Dealer’s Life updated: version B:0.74

Hello to all Dealers out there!

Today we’re releasing the new great version 0.74! We released it for Beta testers last week and we had great feedback, now it’s time to let all players enjoy it!

Usually we try to release new content every two or three weeks but we went a little bit late because we’re really working hard on many things at the same time, for example in the background we never stopped working on big things like recurrent characters and new localizations for the game. And today we’re releasing a real lot of new stuff, we hope you’ll like it!

Let’s begin with the great new Item Pack #3 including 16 new items! This time things have gone big since we went for cars and motorbikes!

We really would have liked to introduce them since the beginning, especially because they’re really expensive but we couldn’t find any easy way to balance them with the items already in the game without compromising the delicate relationship between prices, rarity and year of production. So we made a huge tide of rebalance for every item price in the game.
It was a big work indeed but it was just the first step towards a new era of longer lasting games! Many players have reported us that going wild with DL and playing it like there is no tomorrow could result in relatively short games… Since we simply love players that go wild with DL, we decided to second their secret desires and release a huge amount of late game content, all very shiny and expensive!

With this release we’re also giving a lot of love to shops! Version 0.74 comes with the great New Shops Pack including a new best shop for every district, with the best features and the highest price you can find! But of course that’s not all about shops: we also introduced a whole brand new luxury district, with four totally new (and really expensive) shops, as an exclusive to our Premium Players only!

The Boss Empire

Remember the tide of rebalance I mentioned before while talking about items? Well the same thing had to happen here with shops, since they’re linked to the fame level of your character and that in turn influences the game flow, altering the “quality” of procedural generation. By introducing a total of 7 new shops we had to redesign the fame level system in order to grant enough granularity to level progression to better feel the difference between shops and see the differences in new items generation. That’s why now we have nine fame levels and not just five as before! Every fame level has its own parameters for items (and customers!) procedural generation, granting an ever changing experience while you climb the fame ladder to reach the ultimate success!

Could you imagine? That’s still not all about game balance! We really wanted to give a good strike at it and we also made some changes to starting items generation in order to avoid exceptionally good or bad starts that could compromise the entire game. From now on all games will always start with one rare item, two uncommon items and two common items. As it was introduced in the last patch, Premium Players will also get an exclusive legendary item at the beginning of every game, but apart from that every game should now present the right amount of challenge since the very start!
Last but not least we also gave a little rebalance to all costs and prices, to better fit the new game economy.

Next big thing we made with this update is a new management of end of week ads in the Lite version of DL. Before this patch we had an ad showing out at every end of the week, it sounded quite fair to us but then we realized that a week in early game lasts much less than a week in late game because during late game there are much more customers coming to your shop every single day. Thus, a week in early game could last a few (real time) minutes while in late game it could last even half an hour. The consequence of this is that early game players see much more “end of week” ads than late game players. For this reason we decided to equalize the vision of ads for both early and late game players, showing an ad at the end of a generic day if a certain amount of real time has passed.

Finally, let me talk about my favourite argument: recurrent characters! I know, I know, it’s so much time we’ve been talking about it you barely believe they’ll ever come, but before you start throwing rotten vegetables at me, I can tell you that with this latest patch we introduced the last UI adjustments that were needed just before the introduction of recurring characters in the game. We shifted the customer at your desk a little bit on the right, to make him more centered in the screen and by doing this we gained a lot more space for the customer’s balloon and the three choice buttons beneath it, in the left half of the screen. Thanks to this we will not only have more space for recurring character speeches, but also more space for your answers, granting us the possibility to make more complex and deep dialogues!

Since this change required quite a work to rearrange things and modify animations, we planned to make it just before the actual introduction of recurring characters, so you can be sure they’re really coming… and you know what? I’ll spoil you the first chain of encounters with the first recurring character is already in the game! We put it in “sleep mode” in this version because we need to test it a little more, but is already there and will be available really soon!

I hope you enjoyed reading about all these changes!
Stay tuned for more updates and keep up the good deals!