Hi everybody! I'm really happy with all the progress we did on Alpha 7. Now we are pivoting to Alpha 8 which focuses on leveling the town to the 4th type of customer - Upper Class. It will be a quicker alpha and I want to avoid introducing scope creep/mechanics for this part of the game.
Plan for Alpha 8 -
New Customers - The Upper Class - Time to start luring in the wealthy humans of the apocalypse
Make the town evolve and look nicer at level 4
Make level 3 town look more 'under construction' since they are just building up from apocalyptic shantys
What we got done in Alpha 7 -
Second Floor Upgrade for your shop
Employee - This was a huge win and goal in this alpha, i wasn't sure if I was able to figure out a basic employee AI
More shop expansions
Decoration/Tipping Mechanic - Making decorating your store actually rewarded
Relic Furniture - Added a bunch of collectable furniture you can fish out in biomes
Upgrades - This was the highest voted, players wanted the current mechanics to have more upgrades/higher levels like composters, freezers, storage, aquarium, auto weigher
Minor Mechanics - The weather radio for example
UI Improvements - Making decoration and fish points cleaner/easier to understand
Lore System - You can now fish out lore hard-drives from the ocean and unlock little world lore - For people not interested they can just sell them!
Front Yard expansion
What did not complete in Alpha 7 -
Cleaning/filth mechanic - It was the lowest voted mechanic on our community vote - We can see in the future if we even really need this in the game
Pet Obesity/Choosing new pets - This was fairly low voted, I know some people would love to have more pet choices but it seemed like a low priority - So we'll wait and get the game closer to 1.0
Painting Tool - I was surprised this was voted very low as well! I thought people would really want this so it's great we did a vote. This would have taken some serious time to make, so we were able to make a lot of progress in other areas. We can revisit this next shop alpha