Hello Booksellers! Our tiny team been quietly tinkering behind the scenes, dusting shelves, sorting books, and listening closely to your feedback. With the refreshed Tiny Bookshop demo, this is what you can expect:
⭐ What's New in the Demo Refresh? ⭐
1. 📚 Book Recommendations
First up, let’s talk about one of Tiny Bookshop’s most unique feature. We’ve received so much feedback from the demo, and we’ve been hard at work making improvements. In this new demo refresh, we’ve revamped and made a bunch of adjustments to improve the recommendation system.
Clearer Book Requests – We've massively reworked and reworded NPC requests. They are now easier to understand, more sensible, and their responses are slightly less harsh.
Favourite Book Hint – If someone mentions their favourite book, you can now view its description right within the request, saving you a Google Search side quest.
No More "Meh" – Customers no longer respond with apathy when given semi-fitting book suggestions (rude). Instead, they’ll be pleasantly surprised when you recommend an unexpected book. Everyone should be willing to try something a little bit different!
Always An Answer! – We’ve also tweaked how customer requests are generated. Now, customers will ask for something that matches a book already in your current inventory. That means fewer “sorry, I don’t have anything” moments and more satisfying decisions.
Polite Bookseller – Don't lie to your customer! By popular demand, "Sorry, we're closed" is now changed to something more fitting!
Difficulty Indicator – There's now a difficulty indicator for recommendation requests, making difficult requests a little more obvious and hopefully rewarding.
Dual Genre Tutorial – We've added a tutorial explaining how books can belong to multiple genres. Think Dracula, is it a classic or fantasy? It’s both!
Less Duplicated Books – You are now much less likely to find the same book twice, when going through your shelf.
Recommendation Sale Boost – After you nailed a recommendation, customers become Inspired, briefly boosting everyone’s chance to make a purchase. May your kindness spark bookish joy!
2. 🫶 Accessibility
Secondly, we know coziness feels different for different people, so we’ve introduced a host of new accessibility settings to make Tiny Bookshop more accessible to players with different gaming needs!
General:
Recommendation Timing – You can now adjust how long customers will wait for book recommendations, giving you more breathing room to play at your own pace!
Auto-Accept Recommendations – Don’t want to click recommendation bubbles at all? No problem. Let the game auto-accept them for you!
Mouse and Keyboard:
Pause on Tooltip – We've added a setting to automatically pause the game when reading a tooltip. This is especially useful when inspecting timed effects and detailed info.
We removed the need to click and hold or click and drag completely on mouse and keyboard.
Click and Place Decorating – In customisation, instead of clicking and dragging. You can now simply click to pick up and click to place when decorating your wagon.
New Camera Control Setting – "Cursor at Screen Edge", which can be used instead of the default "Click and Drag". This moves the camera as you hover near the screen borders.
Controller:
Hold-to-Confirm Settings – Sometimes throughout the game, we ask you to hold a button to confirm an important choice. Because this can be a problem for some players, you can now toggle a setting that removes that requirement entirely.
Customizable Movement – To move the view, it is still necessary to move and hold one of the sticks in the desired direction. So stick sensitivity and movement speed can now be finely tuned in the settings to feels just right.
Optional Haptics – While our haptics are subtle, you can now turn them off completely if you prefer to play without haptics, or may find haptics uncomfortable.
Ease of Use Enhancements:
Smarter Graphics Defaults – The game will now do its best to approximate a combination of settings that works well on your device on first launch.
Settings Tooltips – All settings now contain detailed tooltips to help you understand exactly what it does.
3. 📒 Journal Updates
Your journal has received some much needed glow-up:
Chapter Navigation – Flipping through your notes is easier than ever.
Calendar Page – There's now a brand new calendar page in the Journal, showing you upcoming events, and helping you keep track of all the things that happened this seasons.
Bookshop Stat Page – The new Stats page gives a detailed overview of your shop’s current setup and how it’s affecting your business. Great for aspiring expert booksellers who want to fine-tune their strategy.
Character Pages – There are now pages dedicated to Special Friends you'll make, with space to document memories and quests.
4. 👗 Visual Updates
Customer Variety – There's now more variety in people's outfits. They can show up wearing hats, bags, umbrellas or raincoats, and so much more!
Better Visual Effects – We've reworked the visual look of the game, and improved the look of shadows and visual effects throughout Tiny Bookshop.
5. 🎶 Sound Design
Morning and Evening Music – We’ve added peaceful morning and evening music to frame your day in a gentle ambience.
Recommendation Music – The recommendation scene now has chill music to help you get into a thinking space!
New Sound Effects – We've added new sound effects to book recommendations and journal navigation.
6. 🎨 Customisation
Item Filters – We added filters to easier find that one item you want to decorate your bookshop with and make it easier to try out different builds.
7. 🗞️ Newspaper
Sales Report – From time to time you will get a sales report in your newspaper to see how you are doing.
We hope these changes will help give players a better gaming experience and give you a good taste of what's to come in the full release!
🐛 What To Do if You Find a Bug! 🐛
We done our best to ensure smooth gameplay for this demo refresh, but if there is anything that fell through the cracks, check out what you can do on our Bug Report Post to give us a heads-up!
Tiny Bookshop - So you've found a bug while playing the Tiny Bookshop Demo? - Steam News
As always, thank you so much to everyone for your continuous support! And have fun book selling!
Until next time!