Chapter 2 Sneak Peek #4: Changing Store Appearance
Charlotte's shop, the Dragon's Hoard, is a rustic place that is mostly unchanged from the time when it was owned by Charlotte's grandfather up until the end of Chapter 1. In this post we will be introducing our newest feature for Chapter 2, which enables players to change the store's appearance!
With the arrival of Chapter 2, Charlotte can obtain new furnitures to augment her store's look. These decors are divided into several categories: Display Counters, Carpets, Floors, and Miscellaneous. Player can choose one type of decor to be active for each category. How players can obtain these new decors are undecided at the time we wrote this post, but we will likely be adding them through quests and other ways.
The changes players will be making are not just superficial, as these decors determine the overall store's ambiance. There are four parameters at work here: Gloom, Bright, Lavish, and Humble. These parameters will determine which type of patrons will visit the store. Increasing the Lavish parameters, for instance, will make the nobles to visit the store more often, but it will detract the Lekumbas from coming. Players can use this new feature to modify the store's ambience to suit what they are currently selling, maximizing the probability of items to be sold.
That is all for now on our sneak peek on Chapter 2. What do you think about the new changes? Feel free to submit ideas and suggestions to us, we will be very happy to hear any feedback from you. Until next time :)
Sincerely,
Crunchy Bit Games.
Comments
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hello, I am a enthusiast of your game, and would like to share my thoughts about this release.
It is interesting to be able to customize the shop, yes, but the issue I have with this aspect of the game is the entire shop mechanic itself.
It is not transparent to understand exactly what is going on, these changes you are making do improve a bit, yes, but it still feels lacking, like I shared on the reddit, I believe the shop should have a entire in depht rework in order to make the mechanic more appealing and immersive, there should be a entire set of skills and stats designed only for the shop, like for combat you have attack, defence, etc.
For the shop, these should be transparent stats that you could improve by levels of experience earned through sale, where you would invest points on shop skills, like sale profit %, customer attaction, number of itens per stack, shop reputation and supplier attraction, yes, supplier, because as your shop grows, it should attract artisans and adventurers interested in selling stuff to you, so you can resell or use as equipment or crafting materials.
The customization you are adding would then work like equipment on a fighter, to improve the skills I mentioned, this idea of gloomy or bright, or even poor / rich I find kinda unnatractive to be honest, like, if the shop has reputation for quality products, the appearance should not matter much at all
This feature is just one of the many updates that we will be implementing with the Chapter 2 release. There are others in store and we will share it in another post when we finish developing it.
The store appearance will affect which patrons will come to the store. Nobles, for instance, will be reluctant to come if the store is too simplistic since "it feels so cheap" while the Lekumbas don't like when it is too gaudy. Other type of customers may be apathetic to the kind of decors players are using. Players can tweak the decors according to the type of wares they are selling to target specific patrons to maximize sales.
But that is exactly the issue, unless there is something hidden regarding events or quests spawning based on who you sell your merchandise to, the effects of this change is quite small, it would only affects what kind of merchandise you decide to sell, and once you figure out which ones are more valuable to sell, you will stick to these.
Not to mention being weird overall, not the appearance, but how it affects the game, if you keep changing the entire decoration of the shop from one day to the other based on what kind of stuff you want to sell, like, flipping the appearance of the shop from rich to poor, so that it magically makes people cities far away finding out that yesterday the shop looked like it housed the British Royal Wedding so that you would attract nobles as customers, and now it looks like a scene from slumdog millionaire so you can sell the rest of your stuff to poor people, It may look like something interesting when you are just observing it, but being able to change it entirely and have it's effects show up immediately is at least weird, unless you balance it by implementing some sort of reputation built over time for every 'faction' of customer