bit more exciting. It’s the first exclusive vehicle (Silver and Gold packages): Mercedes S-Class.

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That’s all for now. See you in 2 weeks!

Thank you for reading!

All the best,
Jonas