In this thread I’ll share screenshots and videos of daily development. Ultimately all of these updates is what goes into the devlogs.
Yesterday I added landscape support to the smartphone, allowing for much more space when designing apps.
Today I’m working on the “EconoView” which gives you a financial overview of your expenses and businesses.
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Today I’ve been optimizing the rest of the smartphone apps to the new format.
In order to visualize finances in EconoView, I have been working “behind the scenes” adding additional data points for customers, orders and transactions.
Moving on I’m going to focus on adding UI for visualizing how to improve a business and attract more customers.
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Monday and Tuesday was awful days! I spent all my time figuring out how to handle certain challenges in Unity UI. However, I was able to put together a mockup of the upcoming BizMan app. Most importantly, it’s now possible to set prices for the products a business sell:
Today I’m working on hooking up all this new data to the actual game experience. I already extended the customer AI to make them consider prices. Right now I’m working on something called Customer Interviews which allows you to see how satisfied your customers are. For now based on: Product Range, Pricing and Customer Service.
More about that tomorrow hopefully…
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Just another quick update: The “insight view” are now showing real data, except customer service being an RNG value defined on the employee.
Moving on I’ll need to extend the employee hiring process to include skills, specifically customer service.
Introducing all these new metrics caused a lot of rewriting. I’m expecting to spend quite some time fixing bugs tomorrow.
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Hi everyone!
Sorry for the silence. I’ve had an disturbing week starting with losing my internet Thursday, forcing me to work on an unstable 3G connection. Fortunately my fiber was reconnected Monday.
I’ve spent a couple of days working on the story line of Alpha 1. Big Ambitions will be much more story driven than Startup Company, but it will continue being “sandboxy” and open world.
Here’s the prologue script that starts the game:
It’s been 3 months since grandma died. I know that I’m an adult now that I’m 18 years old, but still… It feels so scary that no one is there to take care of stuff.
There’s one good thing though. At the funeral, my uncle Fred asked me for my phone number. He said he wanted to help me get on my feet. I don’t really know him, but I guess he’s family after all.
The words are coming from our main character. We instantly get introduced to Uncle Fred. He’s an unknown rich uncle, who will be the player’s mentor throughout the game. As the game evolves the player will slowly start to learn about Uncle Fred’s relationship to the main characters father and how our main character ended up on the street in such a young age.
More about that later…
Yesterday and today I’ve been working on the Quest System that will help the player from early to mid gameplay. Instructions are mainly coming from Uncle Fred. As you can see in the screenshot, the system is already able to show quest pointers in-game.
Oh, also Monday I had a meeting with the design team. They expect to have actual city prefabs ready for me at the end of this week. It means I can finally start to put together the actual city - super exciting! 
Over and out!
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Devlog 5 is now available:
Hi guys!
Just a quick update. I’ve been working on completing the quest/tutorial system. Adding checks for each task have taken a lot of time, but I believe it’s worth it at this point, as it will greatly help playtesting in the future!
Yesterday I started working on the cleaning mechanics. The idea is that your stores will become messy over time. The player can choose to clean himself, or hire workers.
So far I’ve made it so floor tiles become dirty based on the amount of customers walking on them. Today I’m gonna implement the mechanic that allows you to clean it again. Super interesting!
Got an update from the 3D artists working on the building interior. This is insane!
Here’s two screenshots of a regular small fast food restaurant. The first short is taken at noon and the second is at afternoon. Notice how the sun’s affecting all the objects. No baked lighting, everything dynamic through Unity’s HDRP:
I’m working on getting the cleaning mechanic working. I was lacking a “sweep” animation, so using a punch combo for now. Progress at least! 
Hi everyone!
Sorry for the silence. I’m super busy working with the 3D artists switching over to the real graphics. It looks amazing and I’m so pumped about how much progress we’re doing now!
Can’t wait to show you more. Stay tuned.
Devlog #6 is now available:
Hi everyone!
I hope you all enjoyed the latest devlog. So much new stuff. Just a quick update. I’m now working on a city map, to help you navigate the city:
I hope to soon be able to release another build 
Yesterday I got street names added to the city map + added the option to set custom destination.
Today I’m working on setting up traffic and intersections. Crazy progress these days!
Hi anyone still keeping up with these updates 
Apologize for the silence. I currently got 5 people working on the game, making my time very limited. It’s only temporary, so I should soon be back to normal.
Progress is incredible at the moment. Generally we’re busy optimizing performance and moving to production assets.
Without going into details, here’s a few screenshot. The first is the Appliance Store now partly using production assets, but also with a new character.
The second is a preview of the game UI which hopefully can be implemented in a few weeks:
I hope you like it!
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