Hello fellow Magnates! It has been a busy couple of months with this update and we’ve mostly centred our work around visual upgrades, bug fixing, and polish. We also have been doing dual work on our next update.
Improved Textures
This update saw several improvements in how we handle wall and floor textures. Firstly, we made adjustments to all of our textures in an effort to better reflect our art style (in addition to ensuring consistency).
We then created normal maps for several textures. Now, these textures will be able to catch light in a variety of ways. To achieve this, we made some adjustments to the shaders we use for both walls and floors which took up a significant amount of time.
As you can see, these textures now catch light differently under changing lighting. There is still a bit of work to do around the light direction – mainly when a texture is indoors and under ambient light – but the effect this already creates is a great improvement over the flat textures we had before.
More Guest Activities
We have added in a round of new guest activities! Watch carefully and you might see some guests dipping their feet in the pool, meeting for a chat in the bar, using more of the equipment in your gym or enjoying the heat of a fireplace!
What’s Cooking Now?
Our next update – which we have been working on for a few weeks already – will introduce the concept of Guest Requests, Checklists, and a more robust Guest Mood System. All three of these features are meant to help and increase player-to-guest interactions. In other words, the player will have to spend more time managing and looking after guests to ensure they have a good stay.
Make sure your guests don’t fall into a bad mood, otherwise they might start causing trouble in your hotel! There will also be some work done on Guest Reviews. Our aim is to make these reviews more transparent so you can understand why guests scored the way they did.
Additionally, we’ll be introducing the much requested Loans and Bankruptcy. Essentially, you will not be able to go into debt the same way you can now. Once you run out of money, you will be stopped from placing/purchasing anything until you sell some items, take out a loan, or both! This should add a new level of difficulty and will require careful planning around the growth of your hotel.
You can always check out our Public Roadmap on Trello if you want to know what’s coming up!
Changelog:
Changes:
- Fixed some issues with Objectives not always completing
- Fixed the “Cost per day” value in the budget menu
- Fixed an issue where guests would ‘steal’ dumbbells, causing all sorts of issues
- Fixed some sizing issues with the Guest Management List
- Fixed an issue where changing levels with page up/down wouldn’t cancel following characters
- Fixed an issue where negative guest reviews wouldn’t deduct Hotel Points
Fixes:
- Improved animation transitions
- Added Analytics to better track player progression (Privacy Policy & Opt-out can be found in game settings)
- Various UI adjustments (mostly resizing/scaling)
- Removed gaining bonus Hotel Points for higher star level guests
- Added some easing effects to camera movement
- Added the ability to be able to sort reviews
- Removed some duplicate furniture in some catalog nodes
There were 9 different hotfixes that addressed many different issues between this update and the last. You can read them on our Steam Events Page