Gosh, has it been two months already? Time sure flies when you're gamedeving.

This update features a lot of stuff that took a lot longer than it should. Contracts got heavily reworked and now offer more than just money. Cutscene dialogue has been trimmed down, and will probably continue to be trimmed down. Random events were added over a weekend. I'd like to call out some things that aren't in-game per se but still took effort.

Concept Art

I wanted to hire an artist to do the character art for cutscenes, as my placeholder art that's currently in-game sucks. Ended up hiring an artist from the /agdg/ thread who goes by Stop. We've had a lot of back-and-forth and some of the discussion has led to improving the game in other ways, such as lore, art design, mechanics, etc. If nothing else, I can safely say that the final target for the art style would be something akin to '80s and '90s anime, with strong colors and a hint of retro-futurism.

This part took a lot of effort, what with trying to define a hard scope for the art, finding and contacting artists who could deliver, and some bank non-sense to actually pay them. I now personally understand why some companies prefer to ghost candidates rather than be like "Yeaaaaah, you're great but we're going to go with someone else..."

Discord

Yup, we've got a Discord server now. I made it for a previous game but that one will probably never see the light of day again.

Feedback

A lot of effort was also spent on allowing players to submit feedback in-game. Inspired by Reus 2, players can press F11 to send feedback directly to us. The implementation uses Azure services, which let me tell ya, it's like sandblasting a soup cracker and the sandblaster keeps trying to upcharge you. I also spent a lot of time overly cautious and paranoid as you hear horror stories of people setting up cloud services and they end up with a $10,000 bill after a weekend. I'm proud to say that the setup thus far used 1/3 of a penny for the length of December, though now that it's in your hands, I'm sure it'll shoot up like crazy. (Please don't spam it, I only have so much money ;-;)

Version 0.3.3 Changelog

Major Features

• Added a new building: AuSome Exchange
• Added a new building: Coolant Tanks
• Added random events.
• Added a feedback form available anywhere in-game. Press F11 to send your thoughts!
• Added automatic crash uploads.
• Added social media links to the main menu. Join our Discord or follow us on X and Itch.io!

Minor Features

• Contracts can now offer an assortment of rewards, including Money, Power, Resources, and Prestige.
• Contracts have been split into "Sell X Resources over time" and "Sell X Resources in one action".
• Reworked contract difficulty.
• All cutscenes have been cleaned up in terms of length.
• The tutorial has been trimmed down greatly and is now taught by a new character.
• You can now press the Space bar to skip cutscenes.
• Upgraded the notification when a player meets quota.
• Buildings that increase in power cost now track power growth separately between the primary and secondary actions.
• Changed the Deposit Report to show a pie chart.
• Changed the order of the basic buildings in the bottom row of the UI.
• Quotas have been lowered.

Bug Fixes

• Lowered the time spent processing various events between actions.
• Fixed various audio bugs.
• Fixed tutorial cutscenes accidentally playing while not in a tutorial.

What's Next?

During some internal discussions, it came up that I've been ignoring how many assets will need to be made for the final product, so that will most likely be the next big target. I'd still like to continue working on gameplay, so the second priority would be adding more content.