New Game+ - Game Store Simulator Playtest · published
It's been quiet on this page and busy everywhere else. Since the first playtest build went up there have been 477 changes to the game, 61 of them new features. This is the first proper update post, so it's a big one. Here's what actually changed.
THE STORE STARTS EMPTY NOW
The single biggest change. You no longer inherit a furnished store. You get a lit shell and a catalog, and the floor is yours to build.
- Buy and place every fixture yourself: shelves, glass cases, counters, racks.
- Four genuinely different glass display cases. They used to be four copies of one.
- Fixture prices now reflect real slot count and presentation quality, with honest names instead of guesswork.
- Wall paint, wallpaper, slatwall, carpets and ceiling panels, with real 2000s-retail texture packs.
- Posters, hanging signage and ceiling banners you can place, move and remove, and it all persists.
- Free-look while placing, repeat-place, and undo a committed move with Ctrl+Z.
THE FLOOR MATTERS MORE THAN THE REGISTER
A deliberate shift. The interesting job is being a shopkeeper, not a cashier.
- Go-backs and reshelving. Customers put things back, and not always where they found them.
- Indecisive customers, the charming source of most of that mess.
- Shelf entropy. A browsed shelf stops looking merchandised.
- "I can't find it." A customer who fails to find what they came for now tells you, with an overhead label and a reason at the register.
- The clerk who remembers. An unmet request brings that named customer back days later, once you've stocked it.
A REAL ECONOMY UNDERNEATH
- One purchase-intent table. Every system - demand, era, your pricing, your displays, the customer's own taste - now feeds a single scoring pass. Customers buy as themselves instead of following a script.
- Unmet demand feeds the market. The loop closes: what people ask for and don't get changes what the world wants next.
- The acquisition economy. Naive and savvy sellers, firm pricing, appraisal, and variant tells you learn to read.
- An online collector marketplace. List a rare find and watch bids escalate, or keep it and let it draw collectors to the store.
- Sticker pricing with teeth. A fair-value band, sticker-shock demand drag, and XP for pricing sharply.
- Console licensing. Buy a platform's license before you can order its games and hardware.
- Bills. Rent and utilities you pay manually, on your schedule.
THE REGISTER GOT REBUILT
- Physical cash. Take the notes, deposit them in the drawer, count out change.
- A working counter card reader you ring the total on.
- Multi-item baskets ring as one tab. Scan each item, pay once on the total.
- Opening the register whooshes the camera into the monitor, and back out when you're done.
- Add-ons are one clipboard and one pitch per transaction, instead of a prompt storm.
CUSTOMERS FEEL LIKE PEOPLE
- Per-NPC clothing and hair color variety, so the crowd stops looking like six clones.
- Customers browse where the stock actually is, not at the middle of a fixture.
- They walk all the way up to the counter instead of stopping a meter short.
- Multi-second traffic jams between customers are gone.
- Groups work properly. Parents and kids, couples, friends, each with their own identity.
MINIGAMES AND PROGRESSION
- A new Lock & Key arcade prize machine.
- Trade-in inspection and the repair bench both got depth passes.
- The upsell round is an arcade-style pitch board with shared-patience greed.
- Six level-gated skills across 19 categories and 70 tiers, that visibly change the floor.
- A post-day level-up screen that actually names what you unlocked, and a Progression tab showing what's next.
- Grails: a rare-find trade-in channel, collection sets, a protected trophy case and a flip market.
- Midnight launches: a coming-soon teaser, an out-now hero, and a queue down the pavement at midnight.
PERFORMANCE AND SIZE
- The download is more than half what it was, down to 5.4 GB, with no visual downgrade. Stale mobile textures, dead assets and oversized imports all got cut.
- A Graphics Quality preset (Low / Medium / High) in Settings, Display.
- A long list of per-action hitches hunted down: NPC spawns, box pickups, first scan, shelf rebuilds, the register screen.
STABILITY
If the first build didn't run for you, please try this one.
- AMD and Vulkan crashes are handled automatically. The game detects the bad combination and switches itself to D3D12 before loading anything. If a launch fails twice, it changes renderer on its own.
- The loading screen can no longer hang forever. There's a watchdog, and a notice if your disk is being slow.
- Crash logs actually write out now. Previously the tail was being discarded, which is why some reports had nothing in them.
- The game tells you when safe mode has downgraded your graphics, instead of silently looking worse.
YOU REPORTED IT, IT'S FIXED
Straight from the first playtest reports.
- Couldn't get past 35% on a new game. That was the AMD and Vulkan crash. The game now detects it and switches renderer before loading anything.
- "Can't remove the display cases, the store doesn't feel like mine." You can now remove them, and the store starts empty anyway.
- Furniture control in main-menu Settings crashed the game. Fixed.
- Customers get stuck on each other. Multi-second standoffs are gone.
- Picking things up from across the store. Reach is properly limited now.
- Many areas missing colliders, you could leave the map. Sealed.
- NPCs walking through buildings. Fixed.
- A customer despawned inside the shop. They leave through the door now.
- Arcade machine screens broken on a Continue. Fixed.
- Cars culling too quickly, and the taxi missing its rear wheels. Both fixed.
- Colliders on delivered boxes too large. Tightened.
- Online orders missing text in the orange fields. Fixed.
- The hint bar showing hints for things you aren't doing. Fixed.
- Text too small to read comfortably. A full type pass, every sub-legible label moved onto one readable scale.
- Ordering one copy at a time. There are +1, +5 and +10 buttons on every item.
THANK YOU
Genuinely. The reports from the first playtest drove a lot of the list above, including the crash-on-launch fix and most of the customer-behaviour work. If something feels wrong, tell me or post in the community hub.
More soon,